Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century

Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century
Author: David Montejano
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2010-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292778635

The various protest movements that together constituted the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s urged a "politics of inclusion" to bring Mexican Americans into the mainstream of United States political and social life. This volume of ten specially commissioned essays assesses the post-movement years, asking "what went wrong? what went right? and where are we now?" Collectively, the essays offer a wide-ranging portrayal of the complex situation of Mexican Americans as the twenty-first century begins. The essays are grouped into community, institutional, and general studies, with an introduction by editor Montejano. Geographically, they point to the importance of "Hispanic" politics in the Southwest, as well as in Chicago wards and in the U.S. Congress, with ramifications in Mexico and Central America. Thematically, they discuss "non-traditional" politics stemming from gender identity, environmental issues, theatre production, labor organizing, university policymaking, along with the more traditional politics revolving around state and city government, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and various advocacy organizations.

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
Author: Zaragosa Vargas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2007-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691134022

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

The Chicano Generation

The Chicano Generation
Author: Mario T. García
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2015-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520961366

In The Chicano Generation, veteran Chicano civil rights scholar Mario T. García provides a rare look inside the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as they unfolded in Los Angeles. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with three key activists, this book illuminates the lives of Raul Ruiz, Gloria Arellanes, and Rosalio Muñoz—their family histories and widely divergent backgrounds; the events surrounding their growing consciousness as Chicanos; the sexism encountered by Arellanes; and the aftermath of their political histories. In his substantial introduction, García situates the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and contextualizes activism within the largest civil rights and empowerment struggle by Mexican Americans in US history—a struggle that featured César Chávez and the farm workers, the student movement highlighted by the 1968 LA school blowouts, the Chicano antiwar movement, the organization of La Raza Unida Party, the Chicana feminist movement, the organizing of undocumented workers, and the Chicano Renaissance. Weaving this revolution against a backdrop of historic Mexican American activism from the 1930s to the 1960s and the contemporary black power and black civil rights movements, García gives readers the best representations of the Chicano generation in Los Angeles.

Mexico's Politics and Society in Transition

Mexico's Politics and Society in Transition
Author: Joseph S. Tulchin
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781588261045

An exploration of the interrelated trends of Mexico's transitional politics and society. Offering perspectives on the problems on the Mexican agenda, the authors discuss the politics of change, the challenges of social development, and how to build a mutually beneficial US-Mexico relationship.

Chicano-Chicana Americana

Chicano-Chicana Americana
Author: Anthony Macías
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-02-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0816547238

This exciting new cultural history documents how Mexican Americans in twentieth-century film, television, and theater surpassed stereotypes, fought for equal opportunity, and subtly transformed the mainstream American imaginary. Through biographical sketches of underappreciated Mexican American actors, this work sheds new light on our national character and reveals the untold story of a multicentered, polycultural America.

Hispanics in the American West

Hispanics in the American West
Author: Jorge Iber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2005-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1851096841

This work provides a revealing look at the history of Hispanic peoples in the American West (or, from the Mexican perspective, El Norte) from the period of Spanish colonization through the present day. Hispanics in the American West portrays the daily lives, struggles, and triumphs of Spanish-speaking peoples from the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the present, highlighting such defining moments as the years of Mexican sovereignty, the Mexican-American War, the coming of the railroad, the great Mexican migration in the early 20th century, the Great Depression, World War II, the Chicano Movement that arose in the mid-1960s, and more. Coverage includes Hispanics of all nationalities (not just Mexican, but Cuban, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan, among others) and ranges beyond the "traditional" Hispanic states (Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado) to look at newer communities of Spanish-speaking peoples in Oregon, Hawaii, and Utah. The result is a portrait of Hispanic American life in the West that is uniquely inclusive, insightful, and surprising.

The Illusion of Inclusion

The Illusion of Inclusion
Author: Rodolfo Rosales
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292787707

To many observers, the 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as mayor of San Antonio, Texas, represented the culminating victory in the Chicano community's decades-long struggle for inclusion in the city's political life. Yet, nearly twenty years later, inclusion is still largely an illusion for many working-class and poor Chicanas and Chicanos, since business interests continue to set the city's political and economic priorities. In this book, Rodolfo Rosales offers the first in-depth history of the Chicano community's struggle for inclusion in the political life of San Antonio during the years 1951 to 1991, drawn from interviews with key participants as well as archival research. He focuses on the political and organizational activities of the Chicano middle class in the context of post-World War II municipal reform and how it led ultimately to independent political representation for the Chicano community. Of special interest is his extended discussion of the role of Chicana middle-class women as they gained greater political visibility in the 1980s.

Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan

Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan
Author: Armando Navarro
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 772
Release: 2005-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0759114749

This exciting new volume from Armando Navarro offers the most current and comprehensive political history of the Mexicano experience in the United States. He examines in-depth topics such as American political culture, electoral politics, demography, and organizational development. Viewing Mexicanos today as an occupied and colonized people, he calls for the formation of a new movement to reinvigorate the struggle for resistance and change among Mexicanos. Navarro envisions a new political and cultural landscape as the dominant Latino population 'Re-Mexicanizes' the U.S. into a more multicultural and multiethnic society. This book will be a valuable resource for political and social activists and teaching tool for political theory, Latino politics, ethnic and minority politics, race relations in the United States, and social movements.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary
Author: Nicole Waligora-Davis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195369912

In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were often characterized by the media as "refugees." The characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing. Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years. In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights. Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored the power of language to define political realities, how critics like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and how they and other public figures have used their writing as a forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.

Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912-1999

Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912-1999
Author: Jorge Iber
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2002-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781585442058

As immigrants came to the United States from Mexico, the term "Greater Mexico" was coined to specify the area of their greatest concentration. America's southwest border was soon heavily populated with Mexico's people, culture, and language. In Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912-1999, however, Jorge Iber shows this Greater Mexico was even greater than presumed as he explores the Hispanic population in one of the "whitest" states in the Union--Utah. By 1997, Hispanics were a notable part of Utah's population as they could be found in all of the state's major cities working in tourist, industrial, and service occupations. Although these characteristics reflect the population trends in other states, Iber centers on those aspects that set Utah's Hispanic comunidad apart from the rest. Iber focuses on the significance of why many in the Utah Hispanic comunidad are leaving Catholicism for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). He examines how conversion affects the Spanish-speaking population and how these Hispanic believers are affecting the Mormon Church. Iber also concentrates on the geographic separation of Hispanics in Utah from their Mexican, Latin American, New Mexican, and Coloradoan roots. He examines patterns of Hispanic assimilation and acculturation in a setting which is vastly different from other Western and Southwestern states. Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912-1999 is an important source for scholars in ethnic studies, American studies, religion, and Western history. Drawing on both oral and written histories collected by the University of Utah and many notable organizations including the American G.I. Forum, SOCIO, Centro de la Familia, the Salt Lake Catholic Diocese, and the LDS Church, Iber has compiled an interesting and informative study of the experience of Hispanics in Utah, which represents "another fragment in the expanding mosaic that is the history of the Spanish-speaking people of the United States."