Chicana Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Marie Calafell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Mexican American Women ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Rights ◽  
Chicana Studies ◽  
The 1960S

The field of Chicana studies was born out of the experiences of Mexican-American women in the southwestern United States. Chicana leaders, such as Dolores Huerta were central activists in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1960s, working alongside leaders like Cesar Chavez and cofounding the UFW. Others were involved in social movement activity in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas with activists Reies Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, and José Ángel Gutiérrez. While fighting for labor, political, and educational rights, Chicanas contested the machismo, sexism, and heterosexism that they experienced from Chicanos. Chicanas were urged to perform stereotypical feminine roles or activities, while men served as the public face of the movement. They were disciplined further by the invocation of the virgin/whore dichotomy, based in Catholicism around the Virgin of Guadalupe; and Malintzin Tenépal, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’s translator and lover. In addition, Chicanas were encouraged to take a single-axis approach to social justice and keep silent about their concerns in order to highlight the fight against ethnocentrism and racism, which were deemed by male leaders to be of the utmost importance. Similarly, Chicanas who looked for solidarity in the mainstream women’s movement were encouraged to put aside their racial concerns in favor of an agenda that focused solely on their identity as women. Put in the untenable position of lacking a space in which their complex and intersectional experiences were honored, and of being subjected to the virgin/whore dichotomy and its unrealistic expectations, Chicanas needed to create a space of their own. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the birth of Chicano Studies departments in academia, as well as the rise of Chicana studies and Chicana feminism. Chicana studies blossomed through works by artists such as Yolanda Lopez, Judy Baca, Patssi Valdez, and Ester Hernández, and scholarship by Deena J. González, Antonia Castañeda, Angie Chabram, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ana Castillo. The publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color became an important benchmark for Chicana feminist writings, and women of color feminism in general. In addition, Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza were foundational texts in the development of Chicana feminist thought. Moraga’s work (originally published in 1983 and republished in an expanded edition in 2000) addresses her experiences as a queer Chicana born to a White father and Mexican mother, while Anzaldúa’s book (published in 1987) theorizes about the possibility of a mestiza consciousness or borderlands identity. A central theme in Chicana feminist writings is the reinterpretation of Malintzin Tenépal, also referred to as La Malinche, through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, while Chicana feminist artists have visually reimagined the Virgin of Guadalupe queerly and in their own images as everyday women. Through the reinterpretation of these figures, Chicanas have created possibilities for Chicana identifications that resist the binary virgin/whore dichotomy.

The Turning Point

2019 ◽  
pp. 301-352
Author(s):  
Steven K. Green
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Legislation ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the various events that undermined the public support for church–state separation in the 1960s. It considers the impact of Vatican II, of ecumenism, of the civil rights movement, and of federal social welfare and education legislation on Protestant attitudes. All of these events encouraged Protestants and Catholics to find common ground in working for the greater societal good. These events also suggested a model of church-state cooperation rather than one of separation. The chapter then segues to consider the various church–state cases before the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1975 in which the justices began to step back from applying a strict separationist approach to church–state controversies.

The Chicano Movement: Mexican American History and the Struggle for Equality

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Carlos Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
School Students ◽  
Mexican American History ◽  
Mass Protest ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract The Chicano/Chicana movement was a product of the global eruption that took place in 1968. A critical understanding of this movement requires that it be put into a historical context and theoretical framework of an indigenous people who were internally colonized by the expanding us Empire after the end of the us-Mexico War of 1846-48. Violent and nonviolent struggles took place prior to the 1960s over the issues of land, social justice, and civil rights. The first nonviolent and largest Mexican American mass protest in us history occurred in the Spring of 1968 in East Los Angeles, California, where over ten thousand Chicano high school students walked out of their inferior and racist barrio high schools. The student walkouts ignited the emergence of the Chicano civil rights movement. The movement’s positive contributions and failures will be discussed. Discussion will conclude with a critical analysis of Mexican American struggles in the present age of “Trumpism”.

scholarly journals Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969

Open Theology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobin Miller Shearer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into public space acted as a conduit of moral judgment even when intended as a bridge of connection, a pattern that suggests the exercise of public prayer can be a catalyst for violence.

Before Chicano

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Varon
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts

Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 is the first book-length study of Latino manhood before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mexican Americans are typically overlooked or omitted from American cultural life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite their long-standing presence in the U.S. This book dislodges the association between Mexican Americans and immigration and calls for a new framework for understanding Mexican American cultural production and U.S. culture, but doing so requires an expanded archive and a multilingual approach to U.S. culture.Working at the intersection of culture and politics, Mexican Americans drew upon American democratic ideals and U.S. foundational myths to develop evolving standards of manhood and political participation. Through an analysis of Mexican American print culture (including fiction, newspapers and periodicals, government documents, essays, unpublished manuscripts, images, travelogues, and other genres), it demonstrates that Mexican Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries envisioned themselves as U.S. national citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. Before Chicano moves beyond the resistance paradigm that has dominated Latino Studies and uncovers a long history of how Latinos shaped—and were shaped by—American cultural life.

The 1960s: The Struggle for Justice and the ‘View from the Sidelines’

2021 ◽  
pp. 74-90
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Cooperative Commonwealth

When Reinhold Niebuhr retired from teaching in 1960 at the age of sixty-eight, he was famous for espousing Cold War militarism, blasting liberal theology and the Social Gospel, and urging the Civil Rights Movement to proceed with patient moderation. In his retirement years he substantially changed or refashioned these positions, transmuting his legacy and the meaning of Niebuhrian realism. The Social Gospel tried to moralize the public square, but Niebuhr said that politics is a struggle for power driven by interest and will-to-power. The Social Gospel taught that a cooperative commonwealth is achievable. By the end of his career, Niebuhr said the ideal of a good society must be given up. Social ethicists ever since have struggled with both sides of his legacy.

A Legacy of Neglect: George I. Sánchez, Mexican American Education, and the Ideal of Integration, 1940–1970

2012 ◽  
Vol 114 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Carlos Kevin Blanton
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Compensatory Education ◽  
American People ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
The 1960S

This biographical study of Dr. George I. Sánchez, a leading Mexican American educator, intellectual, and activist from the 1930s through the 1960s, opens up the idea of compensatory education—the prevalent notion of the 1960s that schools use specialized instructional programs to combat the alleged cultural deprivation of some children, particularly minorities—to a wider focus. While George Sánchez addressed key themes of compensatory education in critical and even predictive ways since at least the 1940s, he was not known to the compensatory education movement, nor was his most passionate subject, Mexican Americans, much of a factor in compensatory education thinking. And this was most unfortunate. No one captured more forcefully the tension between liberal sympathy to offer special schooling to Mexican Americans and how such innovative educational programs maintained and perpetuated the widespread practice of racial segregation. I focus on several discrete, illustrative episodes of Sánchez's life and activism over a three-decade period: first, Sánchez's New Deal-era idealism from the late 1930s and early 1940s in which he used stricter sociological definitions of Mexican American culture as deficient and in need of government action; second, his efforts of the 1940s and 1950s to desegregate public schools in Texas and the Southwest on behalf of the nascent Mexican American civil rights movement; third, his support for bilingual education in the 1960s for reasons of civic and political equality, but not from the perspective of sociolinguistic theory; and finally, Sánchez's surprisingly persistent and pugnacious opposition throughout the 1960s to a preschool compensatory program that originated from within the Mexican American community. These four phases of Sanchez's career illustrate the degree to which Sánchez wrestled with, and even predicted, some key points of later criticism of the entire compensatory education intellectual project. These aspects of Sanchez's work also document just how invisible Mexican American struggles were to national intellectual and policy circles. But most of all, George I. Sánchez recognized that the Mexican American people in the United States, his people, suffered greatly from a sad legacy of neglect. One of the central consistencies to his pedagogical thinking regardless of the decade was his willingness to call attention to that tragic legacy in the hopes of correcting it. This underlying principle to Sánchez's life and work, as well as his sharp diagnosis of the leading educational theories of the day, makes his marginal, almost invisible position among compensatory education thinkers of the 1960s, who also sought to correct legacies of injustice, just as tragic. Educational thinkers today should know more about George I. Sánchez as well as his perspectives on Mexican Americans, schools, and justice.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”

Introduction

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

Folktales and Civil Rights

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Suk-Young Chwe
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Real World ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real World Applications ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Brer Rabbit

This chapter examines African American folktales that teach the importance of strategic thinking and argues that they informed the tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement. It analyzes a number of stories where characters who do not think strategically are mocked and punished by events while revered figures skillfully anticipate others' future actions. It starts with the tale of a new slave who asks his master why he does nothing while the slave has to work all the time, even as he demonstrates his own strategic understanding. It then considers the tale of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, along with “Malitis,” which tackles the problem of how the slaves could keep the meat and eat it openly. These and other folktales teach how inferiors can exploit the cluelessness of status-obsessed superiors, a strategy that can come in handy. The chapter also discusses the real-world applications of these folktales' insights.

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
The 1960S

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

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