Becoming La Raza: Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s) (Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation)

Synopsis

In 1965, striking farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley sparked the beginning of the Chican@ movement. As the movement quickly gained traction across the southwestern United States, public frictions emerged and splits among activists over strategic political decisions. José G. Izaguirre III explores how these disagreements often hinged on the establishment of a racial(ized) identity for Mexican Americans, leading to the formation of La Raza Unida, a political party dedicated to naming and defending Mexican Americans as a racialized community.Through close readings of figures, vocabularies, and visualizations of iconic texts of the Chican@ Movement—including El Plan de Delano, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquin,” and newspapers like El Grito del Norte and La Raza—Izaguirre demonstrates that la raza was never singular or unified. Instead, he reveals a racial identity that was (re)negotiated, (re)invented, and (re)circulated against a Cold War backdrop that heightened rhetorics of race across the globe and increasingly threatened Mexican American bodies in the Vietnam War. In lieu of a unified nationalist movement, Izaguirre argues that activists energized and empowered La Raza as a political community by making the Chican@ movement multivocal, global, and often aligned with whiteness.For scholars of political movements, US history, race, or rhetoric, Becoming La Raza will provide a valuable perspective on one of the most important civil rights movements of the twentieth century.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780271099286

Related ISBNs:

9780271098753

Publisher:

Penn State University Press

Date of Addition:

12/20/24

Copyrighted By:

José G. Izaguirre III

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.