Latinx Studies
A guide with resources and tips for doing research in Chicana/o Studies
Ethnic Studies Librarian
Books in the Library
Chicana/O Identity in a Changing U. S. Society by Call Number: E184.M5 H865 2004ISBN: 0816522057Publication Date: 2004-05-01What does it mean to be Chicana/o? That question might not be answered the same as it was a generation ago. As the United States witnesses a major shift in its population--from a white majority to a country where no single group predominates--the new mix not only affects relations between ethnic groups but also influences how individuals view themselves. This book addresses the development of individual and social identity within the context of these new demographic and cultural shifts. It identifies the contemporary forces that shape group identity in order to show how Chicana/os' sense of personal identity and social identity develops and how these identities are affected by changes in social relations. The authors, both nationally recognized experts in social psychology, are concerned with the subjective definitions individuals have about the social groups with which they identify, as well as with linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. Their analysis reveals what the majority of Chicanas/os experience, using examples from music, movies, and the arts to illustrate complex concepts. In considering #65533;Qui#65533;n Soy? ("Who Am I?"), they discuss how individuals develop a positive sense of who they are as Chicanas/os, with an emphasis on the influence of family, schools, and community. Regarding #65533;Qui#65533;nes Somos? ("Who Are We?"), they explore Chicanas/os' different group memberships that define who they are as a people, particularly reviewing the colonization history of the American Southwest to show how Chicanas/os' group identity is influenced by this history. A chapter on "Language, Culture, and Community" looks at how Chicanas/os define their social identities inside and outside their communities, whether in the classroom, neighborhood, or region. In a final chapter, the authors speculate how Chicana/o identity will change as Chicanas/os become a significant proportion of the U.S. population and as such factors as immigration, intermarriage, and improvements in social standing influence the process of identification. At the end of each chapter is an engaging exercise that reinforces its main argument and shows how psychological approaches are applicable to real life. Chicana/o Identity in a Changing U.S. Society is an unprecedented introduction to psychological issues that students can relate to and understand. It complements other titles in the Mexican American Experience series to provide a balanced view of issues that affect Mexican Americans today.
Chicana/o Subjectivity and the Politics of Identity by Call Number: E184.M5 G3348 2011ISBN: 9780230111356Publication Date: 2011-10-05This book traces the influence of Hegel's theory of recognition on different literary representations of Chicano/a subjectivity, with the aim of demonstrating how the identity thinking characteristic of Hegel's theory is unwillingly reinforced even in subjects that are represented as rebelling against liberal-humanist ideologies.
Ethnic Realities of Mexican Americans by ISBN: 9780398087814Publication Date: 2014-03-19The goal of this book is to examine the ethnic experience of the Mexican American community in the United States, from colonialism to twenty-first century globalization. The authors unearth evidence that reveals how historically white ideology, combined with science, law, and the American imagination, has been strategically used as a mechanism to intimidate, manipulate, oppress, control, dominate, and silence Mexican Americans, ethnic racial minorities, and poor whites. A theoretical and philosophical overview is presented, focusing on the repressive practice against Mexicans that resulted in violence, brutality, vigilantism, executions, and mass expulsions. The Mexican experience under hooded America is explored, including religion, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Local, state, and federal laws are documented, often in conflict with one another, including the Homeland Security program that continues to result in detentions and deportations. The authors examine the continuing argument of citizenship that has been used to legally exclude Mexican children from the educational system and thereby being characterized as not fit for the classroom nor entitled to an equitable education. Segregation and integration in the classroom is discussed, featuring examples of court cases. As documented throughout the book, American law is a constant reminder of the pervasive ideology of the historical racial supremacy, socially defined and enforced ethnic inferiority, and the rejection of positive social change, equality, and justice that continues to persist in the United States. The book is extensively referenced and is intended for professionals in the fields of sociology, history, ethnic studies, Mexican American (Chicano) studies, law and political science and also those concerned with sociolegal issues.
The Chicano Movement by ISBN: 9781135053666Publication Date: 2014-03-26The largest social movement by people of Mexican descent in the U.S. to date, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s linked civil rights activism with a new, assertive ethnic identity: Chicano Power Beginning with the farmworkers' struggle led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the Movement expanded to urban areas throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Pacific Northwest, as a generation of self-proclaimed Chicanos fought to empower their communities. Recently, a new generation of historians has produced an explosion of interesting work on the Movement. The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century collects the various strands of this research into one readable collection, exploring the contours of the Movement while disputing the idea of it being one monolithic group. Bringing the story up through the 1980s, The Chicano Movement introduces students to the impact of the Movement, and enables them to expand their understanding of what it means to be an activist, a Chicano, and an American.
Mexicanos by ISBN: 0253353688Publication Date: 2009-08-01Newly revised and updated, Mexicanos tells the rich and vibrant story of Mexicans in the United States. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and tempered by an often difficult existence, Mexicans continue to play an important role in U.S. society, even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them. Thorough and balanced, Mexicanos makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Mexican population of the United States -- a growing minority who are a vital presence in 21st-century America.
Occupied America by Call Number: E184.M5 A63 2000ISBN: 0321044851Publication Date: 1999-12-22Occupied America was the first textbook to be published for the growing number of Chicano History courses developing across the country and remains the bestseller. The Fourth Edition has been completely updated, containing a significant amount of new material on Mexican American history. In addition, the Fourth Edition contains a new introductory chapter, Not Just pyramids, Explorers, and Heroes, that includes the period before 1821. The Fourth Edition also looks at the question of gender and includes the role of gender throughout. Finally, a vast amount of new and updated sources have been added. Acuna's reputation as a radical and important voice of Chicano History has only increased since the first edition was published. The changes in the Fourth Edition make this edition of Occupied America the most comprehensive one yet.
Crowding Out Latinos by Call Number: E184.M5 P67 2000ISBN: 1566397421Publication Date: 2000-02-02In this groundbreaking analysis, Marco Portales examines the way in which education and the media act as immobilizing social forces to shape the Latino world that exists despite the best efforts of many Mexican Americans and other Latinos. The delicate relationships between what Latinos are and what they seem to be, as perceived both by the larger society and by Latinos themselves, create and craft a culture that students of American culture have not sufficiently studied or understood. As bandidos or gigolos, drug users or unwed mothers, Latinos continue to figure in the public consciousness primarily as undesirables. Despite decades of effort by Spanish-speaking Americans to improve their image in the United States, Mexican Americans and other resident Latinos are still largely perceived by other Americans as poverty-stricken immigrants and second-class citizens. Accordingly, the great majority of Latino citizens receive substandard educations, equipping them for substandard jobs in substandard living environments. The lives of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, Portales contends, can best be illuminated by looking at the history of Chicanos and particularly Chicano literature, which dramatizes the impact of education and the media on Latinos. Like Irish literature, Chicano literature has sought to articulate and to establish itself as a postcolonial voice that has struggles for national attention. Through psychological and sociopolitical representations, Chicano writers have variously used anger, indifference, fear, accommodation, and other conflicting emotions and attitudes to express how it feels to be seen as an immigrant or a foreigner in one's own country. Portales looks at four Chicano literary works -- Americo Paredes' George Washington Gomez, Anthony Quinn's The Original Sin, Sandra Cisnero's House on Mango Street, and Ana Castillo's Massacre of the Dreamers -- to focus attention on social issues that impede the progress of Latinos. By doing so, he hopes to engage both Latino and non-Latino Americans in an overdue dialogue about the power of education and the media to form perceptions that can either empower or repress Latino citizens.
Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans by ISBN: 1623491657Publication Date: 2014-01-01Part I. Mutual aid and Mexican immigrant organizing -- Part II. Mutualismo and civil rights organizing -- Part III. Mutualista-style labor organizing -- Part IV. Barrio community organizing -- Part V. Big media, big money, and mutualista organizing.
The legacy of the historic mutual aid organizing by US Mexicans, with its emphasis on self-help and community solidarity, continues to inform Mexican American activism and subtly influence a number of major US social movements. In Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans, Julie Leininger Pycior traces the early origins of organizing in the decades following the US-Mexican War, when Mexicans in the Southwest established mutualista associations for their protection. Further, she traces the ways in which these efforts have been invoked by contemporary Latino
Description based upon print version of record.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Navigating Borders by Call Number: E184.M5 C374 2012ISBN: 9781433112614Publication Date: 2012-05-18This book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award In the context of debates about U.S. immigration, this book gives a voice to undocumented Americans of Mexican origin - specifically, involuntary immigrants born in Mexico but brought to the United States by their parents as minors. They are indistinguishable from other Americans, yet in the media and their everyday lives they encounter racism, discrimination, ostracism, and castigation on a regular basis. This book is about their stories and how, against the odds, they offer resistance as they navigate across ideological, historical, socio-economic, institutional and educational borders, in an effort to carve out a life in U.S. society. In constructing an evocative and powerful counter-narrative the authors show how they ultimately worked with artists of Mexican origin and community organizations to bring the undocumented issue to performative and political life.
Ends of Assimilation by Call Number: PS153.M4 C88 2015ISBN: 9780190210113Publication Date: 2015-01-16Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the conditions and costs of cultural change, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the function of literature. John Alba Cutler shows how mid-century sociologists advanced a model of assimilation thatignored the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterized American culture as homogeneous, stable, and exceptional. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar period to the present understand culture as dynamic and self-consciously promote literature as a medium forinfluencing the direction of cultural change. With original analyses of works by canonical and noncanonical writers - from Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Vea, and Patricia Santana - Ends of Assimilation demands that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language weuse to talk about culture.
Literature As History by Call Number: E184.M5 G3746 2016ISBN: 9780816533558Publication Date: 2016-11-06Historical documents--and, for that matter, historical sources--exist in many forms. The traditional archival sources such as official documents, newspapers, correspondence, and diaries can be supplemented by personal archives, oral histories, and even works of fiction in order for historians to illuminate the past. Literature as History offers a critical new path for Chicano and Latino history. Historian Mario T. Garc#65533;a analyzes prominent works of Chicano fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical literature to explore how they can sometimes reveal even more about ordinary people's lives. Garc#65533;a argues that this approach can yield personal insights into historical events that more formal documents omit, lending insights into such diverse issues as gender identity, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the concerns of the working class. In a stimulating and imaginative look at the intersection of history and literature, Garc#65533;a discusses the meaning and intent of narratives. Literature as History represents a unique way to rethink history. Garc#65533;a, a leader in the field of Chicano history and one of the foremost historians of his generation, explores how Chicano historians can use Chicano and Latino literature as important historical sources. Autobiography, testimonio, and fiction are the genres the author researches to obtain new and insightful perspectives on Chicano history at the personal and grassroots level. Breaking the boundaries between history and literature, Garc#65533;a provides a thought-provoking discussion of what constitutes a historical source.
The un/Making of Latina/o Citizenship by Call Number: PS153.H56 U66 2014ISBN: 9781137431073Publication Date: 2014-08-20Examining a wide range of source material including popular culture, literature, photography, television, and visual art, this collection of essays sheds light on the misrepresentations of Latina/os in the mass media.
Domestic Negotiations by ISBN: 0813560969Publication Date: 2013-07-01This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through "negotiation"--a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation--and "self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the "chili queens" of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita Gonz#65533;lez's romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros's "purple house controversy" and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez's self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodr#65533;guez's performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma L#65533;pez's digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.
Ecological borderlands by ISBN: 0252098986Publication Date: 2016"This project focuses on environmental practices among Mexican-American women and offers a rethinking of ecofeminism from the standpoint of Chicana feminists. Christina Holmes examines ecological themes across film, literature, murals and other visual art, Chicano nationalist activism, and contemporary direct action organization and presents how Chicana artists, activists, and scholars craft alternative models for ecofeminist praxis. Drawing on debates central to earlier ecofeminist work, Holmes analyzes issues around embodiment, women's connections to nature, and the place of spirituality in ecofeminist philosophy and practice. Chicana environmentalism provides pathways to insights in decolonization by linking social and ecological justice outside of a narrow framework, and Holmes seeks to explore the challenges to debates in the canon of ecofeminist literature to develop a more inclusive model of environmental feminism to alleviate some of the biases in Western feminism. Close readings of theoretical work; careful elaborations of ecological narratives in Chicana cultural productions; histories of land, water, and work rights struggles in the Southwest; and a detailed description of an activist exemplar of Chicana eco-feminist practices all work in tandem to underscore the importance of living with feminist commitment in body, nature, and spirit. Chicana Environmentalisms demonstrates how Chicana feminists have actively and materially stretched themselves into coalitions with human, nature, and spirit others, and these acts underscore the role of agency in Chicana ecofeminist work"
¡Chicana Power! by Call Number: E184.M5 B55 2011ISBN: 9780292725881Publication Date: 2011-08-01The first book-length study of women's involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, #65533;Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities. #65533;Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauht#65533;moc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.
Suggested Search Terms
- Chicano movement
- Mexican Americans
- Mexican Americans--Ethnic identity
- Mexican Americans--Social Conditions
- Mexican Americans and mass media
- Mexican Americans in literature
- Mexican Americans in motion pictures
- Mexican Americans in popular culture
- Mexican American women
When searching with these terms, make sure the search parameters are Subject is (exact) or contains. You can then narrow your search by adding your topic, such as gender, politics, or popular culture on a new search line using AND.
