(2009). Ethno-Racial Profiling and State Violence in a Southwest Barrio. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n1 p93-123 Spr. This study, carried out in a barrio neighborhood near the U.S.-Mexican border, uses a structural violence perspective to understand the extent of and individual determinants of mistreatment of residents by immigration authorities. Results indicate that barrio residents are more likely than the U.S. population in general to experience mistreatment at the hands of state authorities. Multivariate analyses indicate that authorities dole out mistreatment especially to people who appear Mexican. Educated Latinos are also frequent targets of mistreatment, and being a native-born or naturalized U.S. citizen offers no protection. These results suggest an institutional pattern of state violence in barrios structured more by racism and nativism than by immigration status…. [Direct]
(2008). Improving Latino Education: Roles and Challenges for Superintendents and School Boards. CSRC Research Report. Number 11. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (NJ1) The American education system is failing Latina/o students. Despite their significant representation in the student population, Latina/o students struggle in overcrowded, under-resourced schools and are too often limited to vocational curricula instead of college-bound options. About half of Latina/o students complete their K-12 education, and less than 10 percent graduate from college. In this report we survey research that explores how school boards and school superintendents can contribute to efforts to improve education for Latina/o students. The first part of the report looks at the challenges that educators face in large urban school districts and examines the implications for Latino communities. Next is an overview of the roles and responsibilities of the governance team and the issues that superintendents and school boards confront, with a focused look on school governance in Latino communities. This is followed by a discussion of recent events affecting the governance of… [PDF]
(2008). Straddling "la otra frontera": Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v33 n1 p89-122 Spr. Although there is a surplus of literature dealing with U.S.-Mexico border identities and cultures, this article begins to problematize and reposition Chicana/o art historical discourse by engaging with the U.S.-Canada border. By investigating the relationship between working-class histories and Chicana/o visual culture in Michigan, the article analyzes the function of MiChicana/o culture along la frontera nortena. Evoking a multiplicity of art historical and cultural studies approaches, the author addresses the work of George Vargas, Martin Moreno, Nora Chapa Mendoza, and the Xicano Development Center, among others, in hopes of recentering Chicana/o cultural studies. (Contains 6 figures and 12 notes.)… [Direct]
(2008). The Revolution Fails Here: Cherrie Moraga's \The Hungry Woman\ as a Mexican Medea. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v33 n1 p63-88 Spr. This essay argues that Moraga's recent play, \The Hungry Woman,\ is a meditation on the failure of the \Queer Aztlan\ project articulated in 1993 as part of her collection \The Last Generation.\ It views the play through the lens of Mexican dramatic structures and historiography, explicating how Moraga interrogates the possibilities of indigenismo by dramatizing the failed revolution and the fallen warrior. Inspired by the work of John Ochoa, particularly his reading of Octavio Paz, I claim that while the play stages the failure of a revolution based on cultural nationalism, this lack of success is a productive one. Viewed within this frame, \The Hungry Woman\ emerges as a play almost, but not quite, weighed down by pessimism. The essay concludes by exploring why this Mexican form of failure was so difficult to convey to a U.S. audience and analyzes recent productions of the play, including the one I directed at Brown University in spring 2006. (Contains 2 figures and 14 notes.)… [Direct]
(2008). A History of Black and Brown: Chicana/o-African American Cultural and Political Relations. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v33 n1 p143-154 Spr. Rather than assume that ethnicity or race necessarily marks the edges of one's culture or politics, the contributors to this dossier highlight the messy, blurry, and often contradictory relationships that arise when Chicana/os and African Americans engage one another. The essays explore the complicated mix of cooperation and conflict that characterize black-brown collaborations in activism, music, literature, and art. They illuminate how nonwhite racialized groups share and contest the past, present, and future. Instead of charting culture and politics through the prism of a singular race or ethnicity, the essayists choose to highlight the intersections of Chicana/o and African American lives, paying special attention to how culture, as critic George Lipsitz suggests, often serves as a dress rehearsal for the possibilities and limits of politics and social movements. The intertwining of Chicana/o and African American culture and politics, moreover, is not simply a recent phenomenon… [Direct]
(2008). Tonanlupanisma: Re-Membering Tonantzin-Guadalupe in Chicana Visual Art. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v33 n2 p61-90 Fall. This essay draws on Chicanalo cultural studies and art history to interpret the way three artworks by Chicana artists address the relationship between spirit and flesh through the indigenous inflected iconography of la Virgen de Guadalupe. Recognizing the significance of the transcultural link between Tonantzin (the Nahua mother \goddess\) and Guadalupe, I introduce the concept of Tonanlupanisma as a prism through which to understand cultural productions that engage the contested histories and iconographies of Tonantzin-Guadalupe from a decolonial feminist perspective. Countering the subjugation of Tonantzin in dominant Guadalupana visual culture and discourse in general, Tonanlupanisma critically privileges Mesoamerican indigenous worldviews that render a more complex and humanized image of the mother goddess and woman and thus challenge the spiritual/sexual dichotomies of Christian-influenced Western thought. Integrating scholarly research and personal narrative, the essay… [Direct]
(2007). The Latino Workforce at Mid-Decade. CSRC Research Report. Number 10. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (NJ1) The Latino workforce is increasingly critical to the vitality of the U.S. economy. Despite the importance of Latinos in the labor market, their economic contributions are limited by significant disadvantages. This research report provides an overview of Latino workers in the United States at mid-decade. We provide background information on labor force share and labor force participation, then we delve into how Latinos are faring in the labor market by examining educational preparation, occupations, earnings, employment sectors, and unemployment. The presentation is intended to inform public discussion of Latino workforce incorporation and to guide policy interventions that will improve employment prospects for Latino workers. (Contains 7 figures, 1 table and 3 notes.)[This series is a project of the CSRC Latino Research Program, which receives funding from the University of California Committee on Latino Research.]… [PDF]
(2007). Gender, Order, and Femicide: Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Ciudad Juarez. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p53-86 Spr. More than 400 women have been murdered in and around Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, over the past decade. As the murders continue unabated and unsolved, and with the likely complicity of state authorities, they have triggered a dynamic cultural response from writers, filmmakers, singers, and others who deplore the murders while suggesting the underlying causes of the femicides. Our article examines three of these responses: the photojournalism of Julian Cardona, a novel by Carlos Fuentes, and a song by Los Tigres del Norte. We conclude that even as these artists express a profound sympathy for the victims' plight, their representations, which are based on patriarchal binaries of male dominance and female submissiveness, act to revictimize the women. Since for these cultural producers, it was women's active incorporation into the wage labor force as assembly plant workers that generated Juarez's "disorder," then it follows that "order" will only be restored when female… [Direct]
(2007). Teaching Citizenship and Values on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p87-112 Spr. In the United States and Mexico, public schooling, as a government institution, has attempted to reinforce cultural and national values explicitly through civics lessons and implicitly through attitudes and classroom management. This study shows how schools on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border attempt to teach distinct national and cultural norms. Based on fieldwork in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso schools, our research illustrates the blending and separation of cultural values in a large metropolitan border area. It looks at overt civic rituals in schools, such as the flag salute, and at more tacit normative training associated with classroom organization and management strategies. We link teaching practices to cultural concepts of time, personal interaction, and nationality. The development of themes regarding human relationships and time, sociability and individualism, and nationalism and hegemony opens up some commonly held assumptions of U.S. and Mexican cultures for a more… [Direct]
(2007). "This Is No Slum!": A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Community Cultural Wealth in Culture Clash's "Chavez Ravine". Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p145-179 Spr. Drawing on a critical race theory framework, this article weaves together sociology, education, history, and performance studies to challenge deficit interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory and to analyze Culture Clash's play Chavez Ravine. The play recounts a decade of Los Angeles history through the perspectives of displaced Mexican American families from three former neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine. Culture Clash's performance recovers and personifies the community cultural wealth cultivated by these families. This multifaceted portfolio of cultural assets and resources includes aspirational, linguistic, social, navigational, familial, and resistant capital. Chavez Ravine affirms the continuity of Chicana/o communities, utilizing culture as a source of strength that facilitates survival and nurtures resistance. (Contains 6 figures and 27 notes.)… [Direct]
(2007). Reflections on 1972. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p183-190 Spr. In this article, the author reflects on the events that took place in the year 1972. The author was a junior at the University of New Mexico back then, refusing to eat or buy grapes and lettuce, picketing grocers who did not carry United Farm Workers of America produce. He and his buddies cast their votes against granting Richard Nixon a second term. Nightly he prayed for a just and more peaceful world amid flickering candles to St. Jude, to St. Anthony, to the crucified Christ. His missives of supplication seemed to float into thin air without a listener or response–until, of course, the death of J. Edgar Hoover was announced in May of that year. The war in Vietnam raged on and on. At home in the United States, the war was raging just as fiercely. The peace movement and the repressive government response to it were politicizing Americans–Mexican Americans among them. In particular, the heavy-handed tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were pushing many young Mexican… [Direct]
(2007). Chickens on the Bus. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p191-195 Spr. In this article the author describes his first winter in Elizabeth, New Jersey with his family in 1972. His family included: his mother Margarita; his aunts Dinorah and Nereyda; the family matriarch, his grandmother Maria Otilia Anreus; and himself, an underweight and scrawny twelve-year-old named after the infamous anarchist, Alexander Berkman. His family had come to the United States less than two years earlier, lived briefly in Miami, and then left that city in search of jobs and a life away from right-wing fellow Cubans. His family, like the majority of working-class families in 1950s Cuba, had welcomed the revolution on January 1, 1959. Members of his extended family ranged from liberal to socialist in their political identity and political past. Overall, the family was anti-Batista, anti-Americano (of the U.S. variety), and anticommunist (of the Stalinist variety, the one most available in pre-1959 Cuba). So it was natural that they hid weapons, students, and publications… [Direct]
(2007). The Asian American Fakeness Canon, 1972-2002. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p197-204 Spr. The year 1972 can be seen to inaugurate not a tradition of Asian American New York theater, but the rich and multigenre collection of writing that the author has called "the Asian American fakeness canon." The fakeness canon refers to a collection of writings that take as one of their central points of reference the question of cultural and ethnic authenticity. By claiming for themselves a superior standard of authenticity, by accusing other writers of fakeness, by defending their work from these charges, or by commenting on the debates, the creative writers, journalists, and scholars of the fakeness canon have produced a particularly gendered and historicized narrative through which authenticity and fakeness are understood within Asian American culture. This essay focuses specifically on the central literary figures of the fakeness canon: Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and David Henry Hwang. The purpose of this essay is not to revisit the original texts or arguments of… [Direct]
(2007). Unearthing the Past in 1972: Literary Antecedents and Cultural Capital. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 32 n1 p205-218 Spr. This essay is a cursory examination of 1972 and the early 1970s. These were foundational years for Chicana/o literature. The author has only been able to offer a suggestive analysis of some of the literary production during this period. The author has not discussed the numerous periodicals and journals of the period, some underground, some with larger but still modest circulations, and still others with broad audiences and national distribution that became fundamental to the field, like \Aztlan,\ \El grito,\ and \Revista chicana-riquena.\ The author has only considered published books, not manuscripts that may reside in university and personal archives. The author thinks, however, that from this brief overview one can see that there is still terrific work to be carried out on the period. There are certainly extant copies of many of the lesser-known authors' works in special collections at universities across the country, and no doubt some people have personal connections with the… [Direct]
(2007). Dos Hermanas Chicanas: Overcoming Barriers to Professional Advancement. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n2 p47-63 Fall. Women and ethnic minorities face steep barriers to professional advancement, and those who rise to the executive level typically use a variety of strategies to overcome obstacles in their way. This study first reviewed the literature on barriers to professional advancement for women and ethnic minorities and the strategies that they report using to overcome them. The author then conducted interviews with two Latina executive managers who are sisters to explore their rise in the professional world. The barriers and strategies reported by \las dos hermanas chicanas\ provide guidance for women and ethnic minorities who seek to reach upper management positions and for all who would bring about systemic change to increase diversity in the workplace…. [Direct]