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Chicano Studies Vitality and incremental influence characterize the political history of the Hispanic community. This history is both positive and negative, and expresses a tradition not always fully known or appreciated by all of the contemporary participants, Chicano and non-Chicano alike. Political efforts continue to vary in expression in accordance with the temper of the time and the response of the majority society's institutions; for example, petitions can lead to mass protests, which may be disrupted quickly. Organizations express a given consciousness and are salient manifestations of specific activity; they continue to reveal persistence and innovation, yet they are only a part of a larger political landscape. Domination is reflected in the persistence of issues across time and space and the specific conscious efforts to address these issues as well as the frustration of such efforts. To be Mexican in the United States is still to be against the hegemonic grain, whether right or left.
The unifying element is ethnic consciousness, which interacts with class in the sense that the dynamics of community politics addresses both ethnic and class consciousness. The pressures, requirements, and dependencies of leadership have increased, and the spectrum of leadership has also diversified; but the distinctions between autochthonous and designated leadership remain, and so do their weaknesses. Politics Political activity among Chicano's has waxed and waned during periods of economic dislocation and adjustment and in facing hostile circumstances. A latent or overt anti-Mexican ideology is always being propagated by certain circles. Concomitantly, there are the recurring practices of deportation, anti-Mexican legislation, continued exploitation on the job, the deployment of the ever-present police power against Mexicans, and the continual scapegoating and pursuit of undocumented workers -- all attacks on the Mexican community.
Within this social milieu, Mexican American mobilization activity in the United States is both galvanized and seen as suspect. Politically, U. S. government representatives view transnational Mexican linkages as questionable. Nevertheless, limited to the existing system, the elements are present politically for a future more positive than the past; but they are in fact problematic because they pose questions, not unqualified affirmations. As the eighties came to a close, a number of important developments were representative of incremental trends.
Demographically and economically striking was the increase in numbers as well as the economic significance of the population to levels not previously experienced. Stemming from this, but also distinct, was the greater targeted attention directed to the community. The community was bombarded not only with appeals and arguments that both strengthened and weakened; it was also given a widely circulated image. Levels of education were indeed growing; and the growth of the college-educated population was striking, as was the increase in professionals in unprecedented numbers. The political participation of women increased dramatically the players, resources, and efforts in civic life. A greater organizational sophistication was evident, as well as the proclaimed necessity to participate in community civic life.
There have been also mounting differences, apart from continuing disparities between immigrants recently arrived and the longer-term residents. Disparities between regions were accounted for by the character and tempo of the economy, as were the more ominous differences between those with a high income and education and those who become more, not less, impoverished and undereducated. Leaders nearly always come from the middle class and are increasingly homogeneous in educational background, moderate in posture and personal style, and cautious about overemphasizing ethnicity. College and professional degrees are the rule, as are an orthodox family context, a conforming appearance, and facility in articulation. Generally unorthodox, nonconforming leadership is marginalized.
To date, in the late 1980 s as in the past, the dominant current has been centrist liberalism affected by oscillating moderate, conservative, or progressive impacts. Radical challenge remains the exception. The indispensable requirements for political success have not changed: organization, resources, numbers, skills, and leadership. Whether embodied by men or women, there remain six pillars to civic life and, in particular, blocks in the political edifice. Each alleges sustaining general as well as particular interests.
For a variety of reasons, preeminent in civic activity are elected officials; they are the gatekeepers and monitors in the Mexican community more than in other sectors of the larger society. Professionals, particularly attorneys, have enjoyed a prominence throughout the seventies and eighties. The presence of business persons have already been felt and will grow because of their resources and their ability to become the patrons of others as well as because of their unquestioned legitimacy in the larger society. While churches also possess this reputation, they also have access to numbers, outreach, and an integral community-level organizational network, and they have the will necessary to use these assets. Though only 20 percent of the workers are organized, unions have resources and some numbers, but here a decline rather than an increase in effectiveness is most likely.
Next to neighborhood, work remains the most salient organizational magnet; and work organization remains the largest reservoir of strength. Last are the civic organizations which have an organizational membership and structure and can make a telling commitment. They continue to persist and grow, rather than decline, through the eighties. The demographic growth and economic significance of the Mexican community in the United States will continue; but hype must be taken for what it is even though the hype represents notice. However, numbers and purchasing power, or even production power, do not, in themselves, cultivate, much less assure, political power. Growth should strengthen the community's working-class character; however economic, industrial, and occupational changes are varied and also growing is a subordinate nonworking sector which is incrementally impoverished.
At this time, economic and educational gains for the community are impacting upon its class composition. The national or cultural character of the community has been undergoing change, while the continuing presence of a Mexican culture veils the significant loss of culture. Worsening crises may sharpen Chicano political consciousness, accentuating the change in its political direction from liberal to progressive; however, conservative trends in the United States will continue to have an impact upon the community. A conservative trend is indeed strong and drawing upon the petty capitalist tradition found in Mexico and the continual enhancement of capitalist values and aspirations in the United States.
Education The Chicano educational movement was expressed dramatically in Los Angeles when activists focused community attention on the abysmal conditions within the citys public school system. After several months of p reorganizing activity in March 1968, thousands of Mexican students literally walked out of their classrooms, specifying their grievances and their proposed solutions in a set of demands directed at the Board of Education which became, in effect, the points of negotiation. The Blowouts, as the staged demonstrations were called, involved principally five high schools in the East Los Angeles area; but their impact reverberated throughout the entire Southwest. With the support of older Chicano activists as well as one of their teachers, Sal Castro, the students dramatically drew attention to the racist attitudes held by many Anglo, teachers and to the inferior educational conditions that plagued East Los Angeles schools. These conditions were epitomized by a 50 percent dropout rate for Mexican high school students.
The blowouts precipitated a wave of community outcry and a series of confrontations between local Mexican residents and the Los Angeles Board of Education, and eventually, as was to be expected, police agencies. Students, parents, and community activists demanded quality education and bilingual and bi cultural school programs. One unconscionable response was police harassment and an indictment by nothing less than the Grand Jury for what were, in effect, actions protected by the U. S. Constitution. During this time, the Chicano movement gained a level of notice that reached even the Mexican middle class.
To some extent, young Chicano's made a public issue of the chauvinism and inequality common to institutions that less vocal members of the community had somehow chosen not to mention; and they emphasized urban disparities, in particular. In the arena of struggle for higher education for Mexican students and the development of Chicano studies programs, the 1969 Santa Barbara conference and the Plan de Santa Barbara reflected a major attempt to provide conceptual cohesion, to develop common guidelines, and to consolidate past gains and prepare the ground for future ones. Preceded by six months of planning and followed by a year of meetings, the plan was led by a steering committee and involved selected participants. The major thrust of the plan was to stimulate the growth and operation of Chicano studies programs along movement premises and to coordinate politically and organizationally local programs statewide in an effort to further a particular vision of education and one with a particular purpose, both of which the plan provided for the first time. Eventually, programs were established at many campuses, and as such they represented a net gain; but these programs were shaped and directed according to the rules of the university game. Thus, campus action continued concurrently with community action.
By the 1970 s, many young Mexicans had explored the tolerance of the establishment, and in every way possible, they pursued what the system offered. In that turnabout, young Chicano's motivated a large percentage of their community to exhibit a stronger public presentation. In effect, they demanded that society at large receive a new message about what it was to be Mexican. They also generated support for educational, political, and economic advancement. Public officials began addressing issues of concern to Mexicans in a more considered manner.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the Chicano movement forced certain concessions from the Anglo mainstream; and some of these concessions -- partial bilingual education, underfunded Chicano studies programs, and unenthusiastic affirmative action employment practices -- created a setting from which a viable Mexican middle class could rise to local prominence. Today, Mexicans continue to feel the damaging effects of drastic federal budget cuts and less government support for affirmative action and bilingual education. Culturally, the past twenty years have been a time of revitalization within the community, self-evident in the energies directed into the arts, media, and religious institutions, as well as a period of increased efforts at integration. Entertainment But in the whip of that cultural whirlwind, the community remains tempered by a uniquely Mexican concern for cultural continuity and political affirmation, while it is ambivalent as to how pluralistic the allegedly diverse system is. In the seventies the dominant society made two overarching responses; one was the promulgation of the term Hispanic and its supportive conceptualization. The term Hispanic was a transparent ploy, undercutting the ethnic revitalization movement.
It quickly became the preferred term by bureaucrats, academics, business, and media. Another was the promulgation of the fear of this insurgency which centered on immigration and language, and a renewed emphasis on assimilation and denial of Mexican rights qua Mexicans -- a noticeable phenomenon in Texas and California, in particular. In terms of language, however, two significant trends have strengthened over the past two decades. On the one hand, a sizable segment of the community speaks Spanish primarily. On the other hand, the part of the local community which is English-only has increased.
In fact, many second, third, and fourth generation Mexican Americans are unable to speak Spanish, although they continue to understand it. Their linguistic limitation is primarily due to the saturation of English-language media combined with a lack of formal Spanish-language maintenance. Since 1980 s, the beginning of the so-called Decade of the Hispanic, Chicano media producers and advocates have made increasingly corporatist demands upon both the state and broadcast industry, attempting to gain some control over the consumer sovereignty of commercial and public broadcasting. It is in this period that Chicano's were recognized as consumers. Using a discourse of citizenship, media producers and advocates did not so much question the legal and political distinction between producers and consumers as stake a moral and economic claim to the Chicano citizen-consumer. By emphasizing Chicano cinema as a film movement that emerges vis-a-vis television and its regulation by the state, a reorientation of the field itself has been proposed.
Rather than take Hollywood as the norm against which the two other media histories the avant-garde and television -- are measured (or ignored). In the 1990 s, the average white viewer will go to eight movies per year but will watch nearly fifty hours of television per week. Latinos will watch more of both. Television has also become the endpoint of the avant-garde as it has been incorporated stylistically from Miami Vice to MTV to the evening news. Chicano cinema, like the public sphere that it sought, disappeared within most accounts of the rise of global media and the information superhighway -- as did independents generally. Nevertheless, U.
S. independent producers and media groups joined together and organized around pending telecommunication legislation, starting with their successful lobbying for a separate funding source for independent productions -- the Independent Television Service (ITVS) -- in 1988. Commercial English-language radio providing music became part of the household and did much to stimulate English among the young; on the other hand, Spanish-language radio increased its audience and helped to make up for the decline in readership of Spanish-language journalism. For the most part, however, radio was owned outside the community. The new medium, television, was at first exclusively English, and only later did Spanish-language programming become available.
Mexican musics relatively familiar rhythms and strong external influences may be reasons why it has consistently melted into U. S. popular styles as an often unidentifiable seasoning, where Antillian and Brazilian music has tended to preserve at least some of its identity. But the presence of Mexican music in the southwestern United States also made it one of the ingredients of the western U. S. folk ethos from the start.
The dominant Latin musical area in the Southwest is Texas, whose flourishing culture not only preserved Mexican forms but developed an indigenous Mexican-American style, Chicano or norton music. English-speaking America is still unaware of the continuing richness of U. S. Latino culture. The musical effect of this division is particularly clear in the development of Latino rap, in which some of the most popular groups were from Los Angeles while the creative leadership (at least since the early Bronx days) has mostly been Dominican, though shared by artists like the Panamanian-born El General (Edgardo Franco), whose popularity covers the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Over a span of several years, the major factors that Los Angeles Latino rap, Dominican merengue rap, and artists like El General share is that they do not take themselves as seriously as many African-American artists and -- like most European and African rap artists -- operate in a world where entertainment and prophecy or politics are more evenly balanced. Chicano musics mass popularity was rapidly developing from the 1980 s. An extremely important part was played by Hollywood, with a large number of musicals built around specifically Latin-oriented plots (often tied to a country or city title), and many others that included a Latin number or two in a non-Latin script. Though few aspects of Hollywood have been so thoroughly ignored by its historians, these musicals greatly advanced the spread of Latin rhythms and melodies into American culture. Demographic experts project that by 2010, Latinos will be the largest minority group in the United States and Mexicans will continue to be the largest Latino subgroup. Numbers, of course, do not give cohesion or identity in themselves.
However, in the Southwest numbers will particularly increase, but so will the numbers of other groups. Though the community pursues or rather raises its own ends, these ends are in practice integrated with those of others. The persisting historical Chicano demands have been for civil, cultural, economic, juridical, and political rights. These are encompassed, and variously expressed in contemporary times, by the issues of equity in all areas of life: bilingualism, political participation, quality education, the rights of undocumented workers, employment, rights on the job, job training, economic development, rights of Mexican women, police and political practices, housing, social services, health services, census counting, urban development, and foreign policy issues. Underlying these issues, explicitly or implicitly, is the desirability of and methods for social change.
Past and contemporary progressive political platforms express, in part or in its entirety, this emphasis on positive social change, and coherent political programs in the future must deal with these platforms. To date, what have been granted are incremental concessions in the areas of voting, employment, schooling, and immigration rights. Minimum objectives have been pursued and minimum objectives have been achieved. Though there has been a great stress on voting qua voting as a measure of political achievement and influence, the act of voting does not promise the achievement of full equities, much less direct and full democracy. Bibliography: Chavez, John R. The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Gutierrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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