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Chicano Studies
Chicano Studies
Michael soldatenko
16 15 14 13 12 11 6 5 4 3 2
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Conclusion 168
Notes 189
Bibliography 231
Index 271
Acknowledgments
lic intellectuals had written the United States as the central figure in the
universalist commitment to civil and human rights. In particular, U.S.
history had become the mythic tale of a nonethnic national ideology,
where ancestral (and racial) affinities meant little. As the historian
Nikhil Pal Singh explained: “Civic myths about the triumph over racial
injustice have become central to the resuscitation of a vigorous and stri-
dent form of American exceptionalism—the idea of the United States
as both a unique and universal nation.”14 But he questioned this perfor-
mance: “What if there is a recurring oscillation between universalizing
abstractions of liberal democracy, in which individuals are considered
equal with respect to nationality, and a persistent regression, in which
the actual individuals and communities who benefit from national
belonging are implicitly or explicitly constituted in white supremacist
terms?”15
In American academic practices, race is erased while simultane-
ously being at the center of intellectual production. In much of the
public intellectuals’ engagement with “America,” the issue of race was
envisioned as always being at the point of resolution and therefore no
longer (or ever, for that matter) a concern. Singh, following on the
work of others, has added that both American liberalism and race
are connected to American imperial expansion. Imperial expansionism
and Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century “gave new life to
racist schemas of thought already deposited in the American past.”16
When higher education fostered the tale of “America,” it also asserted
a racialized view of the United States and the world.17
In the 1960s, students of color, following radical whites, contested
American academic knowledge and laid siege to the pact among profes-
sors, their acolytes, and a selective intellectual tradition. Furthermore,
they questioned the association among knowledge, American excep-
tionalism, and empire (though less clearly regarding race and often not
at all looking at gender or sexuality). To undermine this bond, students
sought to subvert the university as a political institution. Given the gen-
eration of this mythic universalism, students of color initially sought to
disrupt academic knowledge. In its place, they wanted to design a new
body of knowledge. They required a knowledge that could more hon-
estly and truthfully explain the condition of people of color. For Mexi-
can American activists, this often meant that a space had to be carved
out of higher education—a space that would be controlled by Mexi-
can Americans and driven by Mexican American social and political
6 C h i c a n o S t u di e s
usage: “Utopia here refers not only to a vision of a future society, but a
vision pure and simple, an ability, perhaps willingness, to use expansive
concepts to see reality and its possibility.”8 Utopia becomes present
when individuals challenge official life, formulating community and
laying claim to other possible, albeit temporary, worlds. Utopia turns
into a possibility when people subvert the day-to-day practices that
uphold usual social and political operations. Utopia is about hope.
Hope becomes possible when alienated people engage in unhindered
dialogue, debate, and activity, fostering a temporary though unstable
unity that results in a provisional but real democracy. Utopia is unique,
irreproducible, and momentary; it is the product of its historical location
and therefore reproduces aspects of established power differences.9
There is a tendency to think of utopia as fantasy and unrealistic.
This results from the structures that society constructs around us. The
Mexican scholar César Gilabert has written that in order to under-
stand utopia, we need to recognize that societies create imaginary
relations to comprehend and control real conditions: “La sociedad,
para mantener las condiciones de su reproducción, construye conjun-
tos de imágenes, representaciones, símbolos, signos, con las cuales los
individuos se comunican, establecen metas y posibilidades, valores y
esperanzas, puede decirse entonces que la producción imaginaria, ‘en
última instancia,’ corresponde a lo que se han dado en llamar estruc-
tura o base de la sociedad.” (Society, in order to maintain its conditions
for reproduction, constructs constellations of images, representations,
symbols, signs, by which individuals communicate, establish goals and
possibilities, values and hope; it can be said then that imaginary pro-
duction, “in the final instance,” corresponds to what has been called
structure or base.10) We might add, following the critical pedagogue
Peter McLaren’s discussion on schooling, that society implants a “ritual
rhythm” in our nervous system. “We are ontogenetically constituted
by ritual and cosmologically informed by it as well,” he says. “All
of us are under ritual’s sway; absolutely none of us stands outside of
ritual’s symbolic jurisdiction. In fact, humanity has no option against
ritual.”11 Ritual or the imaginary is thus reinforced by an activist state
in its defense of society’s economic, political, social, psychological,
and ideological structures. This institutional imaginary, however, can
be challenged by alternative imaginaries that typically remain wishful
and unrealistic.12
How can the unreal and fanciful become possible and thereby
18 C h i c a n o S t u di e s
challenge patterns and rituals that are fundamental to our lives? The
Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s concept of “not yet” can help us
answer this query.13 The “not yet” is a hope based on possible futures
that lie dormant in the remnants of the past.14 In this way, hope is an
expression of what is really possible.15 Utopia is therefore as real as
any presently unfolding possibility, since it is grounded in the many
possibilities of the past. Interpreters of Bloch have written about
“remembering the future,” which is possible because “reality” is not
what is but includes what is becoming and what might become. This
propensity-to-something is not the result of material conditions alone.
Of course in our day-to-day practices, we reproduce and acknowledge
only a given static objective world; in this world, the utopic is repressed
and hidden.16 Hope must be understood as a cognitive act.17 For Bloch,
“concrete utopia” flows from a willful thinking that interacts with real-
ity. “Reality, in this view,” the coauthors Henry Giroux and McLaren
have written, “is engaged as both a subjective and objective experience,
and due to its unfinished nature it is seen as something that is always
in a state of becoming.”18
Human activity thus chooses which possible futures may become
real. Utopia is not some abstract fanciful thinking about the future.
Since hope permeates everyday consciousness, it is human action that
draws out these unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, and abortive hopes
buried in reality.19 Different futures depend on tapping this repository
of possibilities. The political philosopher Stephen Eric Bronner said it
this way: “The future is thus no mechanical elaboration of the present;
nor does it emerge from a series of ‘steps’ or ‘stages’ deriving in linear
fashion from the past.”20 This depends on the degree of consciousness
generated in the present. Utopian possibilities begin with the subjects’
awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of reality.21
Yet we should not underestimate the power of the institutional
imaginary to replace hope with tolerance. The Marxist philosopher
Herbert Marcuse has claimed that in contemporary capitalist society
“[t]olerance toward what is radically evil now appears as good because
it serves the coherence of the whole on the road to affluence or more
affluence.”22 We come to accept things as they are as the only way they
can be.23 In another essay, Marcuse contends that once a specific moral-
ity is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, like McLaren’s
“ritual rhythm,” it becomes second nature managing our “voluntary
servitude.”24 For this reason, the institutional imaginary denies hope
T h e G e n e s i s of A c ad e m i c C h i c a no S t ud i e s 19
and utopia. The second nature that comes from capitalism and the
authoritarian state burdens us with its inescapable regulations and ritu-
als. In the process, utopia is maligned because no one really can or
wants to visualize, much less actualize, possibilities.25 Hope is brushed
aside and replaced by continuous discussions about the necessary or
proper conditions for change.
For the Marxist critical theorist Max Horkheimer, the only real
possible choice, recalling Bloch’s notion of the “not yet,” is to accept
that the time for utopia is always now. He writes: “Present talk of
inadequate conditions is a cover for the tolerance of oppression. For
the revolutionary, conditions have always been ripe.”26 Horkheimer
proposes that the first step in resistance is “to keep oneself from being
deceived any longer.”27 Utopia is the time/place when self-deceit is
recognized and laughed away. In “remembering the future,” Marcuse
suggests we can open the space for real and universal tolerance. The
ability to determine one’s own life, together with the capability of being
free with others, creates “the society in which man is no longer enslaved
by institutions which vitiate self-determination from the beginning.”28
This radical change must reach into people’s “biological dimension”
to bring out a new sensibility. Here the imagination, drawing on the
“not yet,” becomes the grinding force in the reconstitution of reality.
Only then can second nature, with its self-perpetuating majority, be
recognized for what it is—rationalization of the status quo.
Simiotician and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the
carnival adds to this conversation on utopia. He allows us to see the
construction of a second world and second life outside officialdom. 29
This oppositional world supplants official institutional rituals by bring-
ing change, freedom, and disorder. At carnival, for instance, popular
behavior overthrows normal social operations. Through these endeav-
ors, new forms of speech and new meanings to old forms appear. Pro-
fanities as well as sexual and bodily innuendos become part of political
discourse. As Bakhtin has pointed out, there is a transfer to the material
level. This freedom, of course, is possible “only in [a] completely fear-
less world.” Only then is laughter positive, regenerative, and creative:
“Laughter create[s] no dogmas and could not become authoritarian;
it [does] not convey fear but a feeling of strength.”30 Student political
action parallels carnival.
Bakhtin’s analysis allows us to understand how official political
culture asserts that all is stable, unchanging, and perennial. Seriousness
20 C h i c a n o S t u di e s
ship with the university and the academy’s construction of the Mexican
American. An example of this work was Nick Vaca’s essay, which can be
read as the “call” of the Quinto Sol collective. It serves as an introduc-
tion to his and Romano’s later pieces in El Grito. “Mexican-Americans
have never been passive or docile,” Vaca emphasized in the first line of
his essay.44 He contended, using the recent UCLA Mexican American
Project as his starting point, that social scientists had stereotyped Mexi-
can Americans into a passive population. Social scientists’ discovery of
the Mexican American movement led them to conclude that the Mexi-
can American was only now “emerging” or “changing.” These social
scientists argued that this provided evidence that Mexican Americans’
passivity, fatalism, and docility had come to an end. Vaca responded
that the Mexican American has never been docile, passive, or fatalistic.
Rather, the attempt to depict the Mexican American in such a manner is
an instrument of control. He wrote: “To tell them such is to try to prevent
them from ever thinking of themselves as accomplished.”45 Vaca’s essay
called into question the relative ease with which the American episte-
mological totalizing project had created a Mexican American fantasy.
As the anthropologist Karen Mary Davalos has written, “Vaca’s most
significant contribution to the conversation is his suggestion that the
power and politics of racism and nationalism, which in turn can disguise
the sources of oppression, mediate research.”46
Romano’s various essays exemplified El Grito’s program allow-
ing us to discern the evolution of this Chicano(a) critical perspective
at the periphery of the academy. 47 In both “Minorities, History, and
the Cultural Mystique” and “The Anthropology and Sociology of the
Mexican Americans: The Distortion of Mexican American History,”
Romano depicted social scientists as scholars who have translated the
Mexican American into a masochistic, passive, irrational, fatalistic,
and questionable American. Social scientists, Romano noted, use con-
cepts, such as “traditional culture,” that distort the realities of these
communities by presenting them as ahistorical peoples. 48 Social scien-
tists, the “high priests of modern society,” he went on to say, engage
in creating a “social science fiction.”49 In fact, contemporary social
scientists view Mexican Americans in the same fashion as did those
“westward pioneers” of more than a hundred years ago.50 In “Goodbye
Revolution—Hello Slum,” Romano reminds us that the social scientists
have erased Mexican American history: “This amputation is profes-
sionally performed by social scientists wielding the scalpel of sociologi-
24 C h i c a n o S t u di e s
lated in El Plan, but he did not limit its expression. Romano rejected an
empirical view of independent and autonomous historical and cultural
traditions. He emphasized the mutual interdependence of histories and
cultures. Chicanos(as) needed to move toward a politics that postulates
“that duplicity, complicity, coalitions, and social networks are much
more fundamental to the historical process than are ethnicity, skin
color, group history, tradition, and religious affiliation.”62 Given this
formulation, Romano’s use of cultural nationalism brought his ideas
closer to the politics of the Bay Area Third World strikes that occurred
as the first issues of El Grito appeared. How then can we come to know
these Mexican American experiences? In a review of Carey McWil-
liams’s North from Mexico, Romano continued his endeavor to con-
struct his framework. To know if something is true, one has to converse
“with los viejos in the barrios.”63 The need to turn to the community, in
particular the elders, was already present in his dissertation. 64 From the
elders, he suggested, Chicanos(as) could learn that Mexican Americans
have been both participants and generators of the historical process:
“The picture that emerged from the dialogue with the viejitos was one
of constant struggle.”65 These stories, together with McWilliams’s text,
exposed “how ‘social’ ‘science’ ‘studies’ have prostituted and distorted
the history of Mexican-Americans.”66
In these pieces, Romano worked in two directions. First, he criti-
cized the work of social scientists on the Mexican American. He saw
himself as the Socratic gadfly irritating and confounding the academy
and its claims to veracity, asserting that academic knowledge was not
the truth that the institution claimed. His second concern was to vali-
date and present the Mexican American as an active historical agent.
Romano wanted us to reflect on the complex nature of the Mexican
American that social scientists had distorted. But his thinking did not
stop here; he moved beyond critique and a simple return to history.
In “Social Science, Objectivity and the Chicanos,” we encounter a
refinement of Romano’s critique. Where initially he attacked individual
works, scholars, and disciplinary models, Romano now problematizes
the field of social science and reveals the assumptions behind academic
knowledge. He begins by tracing the intellectual origins of objectivity
to dehistoricize the concept, subvert its meaning, and more important,
undercut its utility.
Romano wrote: “[T]he concept of objectivity is impossible without
a corresponding belief in man’s ability to separate his mind not only
26 C h i c a n o S t u di e s
from his body, but also from all of his ecological surroundings.”67 The
Western European quest, he maintained, for objectivity and objective
reality demands the separation of events, phenomena, and ideas from
personal self-consciousness. 68 This empirical project is at the center of
academic knowledge. Moreover, this dualism grants methodological
and conceptual legitimacy to social science, since an assumed unity
exists between the laws governing the physical universe and those that
govern human behavior. 69 For this reason, social science is presented
as value-free, culture-free, and tradition-free. Romano, as the activist
and political scientist Raoul Contreras has pointed out, extended “the
ideological critique of social science on the Mexican American to a
critique of the ideology of social science.”70
At this point in his argument, Romano took a crucial step beyond
his earlier work and many of those who had recognized that the work
of social scientists was not objective, since it was influenced by time,
place, and culture.71 For Romano, the very nature of objectivity, based
on the separation of mind and body, had to be rejected. Thus social sci-
ence studies about the Chicano must also be set aside. Instead, Romano
proposed to initiate Chicano(a) research from the perspective of the
Chicano(a) subject. Chicano studies must begin from the “self-image”
of the Chicano(a). Given the deception of objectivity and social science,
Chicanos(as) needed to reclaim and rewrite themselves. “If this self-
image is rejected by non-Chicano social scientists,” he wrote, “then,
in effect, they will have rejected summarily the rationality of the Chi-
cano.”72 As the Chicano(a) became subject, social science and academic
knowledge would be tossed out. Romano thus altered the relationship
between Chicano(a) scholarship and the academy. From this point,
Chicano(a) research had to start from the standpoint of the Chicano(a)
and his/her position in U.S. society and not from assumed social science
or humanities-based academic practices.
Romano proposed a form of standpoint epistemology in contrast
to the empiricism of the social sciences and other fields. This provided
a radically new starting point for Chicano(a) intellectuals who sought
an oppositional stance to myths created by academic intellectual prac-
tices. Furthermore, it afforded an argument that rooted knowledge
in the multiplicity of Mexican American experiences. Unfortunately,
Romano himself did not follow up on this epistemological break. In
subsequent pieces in El Grito, he either returned to his criticism of
social scientists’ work, to issues of identity and history, or he delved
T h e G e n e s i s of A c ad e m i c C h i c a no S t ud i e s 27
into policy.73 More important, his work moved increasingly toward the
arts. In his evaluation of the publishing record of El Grito and Quinto
Sol Publications, while noting the need to “analyze the fallacious and
educationally detrimental content of social science studies of Mexican
Americans,” his main concern was to provide an open space for alter-
native literary voices.74 He saw his various enterprises as providing a
necessary outlet for Chicano(a) talent, to “forge new ground in literary
publications.”75 Thus in his anthology El Espejo The Mirror, he wrote
that he saw his role to provide “the Chicano community [with] works
by Chicano authors which reflect Chicano experiences from a Chicano
perspective.”76 By the appearance of El Grito del Sol in 1976, Romano
saw Tonatiuh’s role to “leave the narrow horizons of the immediate
past behind, and to publish literature which is more representative
of the rich, varied, and infinite universe that is the Chicano world.”77
Romano’s standpoint position led him away from a rupture of academic
knowledge to the production of another knowledge through the arts.78
Though Romano did not build toward an epistemic break, his
essays, together with the work of the Quinto Sol collective and El Grito,
provided Chicanos and Chicanas with a radical weapon in their battle
with the academy and knowledge.79 Their recognition of the Chicano(a)
scholar as an engaged intellectual opened up new intellectual possibili-
ties for Chicanos(as) in the academy. This vision allowed a radical repo-
sitioning of Chicanos(as) in relation to the engrossing academic project;
a Chicano(a) perspective that made possible a Chicano(a) studies that
could avoid the pitfalls of university-based knowledge. If Chicano stud-
ies accepted the assumptions of the academy, as Romano had noted,
it was doomed to incorporation. 80 Thus he articulated, though not as
clearly as he could have, a nondisciplinary, nonsocial-science Chicano
studies that could survive, albeit always peripheral and questionable,
in the university. This epistemic framework would remain ambiguous,
tethered to a utopian hope. Unfortunately, Romano did not pursue this
discussion; he remained a critic of social science without forcing an
oppositional epistemological and methodological break.
provide the manpower and resources for the struggles with dominant
society. To achieve this curricular goal, lower-division courses would
affirm identity through an appreciation of the Chicano cultural heri-
tage. Upper-division classes would examine the Chicano(a) experience
from the angles of history, economics, psychology, sociology, literature,
political science, and education. The end result would be “to provide
a coherent and socially relevant education, humanistic and pragmatic,
which prepares Chicanos for service to the Chicano community and
enriches the total society.”95
Unfortunately El Plan’s intellectual program was underdeveloped.
It remained unclear what exactly El Plan did offer epistemologically
speaking, aside from a collection of courses on the Mexican and Mexi-
can American experiences with special attention to culture. This weak-
ness allowed Chicano studies academic programs to be framed within
traditional university practices, muting El Plan’s radical hope. Although
many who followed the political vision of El Plan also acknowledged
El Grito’s critique of social science, they did not see a possible con-
tradiction between institutional building and the limits of American
academic practices. In fact, the battle for institutionalization further
justified minimizing academic concerns as secondary if not divisive.
For many researchers tied to the Chicano studies creation myth,
the decline in student activism compounded the curricular limitations
of the new programs.96 The educator Raymond Padilla, for example,
has explained the failure to develop a radical curriculum in Chicano
studies as the result of the de-emphasis of an activist agenda.97 Thus in
his study of the Ethnic Studies department at University of California at
Berkeley, he concluded that the decline of activism left only one “route
to curricular legitimacy . . . the liberal arts model.”98 With this shift,
Chicanos brought traditional and workable technologies to bear on
Chicano studies. On the one hand, Padilla believed that activists could
manipulate the university for the purpose of changing the Mexican
American community. Yet, on the other, he wondered how could they
utilize the university if it was an inhospitable and alienating place.
“Viewed in its most extreme manifestation,” he wrote, “some campus
Chicanos sought to address community problems by using campus
resources but maintaining an adversary relationship with the very same
campus.”99
For Padilla, this inconsistency was acceptable and resolvable so long
as activism was present. As student and community politics declined,
T h e G e n e s i s of A c ad e m i c C h i c a no S t ud i e s 31
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