Product Description: The 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 César Chávez 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...read more

Reexamining the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, In the Spirit of a New People brings to light new insights about social activism in the twentieth-century and new lessons for progressive politics in the twenty-first. Randy J. Ontiveros explores the ways in which Chicano/a artists and activists used fiction, poetry, visual arts, theater, and other expressive forms to forge a common purpose and to challenge inequality in America. Focusing on cultural politics, Ontiveros reveals neglected stories about the Chicano movement and its impact: how writers used the street press to push back against the network news; how visual artists such as Santa Barraza used painting, installations, and mixed media to challenge racism in mainstream environmentalism; how El Teatro Campesino’s innovative “actos,” or short skits,sought to embody new, more inclusive forms of citizenship; and how Sandra Cisneros and other Chicana novelists broadened the narrative of the Chicano movement. In the Spirit of a New People articulates a fresh understanding of how the Chicano movement contributed to the social and political currents of postwar America, and how the movement remains meaningful today.

Product Description: Mythohistorical Interventions explores how myth and history impacted the social struggle of the Chicano movement and the postmovement years. Drawing on archival materials and political speeches as well as music and protest poetry, Lee Bebout scrutinizes the ideas that emerged from the effort to organize and legitimize the Chicano movement’s aims...read more

As both an idea and an institution, the family has been at the heart of Chicano/a cultural politics since the Mexican American civil rights movement emerged in the late 1960s. In Next of Kin, Richard T. Rodríguez explores the competing notions of la familia found in movement-inspired literature, film, video, music, painting, and other forms of cultural expression created by Chicano men. Drawing on cultural studies and feminist and queer theory, he examines representations of the family that reflect and support a patriarchal, heteronormative nationalism as well as those that reconfigure kinship to encompass alternative forms of belonging.Describing how la familia came to be adopted as an organizing strategy for communitarian politics, Rodríguez looks at foundational texts including Rodolfo Gonzales’s well-known poem “I Am Joaquín,” the Chicano Liberation Youth Conference’s manifesto El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, and José Armas’s La Familia de La Raza. Rodríguez analyzes representations of the family in the films I Am Joaquín, Yo Soy Chicano, and Chicana; the Los Angeles public affairs television series ¡Ahora!; the experimental videos of the artist-activist Harry Gamboa Jr.; and the work of hip-hop artists such as Kid Frost and Chicano Brotherhood. He reflects on homophobia in Chicano nationalist thought, and examines how Chicano gay men have responded to it in works including Al Lujan’s video S&M in the Hood, the paintings of Eugene Rodríguez, and a poem by the late activist Rodrigo Reyes. Next of Kin is both a wide-ranging assessment of la familia’s symbolic power and a hopeful call for a more inclusive cultural politics.

A thoughtful study of the America's largest immigrant group reflects on the complexities of Mexican-American heritage and ethnic synthesis, as well as on the long-term cultural, economic, and political influence of Mexican Americans in terms of the character of America.

Highlighting the involvement of women in the Chicano Movement, this anthology combines 44 of columns written by Enriqueta Vasquez from 1968 to 1972 for the path-breaking Chicano newspaper El Grito del Norte, where her fierce but hopeful voice of protest combined anger and humor in -Despierten Hermanos! (Awaken, Brothers and Sisters!), designed to stir her fellow Chicanos to action as she drew upon her own experiences as a Chicana.

Product Description: Noted filmmaker Jesus Salvador Trevino participated in and documented the most important events in the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Coming of age during the turmoil of the sixties, Trevino recorded the struggles to organize students and workers into the largest social and political movement in the history of Latino communities in the United States...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Details the struggles of the Mexican American community for social and legal equality and political and cultural identity