Aztlán, the Southwest and Its Peoples


Book Description

Discusses the exploration and settlement of the Southwest, and the conflicts resulting when its defenders and its builders were unable to blend their distinct cultures.




Aztlán Arizona


Book Description

Aztlán Arizona is a history of the Chicano Movement in Arizona in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on community and student activism in Phoenix and Tucson, Darius V. Echeverría ties the Arizona events to the larger Chicano and civil rights movements against the backdrop of broad societal shifts that occurred throughout the country. Arizona’s unique role in the movement came from its (public) schools, which were the primary source of Chicano activism against the inequities in the judicial, social, economic, medical, political, and educational arenas. The word Aztlán, originally meaning the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica, was adopted as a symbol of independence by Chicano/a activists during the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an era when poverty, prejudice, and considerable oppositional forces blighted the lives of roughly one-fifth of Arizonans, the author argues that understanding those societal realities is essential to defining the rise and power of the Chicano Movement. The book illustrates how Mexican American communities fostered a togetherness that ultimately modified larger Arizona society by revamping the educational history of the region. The concluding chapter outlines key Mexican American individuals and organizations that became politically active in order to address Chicano educational concerns. This Chicano unity, reflected in student, parent, and community leadership organizations, helped break barriers, dispel the Mexican American inferiority concept, and create educational change that benefited all Arizonans. No other scholar has examined the emergence of Chicano Movement politics and its related school reform efforts in Arizona. Echeverría’s thorough research, rich in scope and interpretation, is coupled with detailed and exact endnotes. The book helps readers understand the issues surrounding the Chicano Movement educational reform and ethnic identity. Equally important, the author shows how residual effects of these dynamics are still pertinent today in places such as Tucson.




Creating Aztlán


Book Description

"Creating Aztlâan interrogates the important role of Aztlâan in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being, author Dylan A. T. Miner (Mâetis) discusses the multiple roles that Aztlâan has played atvarious moments in time, engaging pre-colonial indigeneities, alongside colonial, modern, and contemporary Xicano responses to colonization"--




We Are Aztlán!


Book Description

Mexican Americans/Chicana/os/Chicanx form a majority of the overall Latino population in the United States. In this collection, established and emerging Chicanx researchers diverge from the discipline’s traditional Southwest focus to offer academic and non-academic perspectives specifically on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. Their multidisciplinary papers address colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion, setting El Movimiento (the Chicanx movement) and the Chicanx experience beyond customary scholarship and illuminating how Chicanxs have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands. Contributors to We Are Aztlan! include Norma Cardenas (Eastern Washington University), Oscar Rosales Castaneda (activist, writer), Josue Q. Estrada (University of Washington), Theresa Melendez (Michigan State University, emeritus), the late Carlos Maldonado, Rachel Maldonado (Eastern Washington University, retired), Dylan Miner (Michigan State University), Ernesto Todd Mireles (Prescott College), and Dionicio Valdes (Michigan State University). Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.




The Chicanos


Book Description

Thirteen Chicano scholars draw upon their personal experiences and expertise to paint a vivid, colorful portrait of what it means to be a Chicano. "We have come a long way," says Arnulfo D. Trejo, editor of this volume, "from the time when the Mexicano silently accepted the stereotype drawn of him by the outsider." He identifies himself as a Chicano, and his "promised land" is Aztlán, home of the ancient Aztecs, which now provides spiritual unity and a vision of the future for Chicanos. In these twelve original compositions, says Trejo, "our purpose is not to talk to ourselves, but to open a dialogue among all concerned people." The personal reactions to Chicano women's struggles, political experiences, bicultural education and history provide a wealth of information for laymen as well as scholars. In addition, the book provides the most complete recorded definition of the Chicano Movement, what it has accomplished, and its goals for the future. Contributors: Fausto Avendaño Roberto R. Bacalski-Martínez David Ballesteros José Antonio Burciaga Rudolph O. de la Garza Ester Gallegos y Chávez Sylvia Alicia Gonzales Manuel H. Guerra Guillermo Lux Martha A. Ramos Reyes Ramos Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez Maurilio E. Vigil




Mexicanos


Book Description

Newly 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.




Aztlán


Book Description

This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value.




Aztlán


Book Description

During the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of Aztlán, homeland of the ancient Aztecs, served as a unifying force in an emerging cultural renaissance. Does the term remain useful? This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value. To encompass new developments in the discourse the editors have added six new essays.




Manifest Destinies


Book Description

Watch the Author Interview on KNME In both the historic record and the popular imagination, the story of nineteenth-century westward expansion in America has been characterized by notions of annexation rather than colonialism, of opening rather than conquering, and of settling unpopulated lands rather than displacing existing populations. Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of race and law in the nineteenth century. Laura E. Gómez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial status as entailing the law's designation of Mexican Americans as &#;“white” and their simultaneous social position as non-white in American society. She tells a neglected story of conflict, conquest, cooperation, and competition among Mexicans, Indians, and Euro-Americans, the region’s three main populations who were the key architects and victims of the laws that dictated what one’s race was and how people would be treated by the law according to one’s race. Gómez’s path breaking work—spanning the disciplines of law, history, and sociology—reveals how the construction of Mexicans as an American racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the American racial order from the Mexican War (1846–48) to the early twentieth century. The emphasis on white-over-black relations during this period has obscured the significant role played by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the colonization of northern Mexico in the racial subordination of black Americans.




Beyond Aztlan


Book Description

Does the achievement of economic equality in a multiethnic society require the complete loss of a minority's cultural identity? Beyond Aztlan argues that American society has historically viewed a distinctive cultural identity as something that an ethnic group gives up in order to achieve economic and political parity. Mexican Americans, who have scored limited gains in their struggle for equality since the 1940s, are proving to be no exception to the rule. However, Barrera compares the situation of Mexican Americans to that of minority groups in four other countries and concludes that equality does not necessarily require assimilation.