Beholding Chicano History

I consider Chicano History an ideal mural to expand on the analysis of form and content considering that it reflects the time in which it emerged: a period of civil disobedience and social unrest in which art, and art making was utilized for social mobilization and people awakening in order to effect social change.

Becoming Mexican American: An Empowering Exemplar of Social and Cultural History

I am honored to evaluate George Sánchez’s groundbreaking, meticulously researched monograph Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. No matter how many years pass, I will always consider myself George’s grateful student, just as I will always be a humble student of history. Accordingly, this essay mixes the personal and professional as it illustrates the methodological, theoretical, and historiographical impact of Becoming Mexican American on my own research and on Chicana/Chicano history, as well as the importance of Sánchez’s other scholarship and his mentorship.

The Interdisciplinary Project of Chicana History

Chicana history has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. While initially a neglected area of study limited to issues of labor and class, today scholars in history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, among others, study topics of gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as youth culture, reproductive rights, migration, and immigration. In the process, these scholars contribute to the collective project of Mexican and Mexican American women’s history in the United States, making it diverse in its analytical themes, methodologies, and sources. Indeed, Chicana history is not confined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, its cross-disciplinary nature gives it life. This article charts that interdisciplinarity and demonstrates its significance in expanding and recasting Chicano history more broadly.

Looking Back on Chicano History

In the forty years since the publication of the special issue devoted to Chicano history in the Pacific Historical Review in 1973, the literature on Mexican Americans has flourished. In the early 1970s, the nascent subfield of Chicano history was established, and in subsequent decades it reached maturity as the number of historians writing in this area increased significantly, as did the number of monographs and articles. By the early twenty-first century, the importance of historical studies of Mexican Americans is reflected in the literature of many subfields of U.S. history—labor, women, U.S.-Mexican borderlands, urban, immigration—and in the curriculum of colleges and universities across the nation. This article provides a personal perspective on the origins, foundations, and maturation of Chicano history.

“CompromisingLa Causa?”: The Ford Foundation and Chicano Intellectual Nationalism in the Creation of Chicano History, 1963–1977

In the early 1970s the first large cohorts of Chicano PhD scholars entered academia, often hired into faculty positions at newly created Chicano departments or centers. These Chicano scholars came after earlier pioneer Mexican-American historians such as Carlos Castañeda and George I. Sanchez at the University of Texas, Austin; Julian Samora of the University of Notre Dame; and Carlos Cortes of the University of California, Riverside. Instead, they came of age during the fluorescence of the Chicanomovimientoof the 1960s and 1970s. The academic identities of the first Chicano PhD scholars were firmly grounded inChicanismo, a term which emphasizes ethnic nationalism, political and economic equity, and cultural and community pride.