Xicano Studies

This project is supported by the NEH Foundations Grant for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources. Any views, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities

This project is supported by the NEH Foundations Grant for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources. Any views, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities

In the spring of 2000, more than a dozen protestors marched 233 miles from Fort Myers, Florida to Orlando, carrying a 13-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty (Figure 1). In place of the statue's iconic torch and tablet, the replica hoisted a tomato in one hand and a bucket of tomatoes in the other. These are a few of many changes made to Lady Liberty by the artist Kat Rodriguez, who also darkened the statue's complexion and placed her on a platform with the inscription: "I, too, am American." Rodriguez created Lady Liberty for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (C.I.W.) to protest the unfair wages of tomato farmers in Immokalee, Florida. Farmworkers in Florida contribute significantly to the national tomato business, producing almost half of the nation's $1.3 billion annual crop. Yet, they struggle with mistreatment, poor pay and backbreaking working conditions. Many farmworkers have also been held against their will by employers of tomato suppliers and have suffered abuses like beatings, shootings and pistol-whippings. The C.I.W.'s march in 2000 targeted major food corporations in Orlando to improve the deplorable working conditions and wages of their workers. Lucas Benitez, founder of the C.I.W. and former tomato worker, vividly remembers protesting with Rodriguez' Lady Liberty. While the sculpture was first tethered to the trunk of a car accompanying marchers, it eventually had to be dismantled due to police enforcement that prevented protestors from driving down a boulevard in Orlando. Benitez and members of the C.I.W. subsequently carried her on their backs, recognizing the sculpture's visual impact on this protest. Like the tomato workers who carried her forward, Lady Liberty carried on a long tradition in American history of artists and activists who used representations of food in protests and boycotts. As early as the colonial period,

The education crisis facing the Latino community in the United States has received considerable attention. Recognizing the demographic growth, low-educational attainment levels, high dropout rates and low college attendance rates among Latinos, research suggests that Latino males specifically are struggling. In recognition of the various factors that shape the disparity in Latino male outcomes, this article aims to focus on the experiences of four low-income Chicanos within the US context. Our counter-narratives demonstrate that beyond "ganas," key institutional processes, practices and policies shaped our experiences, providing a complex analysis of Latino student mobility from kindergarten to college and career.

In recent years, there has been a remarkable growth in historical scholarship examining the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike earlier scholarship, these works have gone beyond the "great man" and "internal colonial" paradigms to expose the disparate and localized nature of el movimiento from Texas to California. Before Darius Echeverría's Aztlán Arizona, however, little has been written about Chicano activism in Arizona, making the state an "academic Siberia" within the field (6). Of course, with the rise of governmental and militia border policing, as well as a proliferation of antiimmigrant, anti-Latino legislation (for example, SB 1070 and HB 2281), Arizona today is one of the key epicenters of Latino studies. Echeverría rightly frames his history of Arizonan-Mexican educational activism against this historiographic erasure and the current political context. Drawing upon a wealth of previously underutilized archives, Echeverría argues, " 'Arizonan-Mexicans' orchestrated their own Chicano Movement, illustrated principally through educational agency that was the product of social, political, cultural, and historical inequalities" (5). Central to this work is Echeverría's recognition that educational access and equality are fundamental to full participation within a democratic nation-state

This article looks at the practice of urban curating within diasporic communities through the lens of care. Urban curating provides a decolonial understanding of voice, responsibility and care within diasporic urban environments and across their expanded geographies. The Mexican neighbourhood of Pilsen in Chicago provides valuable learnings about how urban curating, enacted through the lens of care, has enabled a historically disenfranchised group to contest and confront prejudice, displacement, and injustice, by reinventing a classic institution of modernity, the museum. Through a close reading of the National Museum of Mexican Art and its curatorial program, this paper articulates the way in which the curatorial as a socio-cultural practice, has played a critical role in enabling migrants everyday engagement in the reconfiguration of the city. The curatorial practices of the Museum have provided forms of direct-aid to the community of Pilsen, cut across time and space for this mul...

The Getty Research Institute Library has been active not only in documenting the Los Angeles art of social transformation during the era of dissent, which was marked by the Civil Rights Movements, the Vietnam War, and Feminism, it has even helped define its dynamic history. Drawing primarily on the holdings of the Getty Research Institute Library, from photobooks, photographs, performance art, and artist books, this presentation discusses the visual language of different art media used for social activism and illustrates the role this institution has played in collecting these primary materials and making them increasingly available to the public, locally and globally, through collaborative initatiatives, exhibitions and publications.

Professors can improve their chances of earning tenure by paying attention to organizing certain areas of their professional lives. Evidence of teaching effectiveness, professional and community service, research and other creative activities needs to be gathered and presented in a clear manner at faculty review proceedings. Good organizational skills, thoughtful planning, mentoring, and strategic production of research can all help to enhance an individual's portfolio and aid survival in academe. (JM)

The activism efforts of Latinx students from the 1960s to 1990s at Michigan State University preceded the current resources available to Latinxs on campus today. Guided by transformational resistance, university library archival sources are used to showcase various activism efforts demonstrated by these collegians. Some include a grape purchasing boycott, a sit-in, and a massive library book check-out protest, which all collectively played salient roles in the development of transformational changes for Latinx students. Recommendations from the findings are provided to advance future research and practice for institutional agents in working for and alongside student activists versus against them.

"If we can't read about our history, then you cannot read about yours."-Rosa Linda Salas, Tlataoni, MSU MEXA, 1998-1999 D uring the 1990s, as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University (MSU), it was my privilege to witness and participate in the historic struggle for Xicana/o Studies. African liberationist Frantz Fanon wrote eloquently about colonized people gaining control of their destinies. The struggle at MSU, and others like it in communities across Aztlán are skirmishes in the five-century-old battle to end settler colonial-ism in the Americas and reclaim the cultural, political, and intellectual destiny of the people of Aztlán. Fanon's powerful critique of the role of the indigenous intellectual, both traditional and organic, 1 in creating a new national culture to replace the colonial structure stated "there is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shriveled up, inert, and empty." His words are more relevant than ever. 2 This national liberation struggle is one where, as indigenous intellectual Taiaike Alfred, a Kanien'kehaka Mohawk, in his book Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom writes, "warriors battle against the political manipulations of their innate fears and repel the state's attempts to embed complacency inside of them. They counterattack with a lived ethic of courage and seek to cause the reawakening of a culture of

The education crisis facing the Latino community in the United States has received considerable attention. Recognizing the demographic growth, low-educational attainment levels, high dropout rates and low college attendance rates among Latinos, research suggests that Latino males specifically are struggling. In recognition of the various factors that shape the disparity in Latino male outcomes, this article aims to focus on the experiences of four low-income Chicanos within the US context. Our counter-narratives demonstrate that beyond " ganas, " key institutional processes, practices and policies shaped our experiences, providing a complex analysis of Latino student mobility from kindergarten to college and career.

Originating in the context of the Civil Rights Movements and political activities addressing issues of race, gender and sexuality, the Women's Liberation movement and the Chicano Movement became departures for two significant counter art movements in Los Angeles in the 1970s. This article explores some of the various reasons why Anglo American feminist artists and Chicana artists were not able to fully collaborate in the 1970s, provides some possible explanations for their separation, and argues that the Eurocentric imperative in visual fine art was challenged already in the 1970s by Chicana/o artists in Los Angeles. In so doing, the art activism by Anglo American feminists and Chicanas/os is comparatively investigated with Los Angeles as the spatial framework and the 1970s as the time frame. Four main components are discussed: their respective political aims, alternative art spaces, pedagogical frameworks and aesthetic strategies. The study found that the art activisms by Anglo American feminists and Chicanas/os differed. These findings suggest that a task ahead is to open up a dialogue with Chicana/o activist art, making space for more diverse representations of activities and political issues, both on the mainstream art scene and in the history of art.

There is a severe lack of representation of Mexican American artists in important American institutions. This, coupled with the hindrance of identity politics and a resistance to diversity, have made the art market for Mexican Americans practically non-existent. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution created a Latino Task Force and recognized 148 years of neglect. Raul Yzaguirre, the Chican@ activist and chair for the task force explains, “when it came to the presentation of the culture and achievements…we simply do not exist.” Not only did the exclusion of Latin@ artists and curators alienate audiences of Mexican descent, but also Mexican American artists because they could not “see [themselves] as contributors to this nation.”

Considering the influence the Mexican muralists had on American modernism in the 1920s-1940s, the omission is surprising. Currently the US population includes close to 55 million people of Latin@ descent — Mexican Americans account for more than half of this number at 64 percent — shifting the majority in areas of the American Southwest. Although the artists of the Chican@ Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the status quo and began to forge their way into the mainstream art world, this task is left incomplete, in large part because they are missing a supporting art ecology of dedicated historians, curators, museum directors, gallery owners, and collectors.   

This paper is largely informed by the research of art historians George Vargas and Adriana Zavala, who tie the status of the art market of Mexican Americans to a lack of education on the topic. In her comprehensive 2013 study titled “Trajectories in Academic Discourse: Absenting the Latino in the so-called ‘Latin Boom,” Zavala found that in a ten year period between 2002-2012 there was a 400% growth in the number of doctoral dissertations produced focusing on Latin American topics. However, when focusing on the Latin@ art subgroup, research did not exist, which she attributes to “the difficulty of finding encouragement and mentorship within departments of art history.” In conclusion, recommendations are made for teachers, museum educators, and galleries to employ research and educational methods that would reposition Mexican American art and help grow its market and collectorship.

Latino Communities & Economic Development: Contemporary Issues and Challenges

Instructor:  Refugio I. Rochin, Ph.D.*

This course examines the economic experiences of Latinas and Latinos in the United States and underlying conditions of (1) Latino workers, (2) Hispanic businesses, and (3) Latino community development.  It profiles Latino workers, self-employed and communities by region, cultural differences, age, gender, education, and immigrant make-up, in examining their economic status.

With regard to Latino Workers, about a half of the course will be an examination of the U.S. profile of Latino workers by age, gender, education, immigrant make-up and occupation in the labor market.  Students will learn how to use federal and state data to examine Latino workers by different sectors of the economy, examining their income and occupational status. In that regard students will learn about the industrial and occupational classification systems used by the federal government to study workers and working conditions. They will also study related public policies of the federal government that govern issues of human rights, employment status, and the economic well-being of all U.S. workers. Students will gain a basic understanding of the U.S. economy, changes in the supply of and demand for workers, the issues of labor displacement and unemployment, wages and labor relations, immigration, employment discrimination, unionization, and protective labor laws of the federal government.

With regard to Hispanic businesses, students will have an introduction to the growth of Latino self-employed and Latino-led non-profit organizations.  The aim here is to show the types of businesses that are now referred to as Hispanic business.  Related to these businesses will be an examination of their composition and position within the U.S. economy.

With regard to Latino community development, students will be introduced to communities where Latinos are the majority population.  The communities will be examined in terms of their composition of Latino workers and Hispanic businesses.
The student will also examine the correlates of Latino occupations and earnings with community economic development. How do labor market forces affect the social and economic situation of Latino barrios and ethnic enclaves? What are the inter-relationships between Latino concentration and labor market conditions?  Do places with high concentrations of Latino workers have correspondingly high numbers of Hispanic businesses? Do Latino communities employ and develop resources from their places of work and residence? In addressing these issues, the student will become familiar with the concepts of and measures for economic poverty, labor market segmentation, and community development corporations (CDCs).

This article is both a discussion of public history and an exploration into the lack of Latinos in museums and humanities positions where culture and identity are collected and presented. Public history and museum studies make up a list of invisible careers for Latinos and people of color. While this is less true now than a few years ago, the number of people of color in both fields is still alarmingly low. At the same time, the exploration into the linkages between public history and museum studies is an attempt to demystify and take certain lingo from contemporary culture out of these vocations. This article also calls for the need to examine the role of the independent scholars and curators in the process of presenting culture and history.

Drawing from observations and interview data, this essay examines the role of ''hormiguero agency'' in nurturing empowered identities amongst Latin@s in Phoenix, Arizona. Specific links are made to how dehumanizing state level policies are resisted in multiple spaces, including schools, activist organizations, and within underground business networks.

"“The University [MSU] has advanced beyond any campus in the Big Ten to establish educational programs and opportunities for students to learn about the role and importance of Latinos nationwide.” - Memo from Dr. Lee June, vice president of student affairs to members of MSU MEXA in 1998 outlining the steps taken by the university in regards to their demands.

During the 1990s as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University it was my privilege to witness and participate in the Xicano history incompletely related in these pages. This story is about those students, my comrades, their struggle to organize and fight against “the state’s attempts to embed complacency inside of them” finding voice within their demand for Xicano Studies. It is important to remember that it wasn’t until the 1990s the Chicano/Latino population at MSU reached sufficient numbers to carry out the type of direct action needed to build enough pressure on the university to force agreement. This political boost through numbers allowed Xicano/Latino students to begin thinking about self-determinative solutions and organizing around direct action to make those solutions a reality."