An online archive of nuestra historia for the Gente by the Gente and in service to Faculty, Librarians, Archivists, Graduate Students working in the field of Chicana and Chicano History and the Public at large.
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August 8, 2011
August 2, 2011
History is A Weapon
History Is A Weapon is a left counter-hegemonic education project.
July 26, 2011
Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
This book unravels the ethnic history of California since the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American conquest and the institutionalization of “white supremacy” in the state. Drawing from an array of primary and secondary sources, Tomás Almaguer weaves a detailed, disturbing portrait of ethnic, racial, and class relationships during this tumultuous time. A new preface looks at the invaluable contribution the book has made to our understanding of ethnicity and class in America and of the social construction of “race” in the Far West.
Tomás Almaguer is Professor of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.
July 21, 2011
On August 29, 1970, a “Chicano Moratorium” against the war in Vietnam was held in East L.A. Loyola-Marymount film student Tom Myrdahl shot this documentary, capturing the events that unfolded as law enforcement and protesters clashed in and around Laguna Park. This film has not been seen in nearly 40 years. Tom, who is still a working cameraman in Los Angeles, is putting this historic film on the web as a tribute to the brave citizens of East L.A. who came together 40 years ago to voice their dissent against the Vietnam War.
July 10, 2011
Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings - Alma Garcia, Ed.
Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.
July 10, 2011
Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago by Nicholas De Genova
Description
While Chicago has the second-largest Mexican population among U.S. cities, relatively little ethnographic attention has focused on its Mexican community. This much-needed ethnography of Mexicans living and working in Chicago examines processes of racialization, labor subordination, and class formation; the politics of nativism; and the structures of citizenship and immigration law. Nicholas De Genova develops a theory of “Mexican Chicago” as a transnational social and geographic space that joins Chicago to innumerable communities throughout Mexico. “Mexican Chicago” is a powerful analytical tool, a challenge to the way that social scientists have thought about immigration and pluralism in the United States, and the basis for a wide-ranging critique of U.S. notions of race, national identity, and citizenship.
De Genova worked for two and a half years as a teacher of English in ten industrial workplaces (primarily metal-fabricating factories) throughout Chicago and its suburbs. InWorking the Boundaries he draws on fieldwork conducted in these factories, in community centers, and in the homes and neighborhoods of Mexican migrants. He describes how the meaning of “Mexican” is refigured and racialized in relation to a U.S. social order dominated by a black-white binary. Delving into immigration law, he contends that immigration policies have worked over time to produce Mexicans as the U.S. nation-state’s iconic “illegal aliens.” He explains how the constant threat of deportation is used to keep Mexican workers in line. Working the Boundaries is a major contribution to theories of race and transnationalism and a scathing indictment of U.S. labor and citizenship policies.
June 27, 2011
Lorena Oropeza, Author of Raza Si! Guerra No! and Associate Professor of History at UC Davis speaking with Charly Trujillo, Vietnam War Veteran awarded the Purple Heart and a native of Corcoran, a small agricultural community of the San Joaquin Valley of California. After his discharge he continued his education and received a BA from UC Berkeley and an MA from San José State University. He is the award-winning author of Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam and Dogs From Illusion. Event hosted by David Montejano at the Center for Policy Research (UC Berkeley)
June 24, 2011
Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism
Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibalswas one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s
most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern “civilized” lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before.
June 20, 2011
Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770's to 1880's
“Conquest usually has a negative impact on the vanquished, but it can also provide the disenfranchised in conquered societies new tools for advancement within their families and
This is a very good book that shows the richness of employing gender, class, race, and ethnicity as analytic tools
—Journal of the West
Negotiating Conquest is a must-read for anyone interested in the process of conquest and colonialism or in the history of early California
—The Journal of San Diego History
This book dramatically and thoroughly documents the transition to the American era and the resulting legal, economic, political, cultural, and social transformation
—Western Legal Historycommunities. This study examines the ways in which Mexican and Native women challenged the patriarchal traditional culture of the Spanish, Mexican, and early American eras in California, tracing the shifting contingencies surrounding their lives from the imposition of Spanish Catholic colonial rule in the 1770s to the ascendancy of Euro-American Protestant capitalist society in the 1880s.Negotiating Conquest begins with an examination of how gender and ethnicity shaped the policies and practices of the Spanish conquest, showing that Hispanic women, marriage, and the family played a central role in producing a stable society on Mexico’s northernmost frontier. It then examines how gender, law, property, and ethnicity shaped social and class relations among Mexicans and native peoples, focusing particularly on how women dealt with the gender-, class-, and ethnic-based hierarchies that gave Mexican men patriarchal authority. With the American takeover in 1846, the text’s focus shifts to how the imposition of foreign legal, economic, linguistic, and cultural norms affected the status of Mexican women, male-female relations, and the family. Addressing such issues as divorce, legitimacy, and inheritance, it describes the manner in which the conquest weakened the economic position of both Mexican women and men while at the same time increasing the leverage of Mexican women in their personal and social relationships with men. Drawing on archival materials—including dozens of legal cases—that have been largely ignored by other scholars, Chávez-García examines federal, state, and municipal laws across many periods in order to reveal how women used changing laws, institutions, and norms governing property, marriage and sexuality, and family relations to assert and protect their rights. By showing that mexicanas contested the limits of male rule and insisted that patriarchal relationships be based on reciprocity, Negotiating Conquest expands our knowledge of how patriarchy functioned and evolved as it reveals the ways in which conquest can transform social relationships in both family and community. ”
June 9, 2011
Barrios Nortenos: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century - Dionicio Valdes
Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of “San Pablo” (St. Paul) Minnesota as a window on the region.
Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews, Dennis Valdés explores how Mexicans created ethnic spaces in Midwestern cities and how their lives and communities have changed over the course of the twentieth century. He examines the process of community building before World War II, the assimilation of Mexicans into the industrial working class after the war, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent changes resulting from industrial restructuring and unprecedented migration and population growth. Throughout, Valdés pays particular attention to Midwestern Mexicans’ experiences of inequality and struggles against domination and compares them to Mexicans’ experiences in other regions of the U.S.
June 2, 2011
Memory, Community, and Activism: Mexican Migration and Labor in the Pacific Northwest - Jerry and Gilbert Garcia, Eds.
Memory, Community, and Activism is the first book-length study to critically examine the Mexican experience in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Many books deal with Chicano history, but few ever attempt to interpret or analyze it beyond the confines of the American Southwest. Eleven essays by leading scholars on the Mexican experience in the Northwest shed new light on immigration/migration, the Bracero program, the Catholic Church, race and race relations, Mexican culture, unionization, and Chicana feminism. This collection analyzes the Mexican experience from the early twentieth century to the present.
CONTENTS
•Beyond the Spanish Moment: Mexicans in the Pacific Northwest, Jerry Garcia
•Northwest and the Conquest of the Americas: Chicana/o Roots of Cultural Hybridity and Presence, Ramon Sanchez
•A Long Struggle: Mexican Farmworkers in Idaho, 1918–1935, Errol Jones and Kathleen R. Hodges
•The Racialization of Mexican and Japanese Labor in the Pacific Northwest, Jerry Garcia
•Race, Labor, and Getting Out the Harvest: The Bracero Program in World War II Hood River, Johanna Ogden
•Mexican American and Dust Bowl Farmworkers in the Yakima Valley: A History of the Crewport Farm Labor Camp, 1940– 1970, Mario Compean
•El Sarape Mural of Toppenish: Unfolding the Yakima Valley’s Bracero Legacy, Margaret Villanueva
•Testimonio de un Tejano en Oregon: Contratista Julian Ruiz, Carlos S. Maldonado
•Mexicans and the Catholic Church in Eastern Washington: The Spokane Diocese, 1956–1997, Gilberto Garcia
•”As Close to God as One Can Get”: Rosalinda Guillen, a Mexicana Farmworker Organizer in Washington State, Maria Cuevas
•Past, Present, and Future Directions: Chicana/o Studies Research in the Pacific Northwest, Gilberto Garcia
June 1, 2011
Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers Cotton and the New Deal
In her incisive analysis of the shaping of California’s agricultural work force, Devra Weber shows how the cultural background of Mexican and, later, Anglo-American workers, combined with the structure of capitalist cotton production and New Deal politics, forging a new form of labor relations. She pays particular attention to Mexican field workers and their organized struggles, including the famous strikes of 1933.
Weber’s perceptive examination of the relationships between economic structure, human agency, and the state, as well as her discussions of the crucial role of women in both Mexican and Anglo working-class life, make her book a valuable contribution to labor, agriculture, Chicano, Mexican, and California history.Devra Weber is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside
May 27, 2011
U.S. Hispanic Country-of-Origin Counts for Nation, Top 30 Metropolitan Areas
The Pew Hispanic Center is a nonpartisan research organization that seeks to improve public understanding of the diverse Hispanic population in the United States and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation. It does not take positions on policy issues. The Center is part of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact tank” based in Washington, D.C., and it is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based public charity. All of the Center’s reports are available at www.pewhispanic.org.
About this Report
This report examines the Hispanic population of the United States by its 10 largest country-of- origin sub-groups, both at the national level and in the 30 metropolitan areas with the largest Hispanic populations.
The data for this report are derived from the 2010 U.S. Census and from the 2009 American Community Survey. The 2010 Census provides population counts for Hispanic origin sub- groups. The 2009 American Community Survey provides detailed geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for each group.
Accompanying this report are profiles of the 10 largest Hispanic country-of-origin sub- groups—Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Hondurans, Ecuadorians and Peruvians. An interactive graphic analyzing country-of-origin data among the nation’s 30 metropolitan statistical areas with the largest Hispanic populations is also available.
May 22, 2011
Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
From the vantage point of the colonized, the term ‘research‘ is inextricably linked with European colonialism; the ways in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world‘s colonized peoples. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. 
About the Book
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the author critically examines the historical and philosophical base of Western research. Extending the work of Foucault, she explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research, and the different ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and methodologies as ‘regimes of truth‘. Providing a history of knowledge from the Enlightenment to Postcoloniality, she also discusses the fate of concepts such as ‘discovery, ‘claiming‘ and ‘naming‘ through which the west has incorporated and continues to incorporate the indigenous world within its own web.
The second part of the book meets the urgent need for people who are carrying out their own research projects, for literature which validates their frustrations in dealing with various western paradigms, academic traditions and methodologies, which continue to position the indigenous as ‘Other‘. In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, the author shows how such programmes are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Exploring the broad range of issues which have confronted, and continue to confront, indigenous peoples, in their encounters with western knowledge, this book also sets a standard for truly emancipatory research. It brilliantly demonstrates that ‘when indigenous peoples become the researchers and not merely the researched, the activity of research is transformed.’
May 16, 2011
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican American Women in Twentieth Century America by Vicki Ruiz
From Out of the Shadows was the first full study of Mexican-American women in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first wave of Mexican women crossing the border early in the century, historian Vicki L. Ruiz reveals the struggles they have faced and the communities they have built. In a narrative enhanced by interviews and personal stories, she shows how from labor camps, boxcar settlements, and urban barrios, Mexican women nurtured families, worked for wages, built extended networks, and participated in community associations—efforts that helped Mexican Americans find their own place in America. She also narrates the tensions that arose between generations, as the parents tried to rein in young daughters eager to adopt American ways. Finally, the book highlights the various forms of political protest initiated by Mexican-American women, including civil rights activity and protests against the war in Vietnam.
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me + mi ‘manito at our graduation party!
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“your ideal graduate student is
someone who doesn’t have to experience community organizing
because you’ve already assigned them five chapters to...”
