Content area
Full text
Carlos Muñoz, Jr .
Verso: New York and London, 2007
260pp., $23.95 Paperback
ISBN:
978-1-84467-142-7
I first read Youth, Identity, Power - at the time, a groundbreaking "first" text about the dynamics of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s - when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s. My original copy of the book is dog-eared, highlighted in three different colors, with post it notes hanging out - worn from the fact that I've consulted it for research and for teaching purposes time and again since its publication 18 years ago. It remains in my estimation, a valuable and substantive contribution to the overall analysis of el movimiento .
What makes the study particularly valuable, both in its previous incarnation and in the revised and expanded edition, is that Muñoz veers away from an approach based on key movement figures - although they are certainly evident here, particularly Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, whose understanding of urban youth identity fostered the development of cultural nationalism as a movement ideology. Re-centering the movement on students and youth, Muñoz's sympathies with participatory democracy over vanguardist narratives or leader-centered narratives of social movements remind us that el movimiento could be understood alongside the other student movements of the time.
When it was first published, the book was talked about and discussed vigorously among Chicana academics and activists, primarily for its most glaring gap: the lack of an analysis of gender or of any substantive acknowledgement of women's contributions to the movement. Muñoz, Jr., who counts many longtime