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Ernesto Chávez; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, 166pp.; Paperback. ISBN: 0-520-23018
At the recent annual meeting of the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies, a well-known and respected Chicano historian and I entered into a conversation. Though the children of different generations - he came of age in the 1940s and I in the 1980s - we hold the political commitments of Chicano Studies in common. As the topic turned to the latest wave of Chicano/a historical scholarship, he remarked: "Your generation is trapped in the sixties. That's all you write about."
Ernesto Chávez provides an opportunity for reflection on this point with ¡Mi Raza Primero! , a concise and meaningful contribution to our evolving understanding of the Chicano Movement. Billed as "the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale," Chávez investigates a select assortment of era organizations in an endeavor to offer a new perspective. His argument is that the movement emerged as a passionate response of the ethnic Mexican community to their historical conditions, yet stunted itself under "an ideologically bankrupt cultural nationalism." Indeed, the work's strength is its understanding of the limits of ideology in creating permanent institutions of social change. In most of the instances described by Chávez, the reader can bear witness to the decline of effective grassroots organizing efforts amidst severe ideological, and at times very personal, debates. The end result is a measured evaluation of the movement, critical of its "inadequacy" to mobilize more broadly "a multifaceted and fractured ethnic Mexican community,"...