The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  In Soldatenko’s retelling, the original dream of using the academy as a fortress from which to launch a utopian revolution eventually got turned inside out: instead of overthrowing the oppressive Anglo establishment of which the university was a part, and founding a People’s Republic of Aztlán, Chicano Studies would make it its goal to “revitalize moribund [academic] fields,” thereby “sav[ing] traditional academic disciplines” such as social science. Soldatenko lists several supposed developments in Chicano Studies that he plainly views as evidence that the discipline, during the 1970s, was a beehive of high-level intellectual activity: he tells us enthusiastically, for example, about the rise of “objectivism of social science” in Chicano Studies; the call by Tomás Atencio of La Academia de la Nueva Raza (Academy for the New Race) for the creation of “a learning experience through dialogue—his famous resolana” (glare); Samuel C. Martinez and Roberto Vargas’s concept of razalogía (raceology), which “evolved out of the attempt to conceptually describe our approach for developing knowledge that heals, liberates and transforms”; and chicanismo, described in the magazine Con Safos as “an attempt at expressing the entire spectrum of feelings that are the soul of the barrio.”

  Then there’s the work of Juan Gómez-Quiñones, whom Soldatenko considers “the senior Chicano Studies historian in the University of California system.” Soldatenko describes Gómez-Quiñones’s 1982 book, Development of the Mexican Working Class North of the Rio Bravo, as a key “social-Marxist” work and his 1977 essay “On Culture” as a “pivotal essay in the consolidation of Chicano Studies scholarship and canon formation” because it “provided an understanding of the structures of oppression that would result in action research,” “ratified the empiricist agenda and dismissed all other versions of Chicano studies and returned to a Leninist-Stalinist form of Marxism,” “left little doubt that a Leninist-Stalinist form of materialist analysis was the only acceptable research epistemology and the only effective expression of action research,” and ensured that henceforth Chicano Studies scholars would seek “to understand the condition of the Mexican American as the result of either the structural weakness of the American system or the oppression of a racist and/or capitalist structure” and would “then devise solutions for this condition—whether a set of reformist policies to ameliorate the American system or revolutionary action to overthrow an unjust and unequal system.” (Action, then, was still, at least theoretically, a part of the picture.) For Soldatenko, the 1981 publication of the second edition of Acuña’s Occupied America was a momentous event, signaling a definitive shift from “the internal colonial model” to a Soviet-style “class analysis.” Acuña’s “turn . . . to historical materialism,” writes Soldatenko, was widely seen as marking “the demise of internal colonialism” and “the victory of dialectical materialism.” The problem with “internal colonialism,” Chicano scholar Estevan Flores commented, was that it offered no “class perspective” and was thus “ultimately reformist” rather than revolutionary.

  But even as empiricism, with a focus on “Leninist-Stalinist . . . analysis,” was solidifying its hold on Chicano Studies, the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa and also published in 1981, introduced a radical feminist perspective into this and other disciplines. Many male Chicano activists felt threatened by feminism; no less a figure than Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, author of the universally revered “I Am Joaquín,” expressed concern that Chicanas would fall prey to “white European thinking” and “lose their Chicanisma or their womanhood and become a frigid gringa.” There was—and still is—plenty of debate among Chicana feminists as to whether they should therefore ally with Chicano men or with Anglo women. Those who choose the latter risk being smeared as traitors to their people and sellouts to bourgeois Anglo materialism. At a Chicana workshop at the first National Chicano Student Conference in 1969, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez spoke of the “dual oppression” Chicanas experienced—both sexism and racism; two years later, at the first National Chicana Conference in Houston, Mirta Vidal went Longeaux y Vásquez one better, speaking of not dual but triple oppression—as Vidal put it, Chicana women were oppressed “as members of an oppressed nationality, as workers, and as women.”

  But who was oppressing whom? And which was the bigger problem, racism or sexism? Predictably, many Chicana activists blamed everything on Anglo capitalism: “It is the economic structure that forces the Chicano to oppress the women because the whole world oppressed him,” wrote Anna Nieto Gómez, proffering a common view. “We aren’t oppressed by Chicanos, we’re oppressed by a system that serves white power,” wrote Velia Garcia in 1971, so “our men, not white women” are “our natural allies.” So it went. Some Chicana women remained loyal members of el movimiento; others focused on feminism; others were Marxists who avoided both movements. In 1986, Chicano Studies practitioner Alma M. García decreed that “a combination of all three approaches” was “the only way to redefine the study of women within Chicano studies.” But a generation later, the squabbling continues; one Chicana scholar after another has written about “multiple oppression” and called for “research” into gender, race, and class as if such things had not already been said a thousand times before.

  And after feminism came all the rest of it—the invasion of Chicano Studies (along with every other sector of the humanities and social sciences) by structuralism and poststructuralism, Queer Theory, and what Soldatenko calls “a ‘cultural turn’”—that is, a shift from straightforward take-to-the-barriers revolutionary rhetoric to the kind of “research” that might focus on anything from, say, Chicano music to Chicano dressmaking while still incorporating the obligatory anticapitalist, anti-Anglo clichés. Soldatenko, for one, isn’t pleased with this “cultural turn”: “While Chicano(a) scholars have won the academic battle, we have lost the war for justice. The ability to transform our neighborhoods and our places of work remains utopian.” He calls for an “ethical turn” in Chicano Studies and an end to “unmediated theorizing”—which presumably means more rallying cries and calls to action. In his letter welcoming participants to the thirty-seventh annual convention of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), the organization’s chair for 2010–11, Devon G. Peña, strikes a similar note. “Chicana & Chicano Studies has followed new directions and this has included a major shift toward preoccupation with post-modern deconstruction of texts and narratives and a narrowing of our political work into acts of interpellation in discursive politics.” As a result,

  academic-based Chicana & Chicano Studies has continued to lose much of its focus on participatory community-based social action research. However, the focus on discursive politics appeared to be running its course. It seems to be in stasis, as an epistemological project, largely because our students and community activists are increasingly losing interest in Chicana/o Studies if it remains committed to a stale form of discourse fetishism that characterizes too much of [the] so-called “cultural studies” Left in academia.

  . . . [A]s bonafide academic intellectuals, we probably became less relevant to the more “gritty” efforts to directly intervene and participate in the myriad social, economic, and political challenges facing our communities. One is right to ask: How many times can we de-construct a text before we realize that this is more an exercise in intellectual navel-gazing than a socially and politically useful form of knowledge that advances the struggles of our predominantly working-class and indigenous Diaspora communities? . . .

  Making our voices heard is no longer enough! We must move beyond discourse to actual mobilization for campaigns against all forms of oppression and exploitation and the structural violence that allows neoliberal capitalism to colonize every single gay, lesbian, trans-gendered, and straight body on this planet: Race, class, gender, sexuality, and place are all real complex structures of difference that are used to keep our communities under control and s
uppress our potential as indomitable forces for social change and emancipation.

  Whatever one thinks about the directions it has taken, Chicano Studies has undoubtedly thrived. The website of the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge recounts its proud history: “[i]n 1968 African American and Chicana/o students demanded that the university [then San Fernando Valley State College] recruit more minority faculty, establish programs that would meet the needs of these students, and provide the necessary support services so that they would succeed and graduate. They took over the Administration Building, were arrested, and presented a series of demands to the President of the university.” The administration gave in, establishing “the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) and a variety of support programs” as well as departments of Chicano and Pan African Studies; in the autumn of 1969, the first semester of forty-five Chicano Studies courses began under the direction of Rodolfo Acuña. Today the department at Cal State Northridge, now called the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies (with Acuña, under the title of professor emeritus, still at the helm), is the largest department of its kind in the United States and offers “a major, a double-major, a minor, and a Masters in Chicana/o Studies”; as of mid-2010, it boasted, according to its website, “25 fulltime and 35 part time professors” and “160–170 class sections” per semester.

  Then there’s the University of California, Los Angeles, where the Chicano Studies Research Center was founded in 1969 and an interdisciplinary Chicano Studies program was established in 1973. In 1990, a MEChA-organized protest demanded the elevation of the program to departmental status. After three years of “discussions,” UCLA’s chancellor rejected the proposal. There ensued a sit-in at the Faculty Center and acts of vandalism that caused thirty thousand dollars’ worth of damage and resulted in more than eighty arrests; but the action that proved decisive was a hunger strike by nine Mexican Americans, including several students and anatomy professor Jorge R. Mancillas, who told the New York Times: “This is not a symbolic act. We either get a department of Chicano studies or we will die here.” After fourteen days the chancellor agreed to turn the Chicano Studies program into a “center” named for the recently deceased César Chávez; in 2005, the program and center became a full department. Today the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies has twelve full-time faculty members, five joint faculty members, ten affiliated faculty members, and seven visiting faculty members and lecturers, and offers an undergraduate major and minor as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Chicana and Chicano Studies.

  Chicano Studies isn’t confined to the Southwest. The program at the University of Minnesota dates back to 1972 and was also the result of activist tumult. “Under pressure from the Latin Liberation Front,” reads the history department at the program’s website,

  a student-led group of Chicana and Chicano students from colleges in the Twin Cities, the University of Minnesota began to address financial aid, campus employment for students, and recruiting. In particular, the Latin Liberation Front strongly encouraged the creation of a Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. Dissatisfied with the pace of the University response, on October 26, 1971, twenty Chicano students occupied the Twin Cities administration building, Morrill Hall. . . . Following a two hour meeting with administration officials, Manuel Guzman presented the group’s demands: “If we do not have concrete evidence of the establishment or implementation of a Chicano Studies Department within 72 hours a vote will be taken to strike against the university administration and its policies.”

  Although an initial response from the college raised the possibility of the new department being combined with another existing department, Latin Liberation leaders rejected the idea, arguing that it would be crucial for the department to have a distinct identity. Within three days of the occupation and ultimatum, College of Liberal Arts committees approved the proposal for a free-standing Chicano Studies Department. . . . Chicano Studies accepted its first students in the fall of 1972 and was the first Chicano Studies program in the Upper-Midwest

  One of the activists there at the beginning was David Diaz. He got a B.A. at Cal State Northridge, was awarded a doctorate in urban planning at UCLA, and then became a lecturer at Northridge, where he held a joint position in Urban Studies and Chicano Studies and stayed for twelve years. Now he’s a colleague of Soldatenko’s at Cal State Los Angeles. One sunny afternoon in the spring of 2010 I make my way to Diaz’s office on campus in East Los Angeles. The door is open, and he waves me in affably as he rises from his chair.

  Diaz looks every inch the aging sixties radical. He’s stocky, with long, messy hair, and is dressed in a loose, rumpled, casual shirt and jeans—a Chicano version of David Crosby. Every aspect of his appearance seems designed to communicate the message that although some might consider him a member of the establishment, he’s still a radical and isn’t about to smooth out his rough edges for anybody. At his invitation, I sit down on his couch. I do a quick survey of his office; it’s crowded with pictures, posters, mementos, and assorted knickknacks that are charged with political meaning and that I wish I had a chance to check out more closely. (When, during our conversation, I mention that I’m gay, he pulls back a curtain and proudly shows me the “No on Prop 8” poster in his window.)

  “We were teenagers in the street,” he recalls, and proceeds to wax nostalgic about his involvement with such movement figures as Vicki L. Ruiz (author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950), Gloria Anzaldúa, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. Diaz reminisces about Gonzales’s Crusade for Justice and about the conference that issued El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. He also talks about the Raza Unida Party, which for a time after its establishment in 1970 enjoyed considerable support among Chicanos in Los Angeles, and about the “Chicano Moratorium,” which organized anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, including a 1970 march in East Los Angeles in which thirty thousand protesters took part.

  Diaz is an expert in state and federal environmental law, but was “always an activist,” focusing on public works and housing. He puts it succinctly: before he became an academic, “people hired me to stop things.” He has what he describes as “a legacy of opposition against the state.” I ask him how he reconciles being both a scholar and an activist. “For me it’s easy,” he says. “I came to the academy in mid-career,” and becoming a Chicano Studies professor was “a natural evolution,” because “interwoven in my field is a legacy of activism.” He writes op-eds frequently for La Opinión, which is the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States and the second-largest daily in Los Angeles, and in them he has, among other things, “gone after mayors.” And none of this has caused him any problems in his academic career? “So far,” he says, “no.”

  Diaz has been at Cal State Los Angeles for three years now, and here, as at Northridge, he teaches both Urban Studies and Chicano Studies—two subjects that, for him, are intimately connected. He’s preoccupied with “issues of gentrifying, eminent domain, displacement”—“attacks on cities” such as the construction of the “freeways that dissect East L.A.,” forcing the destruction of homes. Diaz, who grew up right here in East L.A., as well as in the small neighboring cities of Whittier and Montebello, and whose 2005 book, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning and American Cities, is described by its publisher as “the first book on Latinos in America from an urban planning/policy perspective,” says that as a young man he observed a “parallel between the bombed-out cities in Europe and what I saw around me.”

  When I ask him what his objective is as a teacher of Chicano Studies, he says it’s to “recapture Chicano history for young students who have little clue about history,” especially the history of labor and politics; to get them to “appreciate their own historical and cultural legacy,” and to instill in them the “inquisitiveness to further explore” that legacy. “My ultimate goal is th
at students appreciate the value of knowledge and become engaged in society, in community service. Expecting them to become political activists in an apolitical society is expecting too much.” At present he’s teaching a class on diversity, in which the reading list consists of “eight works on why diversity didn’t happen in America.” He says the questions that animate the course are “What is a diverse society? What will diversity look like in the middle-class future?” I ask about his students. He describes them as “working-class and self-supporting”; one-third, he says, are “struggling,” and one-third are “competing.” Many lack basic academic skills—writing, outlining, doing research. Most, though Chicano, speak English as their mother tongue. “Language has not been super-problematic over the last fifteen years. What is problematic is writing skills.” (Of course, a major reason why writing skills have declined is that students, instead of learning to develop and articulate their own ideas, are taught to parrot ideology.)

  I ask him about Acuña. “I criticized him when I was in college—my peers were shocked—because he said that we needed to form alliances with other minority communities. Acuña thought our numbers would increase and we’d all be leftist activists together. I was always someone who believed in broader activism, though as a youth Aztlán was a powerful image to motivate me and my generation. We hoped that [an independent Aztlán] would occur in the future, but it was obviously utopian, idealistic.” So the dream of Aztlán is dead? “Today it’s . . .” He pauses. “I don’t even hear the term anymore myself, but I situate it in the historical moment of the 1960s and ’70s, as a motivating factor for that generation.”