From Community to Political Action

Abstract

Two true stories: When I was a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles, to imagine or conjure an integrated field of Latino studies was not a possibility. The fractured world of identity politics was raging during the nineties and to even suggest that Puerto Ricans might have some commonalities with Mexican Americans was sacrilege. One of the outcomes of these skirmishes, of these ethnic wars about the legitimacy of studying a particular cultural and national identity, was the establishment of the César Chavez Center at UCLA, a center dedicated to the study of Chicano culture, literature, politics, and more, but to the exclusion of other Latino national histories and cultures. I was one of the first graduate teaching assistants in this center teaching Chicano literature, a literature or culture to which I had not been born and, according to some, therefore lacked the credentials to teach. The only reason I was “allowed” to teach in the Center was because the director at the time already had a broader and more inclusive view of the place of Latino literature in America.