Chicano Professionals

Culture, Conflict, and Identity

Tamis Hoover Renteria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136528750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

First published in 1998. As beneficiaries of aggressive affirmative action policies, Chicano doctors and lawyers educated in universities during the 1960s and early 1970s now dominate Mexican American professional politics and culture in Los Angeles. Chicano professionals have not shed their ethnicity or lost interest in working class Mexican Americans. Rather, they have maintained a sense of ethnic uniqueness and political entitlement through a Chicano professional culture. Rooted in the Chicano Movement, this culture is sustained through networks based on family; professional organization rituals with distinctive Chicano elements; arguments over ethnic labeling; and a variety of ethnic activities in daily life. Chicano professional culture is nurtured by a responsibility for the blue collar Mexican American population; an awareness of continuing discrimination against all Mexican Americans; and the ethnic culture of working class Mexican Americans who have retained their traditions even as they have moved into the Anglo-dominated American upper class. This book is a significant contribution to the sparse literature depicting the experiences of the Latinos who attended prestigious professional schools in unprecedented numbers during the height of affirmative action policies. The book also poses a significant challenge to the commonly-held assumption that class mobility inevitably leads to assimilation. Index. Bibliography.

CHAPTER 1
Ritual Politics: Of Grapes and Glitter

Banquets and barbecues, receptions and meetings. As with any cultural group, the thick tapestry of Chicano professional life is most visible in its community rituals.¹ What stands out in these rituals is the political tug and pull between generations, particularly between the Movement generation culture now in power and its rivals. Some rituals demonstrate the Movement culture in its full strength, presenting Chicano culture as a virtually seamless texture of shared meanings and invoking in their participants a feeling of belonging to a community with a heroic past and a grand destiny. Other rituals manifest the Movement culture at its weaker points, revealing the more raveled edges of the culture where power struggles fray the fabric and new threads challenge the well worn pattern.

Both types of ritual are crucial to understanding contemporary Chicano professional culture and its generational struggles. It is currently the Chicano Movement generation which holds power, but, as its rituals reveal, this cohort must strive to maintain hegemony. Its leaders must jockey not only among themselves to determine who and what ideological emphasis will dominate within particular organizations, but must also vigilantly defend the hegemony of their generation's culture from that of the upcoming generation.

Those rituals that successfully manage to present the professional culture as a “whole” demonstrate the enduring power of the Movement myth and its values, particularly among those of the generation who participated in and created the Movement culture during their college years. Through careful management of Movement symbols, the leaders who create these professional rituals invoke not only deep nostalgia and bonhomie among participants, but may also motivate participation in Chicano organizations by those Chicanos who may have been distracted from their youthful ideals by the pressures and “temptations” of professional life.

These rituals may even reach out to educate and inculcate Movement values in members of the post-Movement generation who participate in them. The rituals can be powerfully persuasive when carefully designed, presenting the Movement in all its glory as a brilliantly colored tapestry which gathers up all loose threads and mends all tears in a mythic story of grand proportions transcending generations.

No less important to understanding Chicano professional culture however, are those rituals whose purpose is not to glorify Movement culture and celebrate the unity of generations, but rather to challenge the dominance of the Movement generation. The Movement generation was shaped by the particular circumstances and combined forces which its members confronted in their youth and through which they forged a unique culture. Like many of the youth cultures which were created during the sixties and early seventies—the counterculture, drug culture, Anti-War Movement—this Chicano culture has had a lasting impact not only on its own generation's members as they shift class position and surrender their youth to middle age, but also on the members of the Mexican American generations which came before and after them. Yet, while Movement culture still wields its power across generational lines within Chicano professional circles, as these more conflictive rituals reveal, the Movement culture does not necessarily have the last word on how Mexican American politics will be shaped in the future.

The following two stories describe two different rituals whose purposes and results contrast sharply. The first, a reunion of C.M.A.C. and C.M.S.A. (Chicano/Latino Medical Association of California and the Chicano /Latino Medical Students Association) was held during the second annual C.M.A.C. conference at the Los Angeles Airport Marriot hotel on November 3 and 4, 1989. This ritual effectively invoked certain key tropes of Chicano Movement culture and subsequently managed to evoke in most of its participants (including me) an intense feeling of euphoria and unity by making us feel as though our individual stories were woven into the texture of a much larger collective story.

The second event was the Latino Lawyer's Association Second Annual Latino Summer Associates Reception, held in the Los Angeles City Hall Tower room on Friday evening, August 5, 1988. This ritual subtly challenged those same tropes on several different levels and left both its organizers and many of its participants (including me) with ambivalent feelings as we felt tugged and pulled by the warp and woof of a new pattern emerging within Mexican American professional culture.²

THE SECOND ANNUAL C.M.A.C./C.M.S.A. CONFERENCE

All day I had been trailing various C.M.A.C. members with my notebook in hand and a baby on my shoulder, in and out of the conference room, the lunch room, the bathroom, the halls. This was the nuts and bolts of fieldwork, not to mention motherhood. But tonight I was putting on my new dress, tucking my notebook discreetly into a small black purse, and leaving the baby home with a sitter. Tonight was the C.M.A.C./C.M.S.A. reunion, “Circles from the Past,” an event that had everyone excited because of rumors that Chicano doctors from all over California and several eras of Chicano medical student activism would be there in force.

As I first walked into the hotel that evening around 7:30, I ran into my friend, (Dr.) Miranda Hinojosa,³ dressed to kill in a tight fitting black cocktail dress and high heels. “Isn't this a great conference?!” she exclaimed, “This is so amazing! I've been to medical conferences before and this one really is professional!” Her obvious pleasure in the fact that Chicanos had finally “arrived” and could produce a proper professional conference (in contrast to the ad-hoc student meetings she was accustomed to) was contagious. In high spirits, we sailed arm in arm into the reception room seeking out my husband and the rest of our friends.

The room that had earlier served as lunchroom was transformed. The lights on the crystal chandeliers were lowered and the large banquet tables had been replaced by small, nightclub style tables with white tablecloths and vases of flowers. A trio playing soft Mexican music stood in one corner and about fifty people milled nearby around a large buffet table set with wine, sodas, and hotel style munchies like lunch meats, cheeses, and tiny empanadas.

At the door we discovered a table set with baskets full of brightly colored buttons, each with a logo and the name of one of the California pre-medical school and medical school organizations which had preceded C.M.A.C. and C.M.S.A.⁴ A smartly dressed medical student behind the table directed new arrivals to choose the buttons representing all the organizations to which they had belonged and to wear them.

It was amazing. All these dignified doctors in their suits and dresses, strolling around like college kids, proudly decked out in two inch orange, pink, chartreuse, blue, and yellow buttons and joshing with each other over the memories they evoked. These buttons were a stroke of genius, for they set the tone of the evening. It was to be a genuine celebration of unity; all the quarrels, misunderstandings, and political fights which those buttons represented (for the organizations had formed, melted, splintered, and transformed over the past twenty years in various rows over political turf) were to be forgotten in the larger call of a united history as Chicanos in medicine. The theme was to be repeated throughout the evening.

Miranda dressed herself in the appropriate buttons and we drifted apart as we ran into old friends, met new people, or huddled in corners to catch up with the gossip. Eventually we met up again with my husband, Beto, and another handful of doctors and friends at a table near the podium. I noted that Beto was festooned with at least four different buttons with a pocket full of several others. “Just for the sake of history,” he confided. “These are gonna be collector's items.”

The room had filled by the time the speakers began. There were around a hundred people before the evening was over. I periodically pestered Beto with whispered questions about who was who as I spotted various interesting looking people at the tables around us. From what he told me it was apparent that the event had successfully lured doctors and students from all over California, even some who had been unable to attend the conference that day.

The conference had been planned by a C.M.A.C. committee of nine people plus a hired conference coordinator. Eight of the committee members were doctors (and one director of a medical school health resources program) who knew each other through University of California at Davis networks going back to the mid seventies. It had been sponsored with donations of either staff or money by various pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and medical groups.

Historical circumstances and extensive advanced planning by the president of C.M.A.C. in particular had paved the way for this to be a successful conference, both in attendance and in the enthusiasm it could generate for the organization.

I was particularly aware of the significance of this event since I was a friend of the current C.M.A.C. president, Ignacio Garcia. In fact, over coffee several years before, we had talked about the problems that Chicano doctors had encountered in sustaining a powerful professional organization. At least one other attempt had been made earlier with the Pacific Medical Association. Why had it been so difficult, I asked him, to keep a professional organization going, in contrast to the Chicano undergraduate and medical student organizations which were thriving?

He suggested that while Chicanos were students their activism on behalf of other Chicanos in medicine corresponded with their own ambitions, i.e. it looked good on resumes, and it created networks where they could get help in school as well as recommendations and advice about residencies and jobs. Once these same active students finally became physicians, they were too busy working, having fun, getting married, buying first houses, and so on to be interested in an organization that did not appear to directly benefit them. What was different now, in the late 1980's, Ignacio claimed, was that a substantial amount of Chicano physicians had been in practice long enough to have indulged in satisfying much of that “delayed gratification,” and might now be ready to “help the community” again.

Ignacio Garcia was also central to another recent development which enhanced the possibility for the conference's success. He and seven other Chicano and Latino physicians had in the last year created the first Chicano residency training program and large medical practice group in Los Angeles. They had organized a medical group among friends and acquaintances and contracted with White Memorial Hospital, a hospital with a primarily Latino clientele, to bring their patients exclusively there and to run a residency training program for doctors who wanted to train in the barrio.

This program had been going well for about a year, generating much excitement in the Chicano physician community since it was the first such attempt to create a (predominantly) Chicano residency program.

These recent developments in the Chicano professional community in Los Angeles helped to conjure up a feeling among many people present that day that the fruits of all their labor as medical school activists were beginning to ripen. Perhaps this conference was the beginning of a vital physicians organization which could have a major political impact on a statewide and perhaps even national level.

However, Ignacio and his committee were not leaving the success of the conference as a vehicle for the boosting of C.M.A.C. to chance. Great care was taken to orchestrate the evening to enhance the standing of C.M.A.C. as the appropriate organization to strengthen and unite the political power of the Chicano medical community.

The mood was set by focusing on a narrative theme of which everyone felt a part, a myth formed in the heart of the Chicano Movement culture. This was the story of “The Struggle to Make It.” It was a story told on two intertwining levels. At one level the story concerned the endeavor of every individual there to “make it” through the medical education system. At the other level, it concerned the wider undertaking of their collective organizations, which in the last twenty years, had formed and fizzled and formed again in the intense efforts of getting more Chicanos successfully through medical training.

The speakers and their subjects had been carefully chosen to enhance this theme. The first was a veteran member of several of the student health organizations, a doctor with a Masters degree in public health who was widely known as a firmly entrenched Chicano nationalist with an activist student past in the Movement. It was his task to gather up the various threads of Chicano medical history since the Sixties and to present it as a unified story.

His speech emphasized two themes. One was how the earliest Chicano pre medical school and medical school organizations of the late sixties and early seventies had evolved from back-pack conferences of militant students (he had dredged up old health organization literature on how to make mace and how to behave when you're arrested) to the current hotel hosted assembly of full-fledged doctors. He emphasized that although appearances had changed, this was still the same group of people, the same ongoing organization in a new form: “You're not attending a new meeting here. We go back a long way.”

His other theme was that the struggle for equal representation in health care professions continued even after two decades of progress: “It's the same issues at these meetings twenty years later: retention, recruitment, financial aid, people not applying still. In 1989 that's still happening.” In other words, people should not feel that just because there were larger numbers of Chicano physicians in California, that the struggle for affirmative action was won.

The choice of the speaker, and the speech itself, were key to successfully projecting a unified history in the spirit of the Movement. First, the speaker represented the first generation of affirmative action medical students. Second, he had been active in the leadership of many of the organizations named that night. Third, he had always projected his image as the “Movement Activist Chicano”, the rebel, the die-hard Nationalist, the Movement in its hot, potent youth. And last, he was a controversial figure and the fact that he could make a speech which effectively projected unity somehow made the history that much more credible.

The speech itself nostalgically evoked the good old days of student organizing, “when we didn't know anything,” and “we slept in gyms” when attending conferences on other campuses. He mentioned a litany of names, the founders of various organizations, a patriarchal lineage of heroes in the struggle. One name he mentioned in particular was that of Saul Nevarez, an M.D. with a Masters degree in public health, who had been seminal during the Brown governorship in getting more Chicanos into medical schools.

I was impressed by the speech, but still a bit skeptical about the entire project, especially since he had neglected to mention some of the women that I knew were important in the history, one of whom was Miranda sitting next to me, who had been a founder of C.M.S.A. I leaned over and whispered in her ear, and she nodded. (Later we found her name on the display which had been set up to illustrate the history of the organizations, but we were only partially mollified).

The next speaker was the director of the Office of Minority Health in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Public Health Services, from Washington D.C. The doctor shaped his speech in tune with the theme of the evening by talking about his own experiences as an African-American pre-professional and medical student during the Sixties in the days of the “Great Society.” He emphasized how the early organizing of Blacks in the health field was a similar story to that of the earlier speaker, one of struggle, internal disagreement, and ultimate working together to increase access to medical education. He too mentioned some of the earlier Chicano health organizers, praising Saul Nevarez in particular, as had the earlier speaker. He topped his speech off by urging the audience to participate in their organization, C.M.A.C., and assuring them that the government would try to be responsive to the organization.

The last speaker was introduced by the C.M.A.C. president as a “foil blooded Pueblo Indian dentist” who was a former Assistant Surgeon General during the sixties. The man had convened the first Special Career Grants Committee which was...