Becoming La Raza

Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s)

José G. Izaguirre III

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780271098753
• eBook ISBN: 9780271099293
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1965, striking farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley sparked the beginning of the Chican@ movement. As the movement quickly gained traction across the southwestern United States, public frictions and splits emerged among activists over strategic political decisions. José G. Izaguirre III explores how these disagreements often hinged on the establishment of a racial(ized) identity for Mexican Americans, leading to the formation of La Raza Unida, a political party dedicated to naming and defending Mexican Americans as a racialized community.

Through close readings of figures, vocabularies, and visualizations of iconic texts of the Chican@ Movement—including El Plan de Delano, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's "I Am Joaquin," and newspapers like El Grito del Norte and La Raza—Izaguirre demonstrates that la raza was never singular or unified. Instead, he reveals a racial identity that was (re)negotiated, (re)invented, and (re)circulated against a Cold War backdrop that heightened rhetorics of race across the globe and increasingly threatened Mexican American bodies in the Vietnam War. In lieu of a unified nationalist movement, Izaguirre argues that activists energized and empowered La Raza as a political community by making the Chican@ movement multivocal, global, and often aligned with whiteness.

For scholars of political movements, US history, race, or rhetoric, Becoming La Raza will provide a valuable perspective on one of the most important civil rights movements of the twentieth century.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: A De/Colonial Aesthetic: Whiteness and Mexican American Politics (1848–1965)
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: A Poetics of Apathy: The Farmworkers’ Movement and El Plan de Delano (1966)
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: A Poetics of Ambivalence: “I Am Joaquin” and the Year of La Raza (1967)
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: A Poetics of Relationality: The Invention of a Global Raza (1968)
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: A Poetics Otherwise: (Re) Bordering Mexican American Politics (1969)
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: APoetics of Deferral: La Raza, Ruben Salazar, and a Global Violence (1970)
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index