Cultivating Aztlán: Chicano (Counter)Cultural Politics and the Postwar American University

Chicano Studies mean, in the final analysis, the re-discovery and the re-conquest of the self and of the community by Chicanos.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, El Plan de Santa Bárbara (1969)

The Chicano academic must do what he or she knows best. The first priority is to establish himself or herself as an authentic member of the academy. It is much easier and better to deal within the academy and in the community from a position of strength and authenticity. Professional development should be the number one priority.

Tomás Rivera, “The Role of the Chicano Academic and the Chicano Non-Academic Community” (1988)

Speaking at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in December 1975, Rolando Hinojosa observed that a “serious consequence of poor researching may be that Chicano studies will wither. Since we are labeled as a minority group we may be also marked off en masse as deficient when it comes to digging for facts and in the performance of the highly detailed and laborious task of investigative research.”¹ With the newfound attention devoted to Chicana/o literature and culture within academic circles, Hinojosa saw an urgent need by the mid-1970s for “serious scholars,” rather than “faulty researchers,” in Chicano Studies. “If we don’t police ourselves,” he opined, “others will whether we like it or not for there is already good material on Chicanos being turned out.”² As Hinojosa explained to Juan Bruce-Novoa during an interview in the spring of 1975, the reality remained that Chicana/o literature increasingly was “being read in the universities for the most part. It is read outside, of course, but at this stage, Chicano literature is being discussed in universities through symposia, colloquia, seminars, etc.”³ In Hinojosa’s estimation, then, the very viability and prospect of a genuinely Chicana/o literary arts and cultural criticism, if not simply a Chicana/o presence, within the academy and beyond appeared to rest on the success of professionalized scholarship by Chicano Studies academics and intellectuals. Hinojosa’s comments point to the ways in which the university and its institutional protocols and proprieties continued to exert tremendous pressure on Chicana/o scholars and cultural workers, despite their unequivocal alignment with the radicalism and disruptive politics of the age.

Marginalized, ignored, and disparaged for decades, Chicana/o writers and intellectuals now encountered in the postwar U.S. university a new willingness—although an admittedly tenuous one—to support, disseminate, and study their work. According to Adolph Reed, Jr., the 1960s and 1970s revealed once more “the university’s significance in ethnic pluralist politics,” and as one would expect, when confronted with mounting anti-racist militancy and challenges to institutional forms of discrimination, “the university reflected the world of which it was a part—a step behind.”⁴ However, the social and racial turmoil racking the United States during the Vietnam War era called on the university to do more than simply catch up with the times. As Jodi Melamed details, campus-based “insurgencies” by students and faculty saw the complete transformation of universities “as key to liberation struggles.”⁵ To this end, the objective was never simply representation, professionalization, and disciplinization via academic training and inclusion, but rather “open admissions for nonwhite students, the validation of the new knowledges produced by social movements, autonomy for black and ethnic studies faculty and students, and an education relevant to the concerns of marginalized communities.”⁶ Although forced to address the question of racial difference and inequality, U.S. universities invariably adopted a different agenda and vision than the one fostered by student movements. “[T] he essential function of the university in this period,” Melamed concludes, “was to make minoritized difference work for post-Keynesian times—to produce, validate, certify, and affirm racial difference in ways that augmented, enhanced, and developed state-capital hegemony rather than disrupted it.”⁷ In a similar vein, Roderick A. Ferguson argues that the insurgent politics espoused by Sixties radicals of color elicited “an academic moment that helped to rearticulate the nature of state and...