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Abstract
When Chicano/Latino Studies emerged in the late 1960s it represented a challenge to the traditional productions of knowledge on Mexicans and Latin Americans in the U.S. and an effort to reassert an active subjectivity in the face of an oppressive educational system. Along with other discursive movements in Ethnic Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies constituted an oppositional discourse which sought to radically redefine the relationship between white and non-white people and to carve a space within the university to focus on the experiences of racial minorities. In the mid-70s a number of ideological and methodological changes altered the direction of these programs and came into conflict with their oppositional nature. Two shifts in particular examined here are: the proliferation of empirical and positivist research in the social sciences, and the turn toward postmodernism in the humanities.
Through a combination of intellectual history, textual analysis, and geneological study I examine the formation of Chicano/Latino Studies as a discursive project, focusing particular attention on the political subjectivity which was constructed and re-defined over several generations. I begin with the framing of Mexican American history from 1930–1950 and the contributions of Americo Paredes and Ernesto Galarza to the construction of an oppositional political subjectivity for Mexican Americans. In Chapter Three I examine the confluence of social forces which gave rise to the Chicano movement, the challenges which Chicano/Latino Studies presented to the social sciences, and the limitations of this discourse in representing the gendered identities of the Chicano and Latino communities. Chapters Four and Five focus on the discursive shifts toward positivism and postmodernism respectively. Using a textual analysis of articles published on racial minorities in the American Political Science Review since 1963 along with a survey of dissertations written completed since 1980 I demonstrate how both the turn to positivism and postmodernism have restricted the oppositional nature of Chicano/Latino Studies either by re-inscribing the discipline in a more traditional form of academic inquiry or by submerging it in a sea of oppositions with no theoretical foundations. I conclude with a review of recent movements toward transnationalism and the possibilities this presents for reconstructing Chicano and Latino political subjectivities.
