For many years, scholars had only F. Arturo Rosales's fine text Chicano: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement to consult as a broad overview of the Chicano struggle for civil rights. With forthcoming books such as Marc Simon Rodriguez's Rethinking the Chicano Movement and the recently published Making Aztlán, we now have multiple good synopses of the movement. The latter volume, co-written by Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Irene Vásquez, provides a voluminous and analytically sharp appraisal of El Movimiento. In 39 compact chapters, as well as a preface and introduction, the authors trace Chicano activism from school integration battles to cultural expression, from racial formation to labor battles, from the formation of Chicano studies programs to Third-World Internationalism, and a host of other topics in between. The result is an ambitious, easily digestible read that should appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines.
One of the highlights of this book is an examination of community defense by Chicano activists. As the authors rightly explain, the Mexican-descent community had for many years endured brutal violence at the hands of individuals and especially police. To challenge that violence, Mexican Americans had two related yet distinct strategies. One was the “primarily protective and defensive tactic of denouncing and confronting, and the other was an overall strategy of challenging the authority of the state in a variety of ways, including legal action” (p. 120). Both strategies represented major obstacles and challenges for the Chicano movement—one would have been difficult enough to pursue. Here focusing on activist groups such as the well-known Brown Berets works well, but the authors also explore other organizations and incidences of Chicano resistance to police brutality, which helps to nuance the activism of the Berets.
Cultural expression and exploration was another important component of the movement. Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez do an admirable job of exploring this cultural activism, examining in separate chapters street art, acting, music, dance, the spoken and written word, visual art, and films. Their chapter on filmmaking in particular brings to light some new and important information on the movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano filmmakers addressed numerous topics of historical import, including the Los Angeles Zoot Suit “riots” and the Chicana experience. Combined with the written word and the visual arts, Chicano artistic expression not only proved important for the movement as a whole, as evidenced by Corky Gonzales's now famous epic poem Yo Soy, Joaquin, but also went hand in hand with the development of Chicano Studies programs across the Southwest.
The authors treat numerous subjects in this book and, as in many other efforts toward synthesis, they cannot hope to cover them all. This is the only criticism I really have of the book. It is heavily focused on the Los Angeles region, and given Gómez-Quiñones's own activist history this makes sense. While they do examine other cities and states, the authors’ treatment of those areas comes across as more cursory. For instance, the state of Arizona, a hot topic in the field of Mexican American history at the moment, is almost entirely missing from Making Aztlán. That said, the authors cover much ground in insightful ways and have produced a valuable text.
