What’s Right (and Wrong) With Chicano Studies: An Exchange

To the Editor:

It is disappointing that Book Review chose a reviewer who makes unqualified assumptions about Chicano history (Book Review, Aug. 20). For starters, Gregory Rodriguez does not understand that history differs from other social sciences. It bases its assumptions on documents, and it is not theory-driven. History, however, has accepted canons, which do not always keep pace with the times. A synthesis is reached by documentary challenges to mainstream paradigms such as Cold War views of the world. This is nothing new, and the reviewer should read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” for an understanding of the dialectic.

His assertion that “[t]he study of America’s Latinos has been thoroughly dominated by activist scholars and writers who either once participated in or who still emulate the ethnic campus politics of a generation ago” is simply not true. The field has changed tremendously in the last two decades, and his static analysis, regurgitating reviews written in the late 1970s, does a disservice to the field.

Further, Rodriguez’s Red-baiting the field of Chicano history is unforgivable. Simply, Marxists have made very valuable intellectual contributions to Chicano studies, as they have to U.S. history overall. Ironically, even the culture warriors are today using the works of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Another example of his Red-baiting shows when he accuses anyone who disagrees with his assimilationist model of being from the “good guys-versus-bad guys” school of history. The truth is that “good guys-versus-bad guys” model is not particular to Chicanos. I recommend that Rodriguez read Peter Novick’s “That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession” for a better understanding of the discipline.

He singles me out among those “less concerned with telling the story of Mexican Americans (the good guys) than they were with highlighting Chicano oppression at the hands of Anglo Americans (the bad guys).” I have written other books. “Occupied America” is in its fourth edition. Each subsequent edition since 1972 is totally different from the first and, in each case, the documents alter the story. Aside from “Occupied America,” I have written numerous works, among them “Community Under Siege,” “Anything But Mexican” and “Sometimes There Is No Other Side.” If he read these works, he would know that Mexican Americans are not always the “good guys” in my works and that I am very critical of Chicanos like him.

Rodriguez writes that “[a]ctivist historians ingeniously--if not disingenuously--managed to portray contemporary Mexican Americans as a conquered people, ‘an internal colony’ whose ancient ethnic homeland, the American Southwest, was being occupied by invading Anglos” and who rallied behind the specious notion that “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Again, Rodriguez distorts the facts. First, the internal model was discarded in the mid-1970s. Second, the internal colonial model dealt with relationships with the majority society and outside control of the barrio--how people saw themselves as a result of the subordination--not the war. As for the conquest, the accepted truth is that the United States invaded Mexico; if he doesn’t agree, he has the burden to prove otherwise.

He accuses me of being “perhaps among the first to openly declare that Mexicans did not come to the United States in order to improve their economic prospects” and that Mexicans “were brought here by economic forces over which they had little control.” Really, I was hardly the first scholar to talk about these forces or the impact of uprooting on the uprooted. Even the conservative historian Oscar Handlin concedes this long before “Occupied America” in his classic, “The Uprooted.” The works of Ernesto Galarza and Manuel Gamio also speak of these economic forces. Finally, the musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” dramatizes these tensions.

Rodriguez again Red-baits an entire field: “The Marxist leanings of so many of the first generation of Chicano studies professors made it even more difficult for them to admit that millions of Mexicans have come to the United States hoping to one day finally place their families into the middle class.” I have interviewed thousands of immigrants, and very few say that they wanted to come to the United States to be middle class. Some came for political reasons; others to escape poverty; still others to maintain their middle-class status. Being a Marxist or not being a Marxist has little to do with being able “to consider the myriad hopes, dreams and fears that motivate them.”

His assumption that younger scholars are more independent-minded is laughable and shows a profound ignorance of academe and its review process. Daily I receive requests for help from younger scholars who complain that their institutions are pressuring them to conform to accepted paradigms. My epistemological skepticism would compel me to ask whether some younger Mexican American scholars are really more independent today.

He cites David Gutierrez as saying that “militant, ethnic-based politics held little appeal” to “a large percentage” of Mexican Americans and that “a great many Mexican Americans continue to subscribe to some version of the melting-pot theory in their everyday lives.” Except for high school texts, very few histories subscribe to the “melting pot theory.” Further, although most Mexican Americans do not join advocacy groups, just like most women do not join NOW, a critical mass acknowledge that changes have occurred because of advocacy groups.

With all of this said, the fact that Rodriguez took on Chicano history in his review shows that his review was ideologically driven. His review is peculiar because none of the authors is a historian, and none is technically Mexican American. Juan Gonzalez, Mike Davis and Ilan Stavans are not historians; they do not pretend to be historians. However, this does not disqualify them from making valuable social commentary. Their works offer important insights for academicians. Rodriguez’s statement that “Gonzalez spends an inordinate amount of time on the grisly history of U.S. colonialism in this hemisphere” makes no sense. Moreover, his objection to Gonzalez’s statement that the Spanish language is challenging notions of the melting pot is based more on his biases and linguistic deficiencies than on the merits of Gonzalez’s argument.

To be candid, Mike Davis has more experience with Latinos and Mexican Americans than Rodriguez. So it is ironic that he takes Davis to task for his portrayal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He also tries to discredit Davis by nitpicking his work by pointing out minor errors. More exasperating is that Rodriguez does not understand Davis’ use of words such as “transformative.” So I recommend that Rodriguez visit the Arizona border before absolving the INS and then take a course in epistemology so he can understand Davis.

All Rodriguez has to do is visit any Latino bookstore to appreciate the variety of books on Chicano history, literature, art and the social sciences. The authors differ from one another and they give us a wide choice of perspectives. Rodriguez’s little world fails to capture thecomplexity, growth and contributions of this body of knowledge.

Rodolfo F. Acuna

Chicana and Chicano Studies Dept.

Cal State Northridge

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Gregory Rodriguez replies:

It is odd that Rodolfo Acuna feels so compelled to reply at such length given that I mentioned him only twice in a 2,400-word book review.

His letter is, however, a perfect example of the way in which Chicano intellectual orthodoxy has been enforced over the last 30 years. For a generation, writers presumptuous enough to stray from accepted doctrine have been routinely denounced by those who adhered to the old 1960s militant party line. Much like Acuna’s letter regarding my review, attacks waged on dissenting viewpoints tend to be heavier on personal venom than on intellectual rigor.

In challenging my “experience” with Mexican Americans, he engages in the insidious ploy of questioning my ethnic authenticity, as if he were the arbiter of ethnic pedigree. This sort of bullying rhetoric has been par for the course in what has passed for Mexican American intellectual discourse since the 1970s. As a result, many young, forward-thinking Latino writers, scholars and artists have simply chosen not to challenge their intellectual elders for fear of nasty public reprisals. In my review of three unpromising books, I lament the fact that even as the Latino experience has become more dynamic and pluralistic over the last few decades, its representation in American intellectual life has not. My disappointment with the quality of most contemporary writing on Latinos led me to urge a new generation of writers and scholars to muster “the courage to tear down what has become a worn-out intellectual framework.”

The focus of my review was on the still overwhelming presence of anachronistic ideology in contemporary writing on Latinos. The young intellectual firebrands of 1970 have become the old watchdogs of established doctrine today. As Chicano historian Manuel Gonzales wrote last year, the nascent trend in reinterpreting Latino America has occurred “despite denunciations and charges of backsliding from the old ‘60s militants who continue to dominate ethnic studies departments.”

Continued attempts to discredit dissenters suggests that despite progress, Chicano intellectual orthodoxy is still alive. That is precisely what I wrote in my review. That is the intellectual malaise I referred to in my review when I called for a “healthier, less ideologically driven and less defensive vision of the Latino past, present, and future.” Yet, with or without any of our blessings, a new era of post-Chicano intellectual openness is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.