Hello beautiful people, welcome back. This will be part four of the lecture on ethnic studies and in this section we're actually now going to get to the creation of the department of the discipline of ethnic studies. In the previous part of the lectures we talked about some of the intellectual origins, some of the knowledge, where it comes from. We looked at pre-colonial era indigenous people. Mexican intellectuals, Latin American intellectuals, and other intellectuals that have contributed to our knowledge about ourselves, the world, the systems that we live in, the problems that we have, the institutions that affect us, the culture that we produce.
You know, there's a lot to learn, right? And so when we get to the actual 60s and 70s, some of the intellectuals that I talked about, the intellectual origins, I was mostly focusing on... pre-1970s, right?
If you noticed, most of those people up to the late 60s, early 70s, that's kind of where I stopped. And so what was going on at that time was a time of great social unrest, of turmoil. The society is changing in very drastic, rapid ways. And if you know your history, you know that that's the time of...
the free speech movement. Berkeley was one of those epicenters, very much connected to the anti-war movement, the draft, people were being drafted to go to war, to go fight in Vietnam. And, you know, students are kind of questioning why we are building our empire. Why are we forcing people to die and kill people that we don't even know?
And, you know, so the anti-war movement, the free speech movement are very much connected. the right to your own political beliefs, right? This is a time in a way it's a response to the McCarthy era, the anti-communist time, and anti-workers movements, right? So in a way, people are waking up and having enough and wanting change.
You have the women's liberation movement questioning the patriarchal kind of values and culture, the system itself. wanting to have control over their bodies, wanting better opportunities. You have the counterculture movement or the hippie culture kind of rejecting the materialism and conservative values of the 40s and 50s and a lot of their own parents many times, right? And so also what was going on at this time, we have the civil rights movement, right?
And when we think about the civil rights movement, which also includes the LGBTQ movement, movement, by the way, we're looking at people of color as well, right? So we have the Chicano movement, the Black Power movement, the African American civil rights movement, the Native American, American Indian movement, Asian movement, Asian American movement, right? So those were the main groups.
So when we think about ethnic studies, sometimes people think, well, there's, what does that mean? Ethnic studies, culture, study of culture, there's so many, why not include them? Well, it's because, again, it dates back to the creation of these disciplines. When people were fighting in the 1960s and 70s for departments within the universities, for classes, for professors, they were not necessarily fighting for general ethnic studies.
Each group was fighting to have a discipline that could study themselves, where they could be part of, where they could produce knowledge. From a different lens, from a different perspective, we already talked about how many of the disciplines, like in sociology, anthropology, political science, education, they will look at people of color and say, these are defective people, or there's something wrong with them. What is wrong with these people? That was kind of like the premise, the starting point.
And that was very problematic because then it relied on this view that people that are oppressed, people that are disempowered, discriminated against, targets of racism, somehow are at fault for those issues, for those problems. And so what people of color wanted a space within the university to study, not just their problems, but also their history, their culture, their contributions, the many things that we learn in school that fail. or don't always include the place of native people, of Asian-Americans, of Chicanos, of black people.
And so that's what they wanted. Right. And they were not fighting, like I said, for a for an ethnic studies department. They were fighting for their own particular fields of study within a college. In San Francisco where a lot of this took place, so Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, those were all kind of epicenters of civil rights in California, right, and of ethnic studies in a lot of ways.
California, it's kind of at the forefront of the creation of ethnic studies. Not to say that there's no other places that are also fighting in New York like Puerto Ricans, in Arizona, Mexican American Studies in Texas of course. But ethnic studies is definitely very also very much part of the fights here in California.
And so what we see is that the Chicano movement and a lot of these movements are entering a period of redefinition, of taking control of their own identities, of the terms that are used to define them. And this is where the term Chicano kind of comes from, right? So Chicano already existed before. But when we think about the Chicano movement, as opposed to the Mexican-American movement, why Chicano?
It's because it's the first time that Mexican-Americans are asserting a non-white identity in a sense, right? Mexican-Americans as mixed race people, many of them, some of us are very light-skinned, some of us are dark-skinned. And so the idea of identity, of race, it's very central to the idea of who we are, even though race is a social construction and made up, and we'll talk about that later.
But Mexican-Americans are trying to define themselves and taking that power. So if someone else defines you, they have a lot of power over you. So the idea is that we need to define ourselves.
And for the first time, Chicanos are embracing their indigenous ancestry, their mestizo. mixed race ancestry and culture and they are also looking at working class people the the importance and the value of workers right so when you think about one of the main leaders of the civil rights movement for example we'll think about like cesar chavez and dolores huerta right who are labor organizers they're working with with um with people uh from with workers with farm workers And they're rejecting previous identities, identities such as Spanish-American or Latin-American, Mexican or American of Mexican descent or Spanish surname. There was all these terms that people use, Mexican-Americans use.
And Chicano kind of was a rejection of this idea of we need to renounce our culture. We need to assimilate in order to be accepted. And Chicanos are saying, no, they would say chale.
that in Spanish, right? Like, hell no. Like, we're going to be proud of who we are, of our Mexican indigenous mestizo culture, and we're going to demand a space for it within U.S. society, right? That we shouldn't need to change who we are in order to be accepted and to have equality, right? And so that is part of the value of Chicano.
So what is Chicano? What is Chicana? Or Chicanx, if you're using now as a plural. It's a person of Mexican descent in the United States. This was the understanding of the term when it first appeared.
People have tried to redefine it in different ways, expand it, but it's still kind of very much about Mexican Americans. It was a derogatory word from within the community. Oftentimes Mexicans would use it to refer to other Mexicans.
When we look at the writings from the 20s or the 40s, they would use it as Kind of like those dark skinned, just in the same way that, you know, a lot of internal colonialism, colonized mentalities we have. We look down on our own people when we are dark skinned or we have stray hair or brown eyes. Somehow it's like, oh, you're not as beautiful or you're working class, you're poor. And so kind of like saying you're ghetto. Sometimes people use that term.
Right. So the idea here is Chicano now is redefined from meaning. dark-skinned and poor or working class to what's wrong with that we're proud of our indigenous Mexican ancestry we're proud of coming from working class people and it is that pride that kind of fuels a lot of the political engagement of the time and Ruben Salazar who actually I should have put in the intellectual origins of Chicano studies right he was a he was a journalist he very important he worked for the LA Times he started his a radio station in Spanish, a TV station in Spanish as well. He was very influential. And he has one very famous definition of Chicano.
He said, a Chicano is a Mexican-American with the non-Anglo image of himself. He resents being told Columbus discovered America when the Chicanos ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer's trip to the New World. So like I said before, Mexican-Americans, you know, since 1848, since the colonization of the Southwest by the U.S. and their incorporation of Mexicans into the U.S. society had it. kind of argue or negotiated the U.S. racial system in a way so that they could be classified as a white or as seen as closely as possible to whiteness, because at that time, that's the only people that had rights, really.
And so by the 1960s, Mexican-Americans are rejecting that strategy and saying, we're not European. Our ancestors, yes, we might be European. Yes, we are mixed race.
That's true. African as well is part of that. But we want to center, and at least the Chicanos at the time, they centered their identity in that specific ancestry of the indigenous people, right? So this is the reference to the Mayans and the Aztecs, as opposed to what others were saying. My aunts, you know, they would focus on the Spanish.
Oh, my grandma or my grandfather was Spanish. What about the other grandparents, right? or Italian, so Mexicans would want to be Italian or, you know, anything but Mexican, really.
But the Chicanos, in a way, were the first to really reclaim that. And that's what Chicano meant, that pride in that culture and the recognition that we're not a minority. So I never really used the term minority and minority because minority means less than.
And when people are looking at Latin America. When people are looking at indigenous people and the world, this is like the sense of they're not less than anybody else, right? Not even in numbers, Latin America as a whole, right? In Contra Costa College, what all this means is that students, the community, at the time you had the United Council of Spanish Speakers Council in Contra Costa, you also had clubs, the Latin American Student Union.
And all these people are organizing to create a Chicano Studies, La Raza Studies department. And it's interesting here, like, for example, here is a youth conference held for Spanish speaking. So that that used to be a common way to refer to Latinos, Spanish speaking, Spanish surnames, Spanish descent, Spanish Americans.
Right. So a little side note. So Chicano, again, is rejecting that white identification.
right, in a lot of ways. And so here's some students of the time. Here's a counselor, Zúñiga, who already retired.
And María Teresa Viramontes, who is a local politician, did a lot of good work in education at our college, even at that district. She wrote this piece for the, I think, 50 years of our college district. And she was part of the movement to bring Chicano studies to the college.
And she... I really like how she phrased it, right? Because I think that really is very much in line with what ethnic studies is supposed to be about.
She said, we did not see the Chicano department as simply an academic entity. So it's not knowledge production for knowledge sake, right? It's not just to know things. It was our piece of land within the college to build access everywhere, like spokes on a wheel to recruit, keep, transfer, and enable students to graduate without losing their deep connection.
to the community. So this is a department that was always mindful of the community, of issues of social justice, of equality within the institution, as well as within society, and that deep connection to the community, that identity, the raiz, the root, right, of who you are. And so when Ethnic Studies gets created, like I said, a lot of people were already doing the work, but they hadn't really thought about what is Ethnic Studies. They were they were doing the work studying people of their particular people of color you talk about the voice for example or Ernesto Galarza or Americo Paredes you know they were doing the work within their disciplines but they were all kind of having to be interdisciplinary they had to they saw that their disciplines were not enough to what they wanted to do or their own disciplines where they didn't have the tools or or they were of times complicit with the oppression of their own people. They had these biased ideas about their own people.
So they couldn't just use that and they had to kind of go beyond that. So ethnic studies, again, because it brings people from different disciplines, from sociology, from the social sciences, from the humanities, people that are already kind of trying to think beyond the box, outside the box, into one department. makes it interdisciplinary. It facilitates those conversations across disciplines.
And in that process, it's also transdisciplinary, meaning that it creates new theories that doesn't belong to a theory, a discipline itself, right? It's not a traditional discipline theory or method or tools or way of doing things. And so it seeks to transcend it, to go above it.
And the purpose of it is to decolonize, right? And decolonize is a theory. It's something that is often...
thrown around. But if you think about decolonization, it's about liberation. And it is kind of an abstract idea, and I don't want to go too much in depth here.
But the idea is that we want full human flourishing, full human liberation, well-being. It's kind of idealistic at times, sometimes, right? So we can come back to this one.
Also, the theories and methods are also being developed. Some of them come, like I said, from the disciplines, but we kind of tweak them. We kind of change them.
We adapt them. We kind of pick and choose what's useful for us from other disciplines, as well as create our own as well, right? Pedagogy, the connection to the community.
This is what Maria Teresa Viramontes was talking about, of keeping that deep connection to the community and community engagement. right respecting the student and so I'm just going to restate what I have already said just to just that it sticks with you because these are important concepts so when we talk about interdisciplinary again ethnic studies is looking at the social sciences many of the The scholars actually come from social sciences, they come from sociology or from history or anthropology, but they're always kind of rethinking their methods. There's a lot of creativity and innovation that comes out of it.
They come from the humanities, like I said, as well from theater, from film, literature, English, you know, and other interdisciplinary fields. There's women's studies, LGBTQ studies, American studies, peace and conflict studies. There's so many, right? And so they're also kind of housed there and kind of growing from there. And ethnic studies itself, because it has grown a lot.
So if it was, you know, 50 years ago, it was a new discipline, right? And over time, the more people have written within ethnic studies, contributed to the field, it has continued to grow, right? It's something that we need to also be mindful of.
So transdisciplinary. The idea that, and I would, the one thing I would say here, because it's, again, transcending the limits of disciplines, and also, in particular, the way that disciplines can contribute to colonization, oppression, domination, racism, you know, stuff like that. So trying to transcend that.
So always questioning ourselves. And I think that's something very particular to ethnic studies, that we're always questioning the way we're doing things. that we're always being mindful of how our work is helping the communities, helping people. And something that I wanted to emphasize is that the community is not an object of study. It's not a thing.
It's not a separation. That the community is us, it's our people, and so we want to study them to help them, right? When we think about methods and theories, there's just so many. Some of them, like I said, Our contributions from other disciplines and some of it our own.
When Chicano studies, we have our own contributions, a way of doing things. When we think about intersectionality, for example, bringing, being mindful of how race, sexuality, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, you know, all these things, how they come together in the person to make the person who they are, but also how they live in the world. right, how they interact with institutions and society, right, that kind of thing.
And so I don't want to go over every concept here because there's a lot of them, but some of them are very particular to Chicano studies like nepantla, mestiza consciousness, you know, testimonio, the idea of cultura cura and how we use, we like to use concepts that come from the culture, especially from our kind of everyday life or people's people's culture, what people say on a regular basis in the fields, in the workplace, in the kitchen, and think about how those ideas connect to everything else, right? How it connects to our experiences, our lived experiences, and creating theory. from our lived experience.
That's something that is very specific to Chicana feminism, women of color feminism, making theory out of the self, the lived experience. The idea of intersectionality in a lot of ways came from that, right? Pedagogy, again, what does that mean?
What we teach has to be culturally relevant, it has to be anti-racist, it has to be community affirming, right? The idea of... Connection, solidarity, community love, self-love, that's important. Transformational, critical, and decolonizing, right? And so I just wanted to wrap it up here, again, sharing this quote.
And as we go through our class and as you go through your education, keep thinking about how your success is tied to your community's success. how your life accomplishments will help others also achieve their goals, right, and accomplish great things. And I think that's something very particular to ethnic studies, that as you go through La Raza studies, Chicano studies, Black studies, whatever field you go into, that those classes are going to make you feel proud of who you are, are going to give you the critical thinking skills you need. It's going to make you... It's gonna give you ganas, you know that will that desired to to be an agent of positive change in your community Alright, so thank you so much for watching and sticking with me.
We finished the lecture on this and Hopefully you took some notes best of luck in the quiz. Peace