The Chicano Generation

The Chicano Generation is the latest in Mario T. Garcia's series of interviews with Chicano (and one Chicana) activists from East Los Angeles, an epicenter of the Chicano movement. Garcia uses the interviews as testimonios—a collective Latin American first-person narrative of resistance—to form a “collective memoir or autobiography” (p. 13). Garcia extensively interviewed the photojournalist Raul Ruiz, the Brown Beret activist Gloria Arellanes, and Rosalio Muñoz, a longtime activist who organized a massive national Chicano demonstration against the Vietnam War. Garcia edited the interviews for chronology and clarity; they read as seamless stories. Garcia's introduction provides the historical context of the Chicano movement that links the activists, making the book accessible and engaging. These in-depth interviews provide activists’ perceptions from a vantage point almost fifty years past the movement's heyday, including their memories of the formation of their ethnic identities and involvement with the movement. All touch on, to differing degrees, their introduction to the movement, and participation in various aspects of the Los Angeles movement such as the 1968 Los Angeles Unified School District “blowouts,” when high school students walked out of classes to protest subpar education; the Chicano Moratorium of 1970; and critical milestones in the national movement. Ruiz became an activist when tapped to work with the newspaper La Raza, which he eventually edited. Ruiz narrates his perspective on the paper, his serendipitous photograph of a deputy sheriff firing the shot that may have killed the Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar, and his candidacy with the La Raza Unida party. Muñoz, the first Chicano student body president at the University of California, Los Angeles, publicly refused induction into the draft, and by 1970 was one of the two leaders of the Chicano Moratorium, a massive national demonstration by Latinos disproportionately represented as combat soldiers in Vietnam

Art · Art history · Biography · Collective memory · Context (archaeology · Garcia · Humanities · Latin Americans · Literature · Media studies · Memoir · Movement (music · Narrative · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Transculturation · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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