No Golden Age

Television News and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement

Bibliographic Data

ID9449189
AuthorsRandy Ontiveros (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume62
Issue4
Pages897-923
Publication date2010-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.2010.a409344
OpenAlexW2098202045
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited22

The 1950s and 1960s are often remembered as a “golden age” in American network news. This essay contests such nostalgic narratives by carefully examining the archive of television coverage of Chicano civil rights activism after World War II. Guided by the black-white binary that has historically dominated U.S. history, the networks all but ignored the political developments taking shape among Mexican Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Things changed somewhat in 1966 with the emergence of César Chávez as a media icon, but television producers now tended to represent progressive Chicano/a politics through a narrow ideological filter in which activists were screened either as saints or traitors. I argue that the network news had a powerful impact on how the Chicano movement was received and later remembered in U.S. history. I also argue that this archive challenges us to reconsider certain assumptions about political efficacy and visibility

Aesthetics · Art · Civil rights · Icon · Ideology · Literature · Media studies · Movement (music · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Race, History, and American Society

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