Becoming La Raza
Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s)
José G. Izaguirre III
Winner of the 2025 NCA Latino/a Communication Studies Division and La Raza Caucus Outstanding Book Award“Becoming La Raza opens the door for further discussion on the diverse perspectives that can be used to reexamine the Chicano Movement through a multivocal lens.”
- Description
- Reviews
- Bio
- Table of Contents
- Sample Chapters
- Subjects
Through close readings of figures, vocabularies, and visualizations of iconic texts of the Chican@ Movement—including El Plan de Delano, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquin,” and newspapers like El Grito del Norte and La Raza—Izaguirre demonstrates that la raza was never singular or unified. Instead, he reveals a racial identity that was (re)negotiated, (re)invented, and (re)circulated against a Cold War backdrop that heightened rhetorics of race across the globe and increasingly threatened Mexican American bodies in the Vietnam War. In lieu of a unified nationalist movement, Izaguirre argues that activists energized and empowered La Raza as a political community by making the Chican@ movement multivocal, global, and often aligned with whiteness.
For scholars of political movements, US history, race, or rhetoric, Becoming La Raza will provide a valuable perspective on one of the most important civil rights movements of the twentieth century.
“Becoming La Raza opens the door for further discussion on the diverse perspectives that can be used to reexamine the Chicano Movement through a multivocal lens.”
“José G. Izaguirre III’s Becoming La Raza offers a much needed refreshing update to the study of Chicano movement rhetorics. Drawing on key rhetorical texts and informed by his own family history, he offers illuminating new insights that reflect not only historical trends but contemporary reverberations.”
“José G. Izaguirre III offers readers a compelling racial rhetorical history of Chican@ movement(s) discourse by analyzing the aesthetics of canonical Chican@ texts. Becoming La Raza is riveting to read due to its forceful arguments about selected texts, engagement with cross-disciplinary literature, and nuanced analysis that reveals the racialization by and of Chican@s during the highly charged period of 1965–1970. This book is a must read for those interested in rhetoric, race, violence, social movements, and Chicana/o studies.”
José G. Izaguirre III is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A De/Colonial Aesthetic: Whiteness and Mexican American Politics (1848–1965)
2. A Poetics of Apathy: The Farmworkers’ Movement and El Plan de Delano (1966)
3. A Poetics of Ambivalence: “I Am Joaquin” and the Year of La Raza (1967)
4. A Poetics of Relationality: The Invention of a Global Raza (1968)
5. A Poetics Otherwise: (Re)Bordering Mexican American Politics (1969)
6. A Poetics of Deferral: La Raza, Ruben Salazar, and a Global Violence (1970)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
Mailing List
Subscribe to our mailing list and be notified about new titles, journals and catalogs.