Becoming La Raza

In 1965, striking farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley sparked the beginning of the Chican@ movement. As the movement quickly gained traction across the southwestern United States, public frictions emerged and splits among activists over strategic political decisions. José G. Izaguirre III explores how these disagreements often hinged on the establishment of a racial(ized) identity for Mexican Americans, leading to the formation of La Raza Unida, a political party dedicated to naming and defending Mexican Americans as a racialized community.

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.

“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.”—Bernadette Calafell, coeditor of Negotiating Identity and Transnationalism: Middle Eastern and North African Communication and Critical Cultural Studies

“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.”—Michelle A. Holling, co-editor of both Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? and Race(ing) Intercultural Communication: Racial Logics in a Colorblind Era

José G. Izaguirre III is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

           Political

History

           U.S.

Political Science

           American Politics

           Twentieth-century

Rhetoric

Critical Race Studies