Becoming La Raza - Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s)

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. Jos-. 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 r