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Forty-five years ago when I began university teaching, after some years as a high school teacher of French, there was no Chicano studies - that is, no Chicano studies as an organized field of study. To be sure, there were Mexican-American scholars working on various aspects of Mexican-American life and its cultural productions, scholars like Aurelio Espinosa, Juan Rael, Arturo Campa, Fray Angelico Chaves, George I. Sánchez, Americo Paredes and others. Important as this scholarship was, it emerged amorphously, reflecting independent intellectual interests rather than a scholarship reflecting a field of study. This is not to say that some of these scholars may not have considered their work as part of a field of study conceptualized as Mexican-American studies. Despite its lack of an underpinning, it was a field of Mexican-American studies, its constituent parts subsumed as American folklore.
This situation created a critical barrier to the public discussion and dissemination of information about the presence of Mexican-Americans in the United States and their contributions to American society. Until I960 and the emergence of the Chicano movement, Mexican-Americans were characterized by mainstream American scholars - principally anthropologists and social workers - in terms of the queer, the curious and the quaint. That is, regarded as a "tribe," Mexican-Americans were categorized as just another item in the flora and fauna of Americana in precisely the same way American Indians were categorized.
The Chicano movement - that wave of condentización that came to bloom among Mexican-Americans in the '60s, transforming them into Chicanos - helped to change American perceptions about Mexican-Americans. While Mexican-Americans knew much about Anglo-Americans, Anglo-Americans knew little about Mexican-Americans. From 1848 to 1912 - the period of transition for the conquest generation of Mexicans who became Americans per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on Feb. 2, 1848 - Mexican-Americans were regarded poorly by the American public - so poorly, in fact, that the territories of New Mexico and Arizona were delayed statehood until their populations were predominantly Anglo-American.
In Two Years before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described the Mexican-Americans as "an idle, thriftless people" who could make nothing for themselves. And in 1852, Colonel Monroe reported to Washington that "the New Mexicans are thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-government, and there...