Chicano Studies, 1970-1984

Abstract

When asked, in the spring of 1981, to review anthropological writings on Chicanos for a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I did some preliminary research, hoping to discover the magnitude of the job ahead of me. Books in Print yielded only two ethnographies (1, 35) and a few dissertations that had been printed (by Arno Press and R & E Research Associated) to meet the demand for Chicano studies course materials. A computer search with the keywords Chicano(s), Chicana(s), and Mexican American(s) provided, with duplication, exactly 710 titles, but anthropologists virtually never appeared on the printout, which was dominated by people from other disciplines writing on the topics of health care and bilingual education. So little appeared to have been published by anthropologists writing on Chicanos that I readily accepted the invitation and confidently took on what seemed a simple task.Then I decided to write the few anthropologists known to me who did research on Chicanos. My letter requested lists of their writings, bibliographies on the subject, and the names of other researchers. Nobody sent a review article or bibliography of the field, but virtually everybody sent their own writings and the names of other people to contact. When my "chain letter" reached four removes (contacts of contacts of contacts of people initially contacted), dimin ishing returns set in� At last most of the people to contact were already known to me.

Southern Chile's Archipelago of Chiloé: Shifting Identities in a New Economy

“…The other view of identity—more widely accepted in academic scholarship today—recognizes the malleability and multiplicity of peoples’ sense of group belonging and collective identification. Identity can refer to an ‘imagined community’ constructed out of nationalist discourse (Anderson ; Gould ; Gupta and Ferguson ; Hobsbawm ; Malesevic ) or a group's self‐conscious self‐representations deployed either as resistance or political leverage—so‐called identity politics (Cammarota ; García Canclini ; Koczanowicz ; Lefler and Gleach ; Martín Alcoff ; Nash ; Rosaldo ). Identity, moreover, can encompass a multiplicity of self‐representations.…”