ABSTRACT
The decade between 1965 and 1975 was a period of intense turmoil in many Mexican-American communities throughout the Southwest and California as a heightened ethnic consciousness led to protest over the denial of full and equal civil rights. The struggle for civil rights that came to be known as the Chicano Movement was characterized by demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and sit-ins. A cultural component, consisting of Chicano teatro, revistas (literary magazines), and performance poetry, quickly emerged out of the confrontation with multiple social institutions. Its emphasis was on the conceptualization of identity as nationality; full political rights, and economic and social participation were its primary goals. In contrast to other civil rights efforts, the Mexican-American or Chicano Move-
ment emerged out of land and labor issues in the mid-1960s when, out of previous efforts to unionize agricultural workers, César Chávez founded the National Farm Workers of America in Delano, California, where the first public manifestation of the movimiento was a strike by grape pickers on 16 September 1965. To update farmworkers on issues related to the strike, El Malcriado (1969-75), a newspaper in Spanish began circulation; soon, an English version (1969-76) aimed at the national supporters of the United Farm Workers Union appeared. By the late 1960s, a heightened activism in Mexican-American communities
throughout the Southwest paralleled the efforts of Chávez’s union; these included Reies López Tijerina’s landownership claims in New Mexico, the rise of militant nationalism in Colorado, the rise of La Raza Unida Party in Texas, and the Third World Student Movement that first took place in California but spread throughout the country, calling for the establishment of departments of ethnic studies in California (or programs of Mexican-American studies in Texas and the Southwest, ChicanoRiqueño studies in the Midwest, and Puerto Rican studies on the East Coast). Within the larger context of social rebellion brought about by the war in Vietnam, the war on poverty, the black power movement, and the women’s movement, Chicano/a and Latino/a men and women were in the process of reinventing themselves, their images, and their communities (Fernández 1994a: 23). Revistas played a major role in this process of reinvention tied to nationalistic
issues. Revistas which tend to be a compilation of works of fiction, poetry, or essays are small anthologies of creative works in progress that serve as a forum for the exploration of a cultural process in formation linked together by an editorial mission
(Masiello 1985: 27). “Nation-building,” Benedict Anderson asserts, “is closely tied to print communities formed around newspapers [and magazines] … that nurture the preconceived notion that groups have of themselves as they wish to be, as they imagine themselves to be” (Anderson 1983: 8). By the authority of editorial decisions, the literary magazine directs the reading tastes of the day and creates specific models for the critical reception and interpretation of texts. Literary reviews of a particular period reflect an ongoing dialogue between the editors, the writers, and the readership and leave an imprint of a particular intellectual discourse at a given moment in time (Masiello 1985: 27). Such has been the case with Latino/a reviews.
