Tamis Hoover Renteria - Chicano Professionals: Culture Conflict and Identity (Latino Communities: Emerging Voices (Garland Publishing))

ANTOINETTE SEDILLO LOPEZ

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

First published by Garland Publishing, Inc.

This edition published 2011 by Routledge:

Routledge Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group

711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park

New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Copyright 1998 Tamis Hoover Rentera

All rights reserved

Rentera, Tamis Hoover.
Chicano professionals: culture, conflict, and identity/Tamis

Hoover Rentea.
p. cm. (Latino communities)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8153-3093-6 (alk. paper)

1. Mexican Americans in the professions. I. Title. II. Series.

HD8038.U5R46 1997

331.7'12'0896872073dc21

97-35336

I. Mapping the Cultural Territory

1. Generations

2. Networks

3. Identity

What's in a Name? Chicanos, Latinos, Mexican
Americans and Hispanics

II. Race and the Roots of Resistance

III. Negotiating a New Class Identity

IV. The Assimilation Myth

V. Postscript

I began to wrestle with the issues in this book on my first day as an undergraduate at Stanford in September 1972. Eighteen, dressed in a mini-skirt, blonde hair swinging and my arms loaded with suitcases, I walked into the lobby of Casa Zapata, the Chicano Theme House and dormitory, full of naive excitement about my anticipated encounter with the Mexican cultural Other.

The Chicanos at Stanford quickly set meand my WASP assumptionsstraigh. An encounter with the Other, if it is genuine, may begin with giddy attraction, but will inevitably evolve into something more difficult and profound if pursued.

I owe thanks and continued dialogue to all the Chicanos, and the handful of Anglos, with whom I argued and discussed into the wee small hours, in dormitory halls and rooms, those ideas which challenged my perspectives and opened me up to a whole new world view. I feel particularly grateful to Ramon Flores, Jose Padilla, Mickey Baeza, Sylvia (Martina) Puente, Arturo Pacheco, Gayle Turner, Nancy Mayans, and Elena Robles. I don't hold any of these ex-Zapatistas responsible for the analysis developed here; in fact, I feel sure that every one of them would find things with which to argue. I would feel disappointed if they didn't.

A few of the people I knew at Casa Zapata became subjects for this dissertation study. To them, and to all my other friends and the generous strangers who opened up their lives and ideas to me during the course of my fieldwork, I offer heartfelt thanks.

I am grateful to Jane Collier, George Collier, Renato Rosaldo, and Donald Donham, my teachers, for helping me take the raw clay of my fieldwork experience and shape it into the dissertation which formed the basis of this book.

I owe thanks to Susan Bibler Coutin, my fellow graduate student, who painstakingly helped me clarify my thinking in the early stages of writing and empathized with me over the trials of fieldwork and writing. Thanks are due also to Martha Luemers who helped me trim the jargon for non specialists (although I'm sure there is still plenty of it), and to Blair Pleasant for her editing suggestions. Kristi Long and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, editors for this series, asked questions and made suggestions that helped me to clarify many issues.

I owe hours and hours of lost time to Lucas Emiliano and Elijah Martin, my sassy, sweet sons who will undoubtedly someday ask their parents what this Chicano stuff is all about.

And of course, I owe my sanity, my love, and the very substance of this book to my husband, Beto. He has suffered without complaint in the three demanding roles of native subject, fellow ethnographer, and everloving husband over the last several years. I asked him at the outset of this project how he would feel about being a primary subject and participant, and whether or not he might feel threatened by my scrutiny, analysis, and exposure of the Chicano professional community of which we were both a part. He answered that he looked forward to getting some of these issues we were constantly talking about out in the air, into public discourse. He has since that time never indicated any regrets, whether or not he felt them. I am deeply grateful for his gentle, supportive presence in my life.

Tamis Hoover Rentera

August 1997

Writing about Chicano1 professionals in Los Angeles proves timely for many reasons. Anthropologists now venture into the ethnic borderlands of their own western countries rather than encroach on the flexing ethnicities of the third world as they have traditionally done. The Mexican American community in the United States is particularly important as an arena of study because its numbers are increasing rapidly, and its culture is densely entangled in the history as well as the contemporary reality of the American Southwest. While various subgroups of this community have received a fair amount of scholarly attention, the focus has been primarily on working-class Mexican Americans. White-collar professionals, who for the most part are the product of affirmative action in the last twenty years, have been neglected. This generation of Chicano professionals deserves study because 1) it is a historical product of the creative, political ferment of the sixties, 2) it defies assumptions about assimilation and class mobility, and 3) its members claim to represent and provide leadership to the working-class Mexican American masses. Their leadership claims are shaped by a unique cultural imperative, born and nurtured within the Chicano Student Movement of the 1960's and 70's, when the core of these professionals attended universities and negotiated a shift in class identity from blue-collar to white.