Chicano Studies

Paper Summary:

The paper starts by discussing how difficult it is to define exactly what a Chicano is. It goes on to discuss the U.S. Civil Rights movement and Arthur Schlesinger's idea of the "cult of ethnicity" also the attempts and problems of assimilation.

From the paper;

"It would not doubt be much more convenient for scholars if all Chicanos had the same political values, followed the same cultural customs, related to language(s) in the same way, conceptualized race in the same way. It would, under these circumstances, be easy to define the field of Chicano Studies.
But, of course, this is not the case. While there are certainly common elements linking various individuals within the Chicano community to each other, as a whole Chicanos are as diverse and as fragmented as any other similarly sized group of Americans. A man who has crossed the U.S.-Mexican border illegally to work as a busboy and who speaks no English, is only partly literate in the Spanish he speaks as a second language after his native Indian tongue, and who has a third-grade education " after all " might be suspected to have little in common with second-generation Cuban-American working as a heart surgeon who speaks Spanish to her family but English everywhere else."

More papers on Chicano Studies:

• Essay # 137844 : "Chicano Studies: Questions with Answers"
• Research Paper # 94413 : "The Borderlands and Chicano Culture"
• Analytical Essay # 145245 : "Chicano Peoples and Cultural Identity"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: