Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Young Folks

2011; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2011.0049

2153-4578

Ricardo Gilb,

Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

Young Folks Ricardo Gilb (bio) Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Kelly Lytle Hernández. University of California Press. http://www.ucpress.edu. 336 pages; cloth, $55.00; paper, $21.95. As a kid, I knew more than most: I grew up in a literary household, and I was around writers from the time I was a baby. I heard plenty of discussions of Chicano politics and Movement history, but I always had the feeling that this Chicanísmo wasn't something continuous with my own life. I thought it was just the peculiar nostalgia of an older generation of Chicano intellectuals. This was El Paso, Texas, about as thoroughly Mexican American as any city could be. Everyone my age thought "Chicano" was just another vague term that described the vague sense of identity that most felt in that city. It was Mexican, it was American, and we had no idea how to describe the mixture, nor did we have any sense that it mattered very much. I would go to friends' houses to play Mortal Kombat and listen to Led Zeppelin while someone's abuela yelled in Spanish. Being Mexican was like being a Catholic. It wasn't something to worry about too much; it was something only grandmothers, and every once in a while your own mom too, worried about. College was different. Stanford, where I was an undergrad, had its El Centro Chicano right in the middle of campus, and I would go sometimes to check my email, maybe use the free printer, and I'd see the announcements for upcoming lectures on Chicano issues, labor protests on campus, even a Chicano Thanksgiving. In college, everyone was talking about identity. Not just casual discussions among young people transitioning out of their teenage years, but every discussion of history, of American culture, of university admissions policies, seemed to include some statement of one's personal background as a sort of disclaimer. I learned to be on the lookout for stereotypes, for Eurocentrism, got used to calling traditional history courses "Western," learned to not judge other cultures by modern American standards. I even learned the word "heteronormative." I constantly had to talk about where I was from, and explain—sometimes inventing along the way—what it meant to be Mexican American, to grow up along the border, to be a Chicano. For me, this college experience wasn't exactly an awakening or a rebirth, the way I know it is for some, who are excited by the discovery of their own history, excited about learning who they really are. Those that feel like that aren't wrong to be excited, but neither were us kids in El Paso wrong not to be worried about our identity, to not care about what word anyone used to describe themselves. What I learned in college was that there was a strange and new division in our culture, between the educated middle-class Chicanos that cared about being called Chicanos and the rest of the community, that didn't think about it and didn't care much, for better or worse. What I realized was that the legacy of the Chicano Movement is now in the university. Scholarship has become one of the principal means by which the Movement ideals of inclusion, representation, and respect for the Chicano people are transmitted to young people. And it is a particular, academic version of the Movement that is being transmitted, going from professors with their PhDs and their academic concerns to college students trying their hardest for good grades and good careers. And so it is a version focused not on grassroots labor struggles, or on street protests and rebellion, or on seizures of political power that is put into students. Instead, it is one that centers on a quest for identity and that argues for the liberating power of information and research and facts. It could be the idea of changing policy through social science, or changing the professions by entering them. The goal, too, has changed. It is not simply increased Chicano rights, but broader ideas of diversity and women's liberation—important, of course, but not always central to...