Becoming la raza: Chican@ counterpublicity and rhetorics of the Viet Nam War

This study supplies a rhetorical history of Chican@ movement discourse(s) positing racial otherness through the language of “la raza” in the United States during the Viet Nam War. Racial discourse(s) advancing notions of La Raza were circulated, amplified, stretched, and even resisted among Chican@ movement activists at the end of the 1960s. I call these racial discourses associated with the Chican@ movement raza rhetorics. In this study, I define raza rhetorics as Chican@ movement vernacular discourses that eschewed and disentangled the effects of institutionalized whiteness from the aesthetics of Mexican American politics by (re)inventing a racialized public identity: La Raza. Reproduced, circulated, amplified, and visualized in Chican@ counterpublic spaces, where resistance to dominant and hegemonic discourse(s) undergirding political life occurs in earnest, raza rhetorics proliferated across the Southwest United States at the end of the 1960s as a coincident feature of Chican@ movement. My interest in these raza rhetorics lies particularly in their poetics, the re-presentational praxis of these discourse(s) cultivating racial formation(s), fomenting racial division(s), and activating Mexican Americans politically along racial lines in the latter 1960s. In this study, I propose a rhetorical history of raza rhetorics circulating in and around Colorado, New Mexico, and California from 1967 to 1970, and, from my analysis, I conclude that raza rhetorics were a diverse and multiplicitous form of Chican@ movement vernacular discourse that compelled and forwarded aesthetic alternatives for Mexican American public affairs other than those imposed in and through institutionalized whiteness.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Izaguirre III, Jose G.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cisneros, Josue D.
• Finnegan, Cara A.
• Murphy, John M.
• O'Gorman, Ned
• Romero, Rolando J.

• la raza, Latin@ vernacular discourse, Chican@ movement, rhetorical history, social movement rhetoric

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2020 José G. Izaguirre III

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108666

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/108666