^aUniversity of California, San Diego, CA

¹Although I use the term "Chicana/o" because it is commonly accepted in the field, I agree with the critique raised by Chela Sandoval when she employs the term "Chicana@" in its place. Sandoval explains that the "@" is meant to politicize the term "Chicano" or "Chicana/o" to embody the "re-gendering," "matrixing, trans-ing, and de-compartmentalizing" of the knowledges we call Chicano Studies, thus helping cultivate "a politics that not only seeks to understand race, colonial, and social powers in the Americas, but also – as indicated by the @ – represents a transdisciplinary recognition of gender and sexual difference." I similarly understand the terms "Latina/o," "Filipina/o," etc. See Davalos et al. (2002).

Abstract

This article traces cultural exchange between Chicana/o and Latina/o, African American, and Asian American youth since World War II, including analyses of zoot suit, civil rights movement art, and hip hop cultures. Drawing on theories of zapatismo as critical cultural practice, I explore how the cultural poetics of racialized youth functioned as a struggle for dignity. Rather than dismiss different youth cultures as too disjointed for any kind of productive dialog, I propose that we listen to what each might teach us about addressing crises of resources and domination in the academy. If Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Ethnic Studies are at crossroads in how they respond to increased funding cutbacks, battles over affirmative action, and the intellectual saliency of "new" fields like Borderlands Studies, I argue that a relational approach to Chicana/o youth culture provides clues to retool the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical arsenal of these fields to regenerate them as a site of social struggle.