Becoming la raza: Chican@ counterpublicity and rhetorics of the Viet Nam War
Izaguirre III, Jose G.
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108666
Description
Title
Becoming la raza: Chican@ counterpublicity and rhetorics of the Viet Nam War
Author(s)
Izaguirre III, Jose G.
Issue Date
2020-07-10
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Cisneros, Josue D.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Cisneros, Josue D.
Committee Member(s)
Finnegan, Cara A.
Murphy, John M.
O'Gorman, Ned
Romero, Rolando J.
Department of Study
Communication
Discipline
Communication
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
la raza, Latin@ vernacular discourse, Chican@ movement, rhetorical history, social movement rhetoric
Abstract
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.
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