By Latino Impact / EFE ~ September 9, 2019
The Chicano Studies university subject, door for the dissemination of the Chicano culture of Los Angeles and the basis of Mexican influence in the country, turns 50 this 2019.
The Chicano Studies university subject, door for the dissemination of the Chicano culture of Los Angeles and the basis of Mexican influence in the country, turns 50 this 2019 and seeks to expand to Latin America.
“These issues should also be taught in Mexico and other Latin American countries,” said academician Armando Vázquez-Ramos, a professor at California State University in Long Beach, on Monday.
Vázquez-Ramos believes that it is very important to show in the Latin American countries the relevance that their communities have had in the United States.
“It is the critical point, it is the flag I am planting in Mexico to challenge our academics and our students and institutions, both of the Government and of education,” Vázquez Ramos said in an interview.
The academic recalled that, of the 60 million Latinos living in the United States, 40 million are of Mexican origin. “It is a quarter of the Mexican population in the world,” he noted.
“There is a lack of knowledge of what this human capital with Mexican roots represents for everyone and it is not just about the remittances we send to the country,” said the professor, who also chairs and directs the California-Mexico Studies Center.
For this reason, Vázquez-Ramos has been one of the main leaders in celebrating the half century of the creation of the subject about Chicanos in the United States (dating back to the fall of 1969), date that will have an international conference in Tijuana , Mexico, between October 10 and 12.
The event was convened by CMSC in conjunction with El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, the California State University in San Diego and the Tijuana Cultural Center. The objective is to gather “scholars from both sides of the border and define what follows in the next 50 years”.
“This is not a party, it is a call, a call to wake up, because we have fallen asleep. In the Chicano Studies sector there is no social movement to expand it as it deserves when reaching this huge amount of 60 million Latinos,” he claimed the educator, known among his students as “the teacher Armando”.
For Vázquez-Ramos, the Chicano movement in the 1960s, when it emerged, achieved not only recognition and openness for this group, but also produced a “appeasement” between subsequent generations.
“It has had, in addition to the result of integration, the appeasement of those who did not fight to create this career in the academic sector,” he explained.
“They are already second, third, fourth generation of teachers who have never built; they have inherited positions in the classroom or among administrative staff and we have decades of being appeased, repressed,” criticized the expert.
In addition, although these courses focus on the analysis of social, political or economic functions of Chicanos in the United States, “they have no historical connection to the origin of migration.”
“It is a ‘wall of knowledge’ that we ourselves have created and that we have to break and connect with sources of knowledge and analysis in our countries of origin,” says the professor.
In 1969, when the first Chicano Studies courses in California began, Vázquez-Ramos participated as a student and activist at Cal State Long Beach.
As the founder of CMSC recalled, the curriculum of these first courses emerged in April 1969 as part of the Santa Barbara Plan, where student leaders “and a few professors and administrative” Chicanos pledged to start these programs at their universities.
In this way, Cal State Long Beach and other academic centers established in the autumn of that year the first courses to know the characteristics of those who were part of the Chicano Movement, which called for equal rights and opportunities for Mexicans in the US.
The coming October conference is an important step to open the way for the dissemination of what the Latin presence in this country has meant in the last five decades, says Vázquez-Ramos.
“I am very optimistic, I think we have never had better conditions and it is time, 50 years later. Mexico has the responsibility to know and appreciate better that we are an important human capital,” says the professor.
Source: Impacto Latino
