A comprehensive study of an ethnic political movement.

Clearly, Ignacio M. Garcia has written a sympathetic history of the movement, critically describing conditions of the sixties and seventies and clarifying the outstanding issues and personalities in the Mexican American community of the Southwest. . . Garcia's passionate and insightful contribution cannot be overlooked as a source of factual information and analysis.—New Mexico Historical Review "Garcia's history of La Raza Unida party is a labor of love."—Journal of the Southwest "This book is an insightful, intensive, and interesting report on the origin, development, and demise of the 'party of the united people.' . . . The author['s] most noteworthy contribution may well be in the richness of the details of the party's history and in providing these documented dates, figures, personalities, and events as no one else has or perhaps can." —Southwestern Historical Quarterly "This book is must reading for students of the Chicano-Hispanic community, especially those living in the southwestern U.S. and in the larger cities throughout our country. For this piece of Chicano history is essential to understanding this most important section of our multi-cultural, multi-national U.S. working class." —People's Weekly World

¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale—in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, commonly known as CASA. Chávez examines and chronicles the ideas and tactics of the insurgency's leaders and their followers who, while differing in their goals and tactics, nonetheless came together as Chicanos and reformers. Deftly combining personal recollection and interviews of movement participants with an array of archival, newspaper, and secondary sources, Chávez provides an absorbing account of the events that constituted the Los Angeles-based Chicano movement. At the same time he offers insights into the emergence and the fate of the movement elsewhere. He presents a critical analysis of the concept of Chicano nationalism, an idea shared by all leaders of the insurgency, and places it within a larger global and comparative framework. Examining such variables as gender, class, age, and power relationships, this book offers a sophisticated consideration of how ethnic nationalism and identity functioned in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

In The Chicano Generation, veteran Chicano civil rights scholar Mario T. García provides a rare look inside the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as they unfolded in Los Angeles. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with three key activists, this book illuminates the lives of Raul Ruiz, Gloria Arellanes, and Rosalio Muñoz—their family histories and widely divergent backgrounds; the events surrounding their growing consciousness as Chicanos; the sexism encountered by Arellanes; and the aftermath of their political histories. In his substantial introduction, García situates the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and contextualizes activism within the largest civil rights and empowerment struggle by Mexican Americans in US history—a struggle that featured César Chávez and the farm workers, the student movement highlighted by the 1968 LA school blowouts, the Chicano antiwar movement, the organization of La Raza Unida Party, the Chicana feminist movement, the organizing of undocumented workers, and the Chicano Renaissance. Weaving this revolution against a backdrop of historic Mexican American activism from the 1930s to the 1960s and the contemporary black power and black civil rights movements, García gives readers the best representations of the Chicano generation in Los Angeles.