| The dissertation examines the Movement's close, if albeit complicated, relationship to the postwar American university, tracing the latter's impact on the formation of a widely influential counterculture among Chicano students, intellectuals, and artists. Combining archival study, close literary analysis, and political theory, I read a wide range of Chicano Movement documents, both canonical and non-canonical, in light of the period's contentious debates over the radicalization and redefinition of the new pluralist university. "I recognize [it] as academic," Tomas Rivera says in 1978 of the Chicano Movement, a movimiento "which begins in the universities during the last years of the decade of the 1960s." By the first half of the 1970s, nearly every prominent Chicano writer and poet held an academic position, and universities became the locus for the production, distribution, and consumption of Chicana/o identity and culture via aesthetic texts. My contention is that the political, intellectual, and cultural politics of the Movement largely coalesced within the walls of the university, a fact which carries important consequences for the development of Chicano radicalism, literature, and pedagogy. As Bill Readings observes, the post-1960s shift from Fordist to flexible, neoliberalized global regimes of capitalist accumulation divested the research university of its original social mission, namely to consolidate a unitary national culture and citizenry. Chicano counterculture, I argue, offered one set of coordinates with which to re-map the cultural center of the pluralist university and ultimately helped to translate Movement politics into terms readily exchangeable and consumable within academia and beyond. Despite serious reservations about U.S. higher education, el Movimiento eventually turned to the university in general and Chicano Studies in particular as the principal means by which to promote an emancipatory pedagogy and political practice based on a countercultural conception of Chicano tradition, community, and self-identity. "Cultivating Aztlan" explores the fateful ramifications of this commitment, and the ways in which the university ultimately sponsored a Chicano counterculture that held in abeyance the political, social, and class tensions perennially threatening to unsettle the Movement's precarious residence and aspirations in higher education. |
