NATIONALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SOCIAL CHANGE: CHICANO INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES (CLASS, IDEOLOGY)

This study examines an important generation of Chicano intellectuals which emerged in the politically turbulent 1960s. It analyzes the relationship between the Chicano nationalist context and the work and views of this group of intellectuals. Nationalism produced positive identities and greater group solidarity, yet it had less desireable features. The nationalist movement created a coercive context which constrained serious social analyses and critique by these intellectuals.;The first period (1966 to 1972) was characterized by a strong ethnically or culturally nationalist milieu. This milieu formed in reaction to existing conditions, including treatments of Chicanos in the social scientific literature. The new nationalism and the corollary reactive social analyses had very important often negative, unanticipated consequences. Since the work of this intellectual group was developing from within this cultural nationalism, it often glorified and romanticized an ill-conceived Chicano culture. This reaction put serious social scholarship beyond the reach of these intellectuals. The boundary between cultural nationalist identity and social action, and rigorous social scholarship and analyses was often blurred.;In the second period (1973 to the present), cultural nationalism declined. With the nationalist demise and the "thick," restrictive context it created, other social possibilities emerged. Structural assimilation and political co-optation have been responses to increased social differentiation. However, serious scholarship and more thorough social analyses have also surfaced on a greater scale, as the distinctions between forms of nationalism and forms of professionalism have become clearer. New social, professional, and scholarly alternatives are now possible. However, this period has also seen an increase in the separation between Chicano intellectuals and "the larger Chicano community," making less clear in whose interests they now endeavor (e.g., in the name of scholarship, their own personal status and mobility, or the larger Chicano community). Consequently, their social consciousness and their role in social change have become less clear than in the first period (1966 to 1972).;Due to demographic and occupational changes which took place after 1950, the conditions were laid for the unprecedented emergence of a greatly expanded, younger corps of Chicano intellectuals. There were two major Chicano social movement periods: (1) the reactive/corrective (1966 to 1972), and (2) the active/creative (1973 to present).