Hispanic Heritage Month

Carmen Lomas Garza revisits the people and places of her youth and describes growing up in a Mexican American family in Kingsville, Texas, her experiences with the Chicano movement, and the theme of family, community, and cultural identity in her paintings.

Luis Valdez is the celebrated founder of the Teatro Campesino, the West Coast theatrical group that has given voice to the struggles of Chicano farm workers. As a child, Valdez picked fruit alongside his father in California's fertile valleys. In this program, he describes how he overcame the handicaps of migrant life to become a playwright and director, and explains how his plays retrace the experiences of Chicano families as they contend with the adversities of rural life or the equally squalid and deprived circumstances of life in the city.

Rooted in the post World War II era, a time when car ownership became one of the key components of the "American Dream" myth, the James Dean-inspired rebels "without a cause" of young White America rose their hot-rods off the ground and enhanced their speed. Echoing the greater push for economic efficiency, speed, and competition in the U.S., fast food drive-ins and fast-car drag races became symbolic features of hot-rod culture. For hot-rodders, the fastest car came out on top. Chicanos, on the other hand, refused this mainstream need-for-speed. With their chin up, their y que! (so what!) facial expression, and their carefully slicked-back hair, Chicanos cruised the concrete streets low and slow. Under warm California sunrays, Chicanos' candy-painted, gold-spoked lowriders dropped jaws and turned heads. Lowriders were not fast and competitive; they were slow and visible. Lowcura takes us on a ride into the present-day Bay Area's lowriding scene from the passenger seat of the Padrinos Car Club's lowriders. Through the lens of a car club member's younger sister, the passenger and filmmaker, we see the Padrinos' lowriders as mobile murals for the concrete streets to see. But once the ignitions are off and the lowriders are parked, we are introduced to a 30 year-old legacy of a brotherhood--or a second family--created in the streets of San Francisco. As lowriding has spread globally to places such as Japan and Brazil, the film provides a window into the ways in which the lowriding movement is always rooted in friendships, hometown pride, and, of course, the love of cruising.

The film confronts the accordion music of Chicano immigrants in southern Texas with the traditional music of accordion players in Austria. Without making any final judgments on the 'roots' of 'conjunto' music of the Chicanos, the film is able to reveal the different claims to ethnic identity. Most interestingly, Chicanos in Mexico and Texas and Austrians comment upon each others' way of playing Polka.The film confronts the accordion music of Chicano immigrants in southern Texas with the traditional music of accordion players in Austria. Without making any final judgments on the roots of conjunto music of the Chicanos, the film is able to reveal the different claims to ethnic identity. Most interestingly, Chicanos in Mexico and Texas and Austrians comment upon each others way of playing Polka.

Dubbed "King Tiger" and "the Malcolm X of the Chicano Movement," Reies López Tijerina inspired Mexican-American college students of the late 1960s and early 1970s to start the Chicano Civil Rights Movement that stressed ethnic pride, ethnic studies, and opposition to police brutality. The Chicano movement eventually faded away, but at the time of the production of this film, King Tiger was alive, living in Mexico, and wanting to tell his story.

Illuminating the untold stories of the Chican@ Movement, with a focus on events in Colorado and New Mexico, the film engages student activism, police repression, and issues of identity, land, and community which still resonate in Chican@ struggles today. Through interviews with those who shaped the movement and rare historical footage, the film offers a window into a dynamic moment in history.

In the 1960s and 1970s a generation of Mexican Americans find a new way forward, through social action and the building of a new "Chicano" identity. The movement is ignited when farm workers, led by César Chavez and Dolores Huerta, march on Sacramento. Through plays, poetry and film, Luis Valdez and activist Corky Gonzalez create a new appreciation of the long history of Mexicans in the South West. In Los Angeles, Sal Castro leads the largest high school student walkout in American history. In Texas, activists such as José Ángel Gutiérrez, create a new political party and change the rules of the electoral game. By the end of the 1970s Chicano activism and identity transformed what it meant to be an American.

In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles's Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city's Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on Main Str.

Introduction: Music as culture and as spectacle -- Music of the nineteenth century: An overview -- Vocal music of the twentieth century -- The Texas-Mexican conjunto -- The Orquesta Tejana -- Le Onda Chicana: Pinnacle of the Orquesta tradition -- Tejano: Music of the Post-Chicano Era -- Selected discography.

"A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the frontman of the 1970s experimental pop group Ruben and the Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer is an often hilarious and self-critical look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man. Recognizing racial identity as composite, contested, and complex, Guevara--an American artist of Mexican descent--embraces a Chicano identity of his own design, calling himself a Chicano 'culture sculptor' who has worked to transform the aspirations, alienations, and indignities of the Mexican American people into an aesthetic experience that could point the way to liberation"

This book provides a long-needed overview of the Chicana and Chicano movement's social history as it grew, flourished, and then slowly fragmented. The authors examine the movement's origins in the 1960s and 1970s, showing how it evolved from a variety of organizations and activities united in their quest for basic equities for Mexican Americans in U.S. society

One of the most famous leaders of the Chicano civil rights movement, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, was a multifaceted and charismatic, bigger-than-life hero who inspired his followers not only by taking direct political action but also by making eloquent speeches, writing incisive essays, and creating the kind of socially engaged poetry and drama that could be communicated easily throughout the barrios of Aztlan, the communities populated by Chicanos in the United States.""Gonzales is the author of I Am Joaquin, an epic poem of the Chicano Movement that lives on in film, sound recording, and hundreds of anthologies. Gonzales and other Chicanos established the Crusade for Justice, a Denver-based civil rights organization, school, and community center, in 1966. The school, La Escuela Tlatelolco, lives on today some three decades after its founding.""In Message to Aztlan, Dr. Antonio Esquibel, Professor Emeritus of Metropolitan State College of Denver, has compiled the first collection of Gonzales' diverse writings: the original I Am Joaquin (1967), along with a new Spanish translation; seven major speeches (1968-78); two plays, The Revolutionist and A Cross for Maclovio (1966-67); various poems written during the 1970s and a selection of letters. These varied works demonstrate the evolution of Gonzales' thought on human and civil rights. Any examination of the Chicano Movement is incomplete without this volume. An eight-page photo insert accompanies the text.