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Chicano Manifesto
CHICANO MANIFESTO appeared in 1971 as the first book written by a Chicano to give expression to the spirit of a cultural revolution. The text is largely biographical because much of the history recorded in its pages was actually observed by the author. Many persons and events depicted here were captured only because the author was there as the movement evolved.
Perhaps the most disturbing truth that we now see from having Manifesto in our hands again is that so little has changed since those early urban marches, farmworker peregrinaciones, student confrontations with police and bureaucrats. Manifesto appears today at a time of intense racial fear and hatred toward Chicanos and Latinos in the United States. The racism, the rampant poverty, the school dropout rates, the joblessness, the despair are all still part of the Chicano reality. Reading Manifesto enlightens our understanding of what happened in the late Sixties and provides a starting point for realizing why these gaps still exist.
Manifesto still serves as a rallying cry for action, perhaps the only true clarion call from that era, because it is still unrelenting in its quest for the true Chicano and for the realization of the Chicano as clearly the most important person to the evolution of the peoples on the American continents. As the cover design suggests, the Chicano is the bridge between the Americas; already a composite of the cultures here, the Chicano embodies the vast diversity that the Americas have become.
What Manifesto suggests to all of us is the necessity for understanding the very foundations of our society; where the majority population has failed to understand the origins and aspirations of a people, the country has faltered. When it has recognized the value of its many peoples, America has prospered. The Chicano holds out that promise. As this book proclaims, the goal of the Chicano people is to fulfill its own promise and that of the nation it calls home.
Perhaps the most disturbing truth that we now see from having Manifesto in our hands again is that so little has changed since those early urban marches, farmworker peregrinaciones, student confrontations with police and bureaucrats. Manifesto appears today at a time of intense racial fear and hatred toward Chicanos and Latinos in the United States. The racism, the rampant poverty, the school dropout rates, the joblessness, the despair are all still part of the Chicano reality. Reading Manifesto enlightens our understanding of what happened in the late Sixties and provides a starting point for realizing why these gaps still exist.
Manifesto still serves as a rallying cry for action, perhaps the only true clarion call from that era, because it is still unrelenting in its quest for the true Chicano and for the realization of the Chicano as clearly the most important person to the evolution of the peoples on the American continents. As the cover design suggests, the Chicano is the bridge between the Americas; already a composite of the cultures here, the Chicano embodies the vast diversity that the Americas have become.
What Manifesto suggests to all of us is the necessity for understanding the very foundations of our society; where the majority population has failed to understand the origins and aspirations of a people, the country has faltered. When it has recognized the value of its many peoples, America has prospered. The Chicano holds out that promise. As this book proclaims, the goal of the Chicano people is to fulfill its own promise and that of the nation it calls home.
329 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 24, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 31, 2020
This book kept me in school.
I was a junior in college in the 90s and after American Lit one, two, three, American Short Story, American Novel, I had to ask. “Why aren’t there Indigenous or Mexican American writing included in these classes?” My favorite professor told me we read “Sonny’s Blues”. Baldwin is African American and that was the only Black story we read. We argued. I said “Are you telling me Bret Hart and the long section on Sage Brush Fiction is more important to know than Anzaldua or Cisneros? He told me to go to the Spanish department, which of course, only taught literature in Spanish, most Indigenous and Chicano lit is in English, or the Ethnic Studies department, which wasn’t a solution and wasn’t offering anything like Chicano literature at the time.
The realization that the book lists and the resistance to alter them was the system. I would have to play a game and erase myself and my ideas and my idea that Indigenous and Chicano people had worthy stories if I wanted to graduate and if I wanted to continue that education. I would have to concede my family was less. The academic system came at me in other ways so much that I was going to quit school rather than study literature that insistent on monocultural value, that it was erasure and Heart of Darkness’s “dogs in pants” or nothing. I went through the motions and thought of vocations I could try. There was not one bit of native or Chicano history in our own voices that didn’t damn us I had encountered in school. What could I or anyone do? Since I was leaving school, I went to the library to check books out while I could. Chicano Manifesto was on the shelf. It gave me the history, sociology, and validation I needed. Moreover, it gave me a plan—stay in school and help each other. The system is built to be against you, but we can build ourselves and resist. I stayed and I’ve tried. (And I’m not saying if I returned the books).
There were Chicano scholars before this, Chicano history books, you could argue that a Mexican in an American context in this land fitting the bill would be Juan Bautista Alvarado reciting Californio history in the late 19th century to Bancroft who didn’t give him credit could be the first. Chicano Manifesto was live Chicano history during the movement. It was handed out in meetings and people were told to read this. It remains a modern guide to help know what was going on, where we were, and where we could go and to know ourselves.
I was a junior in college in the 90s and after American Lit one, two, three, American Short Story, American Novel, I had to ask. “Why aren’t there Indigenous or Mexican American writing included in these classes?” My favorite professor told me we read “Sonny’s Blues”. Baldwin is African American and that was the only Black story we read. We argued. I said “Are you telling me Bret Hart and the long section on Sage Brush Fiction is more important to know than Anzaldua or Cisneros? He told me to go to the Spanish department, which of course, only taught literature in Spanish, most Indigenous and Chicano lit is in English, or the Ethnic Studies department, which wasn’t a solution and wasn’t offering anything like Chicano literature at the time.
The realization that the book lists and the resistance to alter them was the system. I would have to play a game and erase myself and my ideas and my idea that Indigenous and Chicano people had worthy stories if I wanted to graduate and if I wanted to continue that education. I would have to concede my family was less. The academic system came at me in other ways so much that I was going to quit school rather than study literature that insistent on monocultural value, that it was erasure and Heart of Darkness’s “dogs in pants” or nothing. I went through the motions and thought of vocations I could try. There was not one bit of native or Chicano history in our own voices that didn’t damn us I had encountered in school. What could I or anyone do? Since I was leaving school, I went to the library to check books out while I could. Chicano Manifesto was on the shelf. It gave me the history, sociology, and validation I needed. Moreover, it gave me a plan—stay in school and help each other. The system is built to be against you, but we can build ourselves and resist. I stayed and I’ve tried. (And I’m not saying if I returned the books).
There were Chicano scholars before this, Chicano history books, you could argue that a Mexican in an American context in this land fitting the bill would be Juan Bautista Alvarado reciting Californio history in the late 19th century to Bancroft who didn’t give him credit could be the first. Chicano Manifesto was live Chicano history during the movement. It was handed out in meetings and people were told to read this. It remains a modern guide to help know what was going on, where we were, and where we could go and to know ourselves.
November 28, 2023
Part Mein Kampf, part communist manifesto this is a delusional liberal Mexican Americans dream. Racist, delusional, immature at times with thoughts of not saving the world but controlling it. Please stay away. Raise your kids to reject this trash.
December 29, 2016
I bought Armando B. Rendón's Chicano Manifesto (1971) hoping to better understand why, when and how the Chicana liberation movement came to distance itself from the Chicano movement. The book genuinely failed to meet my expectations. What I discovered in fact, under some reviewer's promise of it being "the first book written by a Chicano to give vibrant expression to the spirit of a cultural revolution", was a book of hatred, propaganda and semi-misogyny. http://dealulcudor.blogspot.ro/2016/1...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews