Latino Perspectives

Evolving Perspectives, Evolving Histories

Latino perspectives on communication are engendered by the social situations of the theorists and the social location of Latinas/os at any given time. Early 20th-century work borrowed from the modernist projects of progress hegemonic in the United States. For instance, Emma Tenayuca, an activist and theorist writing during the 1930s and 1940s, put forward an eminently American take on Marxism and culture. Her work attempted to understand the intrinsic ambivalence of being culturally bound to Mexico and yet part of the United States. She argued that the American annexation of the Southwest could be seen as a progressive historical event if Anglo America invested in the modernization and progress of Mexican Americans.

Similar concerns are evident in the work of George I. Sanchez, perhaps the most visible of the Latino theorists of the 1950s. Sanchez was committed to understanding and subverting what he saw was the systematic disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. In his liberal, modernist proposals, Sanchez argued that the potential of Mexican Americans to become part of mainstream society was tarnished by unjust cultural, educational, and political structures. A strong believer in education, Sanchez argued for equal funding in public schools and for bilingual education. He argued that with the proper schooling, Mexican Americans could become acculturated to the point of joining the rest of U.S. society without losing cultural specificity.

Both Sanchez and Tenayuca placed language and acculturation to Anglo America as central kernels of Latinas/os' prospects for equality. In the 1960s and 1970s, these issues were taken on by Latino theorists such as Americo Paredes and cultural producers like Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and Luis Valdez. However, instead of imagining that equality would be the product of linguistic and cultural assimilation, these Latino intellectuals took multiculturalism and bilingualism as social facts that Anglo America would have to accept. Teatro Campesino, initiated by Valdez, was appropriately bilingual, pluri-ethnic, and assumed an audience with equal cultural capital. Paredes's work problematized border life by highlighting the difficulties of intercultural communication because of language, ethnic, and cultural differences between Latinas/os and Anglos in the Southwest.

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