Latina/o Studies

Research and Writing

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact age of Latino Studies. If we include memoirs from the Mexican-American War and the second half of the 19th century, for example, Chicano Studies is roughly 150 years old. During the early 1900s, labor economist Paul Taylor conducted research on Mexican Americans in the Southwest and other locales, including Chicago, where Robert Redfield, the noted anthropologist, conducted fieldwork on Mexican colonias during the 1920s. The work of Mexican archaeologist Manuel Gamio during the 1930s on the migration to and work in the United States by Mexican immigrants also contributed to this nascent body of research, as did the work of folklorist Aurelio Espinosa, Jr. in New Mexico and Colorado during the first half of the 20th century. George I. Sánchez made important contributions, both as a scholar and as an activist, in the area of Mexican Americans and education.

Sociologist Julian Samora conducted pioneering work in Mexican American Studies and participated in the creation of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project. As a professor at Notre Dame University, he created the Mexican Border Studies Project and mentored generations of Latino graduate students. He wrote several books, but perhaps the best known is his classic Los Mojados: The Wetback Story. The Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University was named in his honor.

Perhaps no scholar is linked more closely to the genesis of Chicano or Mexican American Studies than Américo Paredes, an English and anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His contributions to the Latino Studies literature, including his groundbreaking book With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, and to the creation of Latino Studies programs were enormous. He cofounded the Center for Intercultural Studies of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 1967 and fought to create a Mexican American Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin a few years later.

Other trailblazers in the creation and development of Chicano Studies included Rodolfo Acuña, Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Jesús Chavarria, Tomás Rivera, and Luis Leal. Other Latino Studies programs had their own trailblazers, including Frank Bonilla and Juan Flores in Puerto Rican Studies; Ruth Behar, Lisandro Perez, Alejandro Portes, Silvia Pedraza, and Eliana Rivero in Cuban Studies; and Silvio Torres-Saillant, Ramona Hernández, Sherri Grasmuck, and Patricia R. Pessar in Dominican Studies.

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