Focused on “Chican@ Movement(s),” Becoming La Raza: Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s) enhances our understanding of what, for some scholars, have become familiar rhetorical texts. Emphasizing their nuances, situatedness, and reproductions while introducing other critical texts that rhetoric scholars have missed or ignored altogether, José Izaguirre makes a compelling case for recognizing how the racial project of becoming La Raza emerged from the uneasy alliances, conflicts, ruptures, identities, and messaging of multiple movements. Resisting the tendency to treat the movement in singular, static terms, as is often done, Becoming La Raza is valuable to social movement scholars writ large. Readers will be rewarded with rich case studies of communication with external audiences, individual versus collective credit given to “authors” of texts, the role of reproductions of artifacts and how they facilitate the needs of particular audiences, debates over when violence is justified, how the media portrays marginalized identities, and much more. The book holds value, as well, for scholars of Latina/o/e studies, Chicana/o/e studies, rhetoric, communication studies, visual rhetoric, public memory, archival studies, and cultural studies. In what follows, I highlight its themes and explore generative areas that remain for further analysis.The account of Chican@ movements in Becoming La Raza begins with a compelling theoretical and historiographic intervention: the decentering of César Chávez, an important Chicano figure who went on hunger strikes as part of his nonviolent activism. He and a handful of other Latinos often operate as tokenistic figures of Chican@ movements. For many rhetoric scholars, Chávez is the center of the Chican@ movement: he delivers speeches, establishes nonviolent principles for the movement, creates the National Farm Workers Association, writes El plan de Delano, and then becomes the Latin civil rights representative. Izaguirre ruptures this narrative by informing readers of important correctives, for example, that Chávez was not the sole author of the plan and that “not all activists agreed . . . with Chávez’s assessment of the potency and appropriateness of nonviolence for Mexican American politics” (1). The Chican@ movement, Izaguirre argues, ought to be understood in pluralistic terms, for, while it may be “useful and even necessary, an emphasis on singular actors inadvertently flattens a Mexican American movement that was as stochastic as it was upheld by popular individuals” (4).Becoming La Raza begins with Chavez’s 1968 speech, moves on to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, then adopts a more chronological account of events primarily between 1965 and 1970. This ordering enables Izaguirre to draw readers in with a familiar face before challenging their acceptance of this rendering of the movement. Becoming La Raza challenges how rhetoric scholars have similarly accepted renderings of the movement as it “contrasts largely with rhetorical histories presented by the two prominent voices of Chican@ movement histories in rhetoric and those following their path: John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen”: “These two, more than any other rhetorical historians, have not only seemingly drowned out contemporary studies of Mexican American rhetorics, particularly Chican@ movement rhetorics, but have been allowed to dominate conversations regarding the writing of Mexican American rhetorical histories and those of other ‘ethnic minorities’” (19). This critique resonates with contemporary claims by other Latine scholars that the discipline’s tendency to tokenize Latine activists and scholars is limiting, “both in terms of expanding our collective imaginaries, and in foreclosing coalition across Latine races, cultures, ethnicities, and diasporas” (Baugh-Harris and Martínez 2025, 2).The discussion in Becoming La Raza is divided among aesthetic and poetic qualities that serve as the foundations for the chapters, including de/colonial, apathy, ambivalence, relationality, otherwise, and deferral. Chapter 1, “The De/Colonial Aesthetic,” points to the “appreciation and use of a variety of linguistic, Indigenous, religious, and corporeal signs typically associated with being ‘not-white’ or ‘not-Black’ that, at the same time, had been targeted for purging from the public sphere” (25). Chapter 2, “A Poetics of Apathy,” conceives of apathy not as lacking emotion but rather as “a decision to care less about something and, perhaps, care more about something else” (50). Chapter 3, “A Poetics of Ambivalence,” focuses on the “temporal” and “linguistic” structural features of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquin: An Epic Poem” to illustrate how “ambivalence might be a consequence of violence, but . . . is also a sign and harbinger of survival” (93). Chapter 4, “A Poetics of Relationality,” illustrates how the movement(s)’ leveraging of the newspaper El grito del norte articulated a testimonio to the disproportionate death of Chicanos in the Vietnam War and transformed the movement into one that emphasized Latine solidarity and was “hemispheric in scope” (116). In Chapter 5, “A Poetics Otherwise,” Izaguirre points to the multiple renderings and reproductions of El plan espiritual de Aztlán as a means to “understand how it exemplified the negotiation of global and local dimensions associated with parallel and oppositional racial project(s)” (123). Chapter 6, “A Poetics of Deferral,” offers a historical corrective by analyzing a document that has often been left out of rhetorical histories of the movement: a 1970 special issue of the magazine La raza about police violence at a peaceful Chican@ rally.A major strength of Izaguirre’s work is the sheer number of archival documents it engages; it does the work of archiving as much as it describes and interprets the artifacts. By seeing the documents in this way, scholars interested in these movements benefit from the placement of the texts via chronological and thematic associations. Archives covered include the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (which includes United Farm Workers of America artifacts), the Independent Voices Collection, the University of California at San Diego Library’s Farm Worker Movement Documentation Project, the University of California at Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, the Denver Public Library, and the Special Collections and University Archives at the San Diego State University Library. Securing permission to reproduce such works as the newspapers La verdad, Bronce, El grito del norte, and El gallo, the newspaper and magazine La raza, the Farm Worker Press’s photobook Basta! La historia de nuestra lucha (1966), the writings of the Chicano poet Alurista, and materials from the Gonzales family and the United Farm Workers of America, among others, provides insight into the labor that went into weaving together this monograph. Then there is also the back-and-forth typically required by book publishers when securing rights for images, which limits the number of illustrations found in books such as this one. Conducting a historiography via available fragments of discourse is tedious work, and having thirty-one illustrations is no small feat.The book, nonetheless, left me with questions regarding a number of its central claims. None of these negate the contributions or value of the book, but nonetheless they warrant discussion. First, the book replicates the impetus scholars often feel to coin new terms. Though there is value to these rhetorical inventions, there is the risk of erasure and reinvention. For example, though the notion of a “de/colonial” aesthetic is valuable for drawing our attention to the de/colonial tensions in operation within Chican@ vernacular discourses and contexts, no connection is made to other existing provocative concepts: no reference to Fanon’s Black Skin/White Masks (1952) or Eagleton’s (1990) notion of the double-edged sword of aesthetics and limited engagement with Anzaldúa’s (1987) notion of borderlands (but none of her more evocative concepts, such as nepantla). What, for instance, might we have learned about the politics of whiteness embedded in Latinidad if our theoretical apparatus engaged with transnational de/colonial scholars within and outside the United States? Likewise, there is a relative absence of Chicana activists and theorists. Indeed, Chicanas appear almost exclusively in chapter 4, and Izaguirre sometimes positions them in opposition to one another, as when he argues that El grito del norte presaged “the Third-World feminism of women activists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and others who followed in the 1970s and 1980s” by publicizing “a relational notion of La Raza that included . . . communities of color facing similar racial violence(s) across the globe” (109). Though this is a fair point, it is an odd one to make within the context of the paragraph, which is about the de/colonial contributions of El grito del norte. These two points contribute to my other critique, which is that the book understandably centers Mexican American voices but makes claims that extend beyond the imagined body politic of Chican@s. There is, for example, little engagement with antiblackness or the experiences of Afro-Latinos. More support is necessary, likewise, for the claim that Chican@ operated as an inclusive hemispheric identity that may not be the norm. Though these may seem minor points—and, to be clear, the book is compelling on many points—these shortcomings mitigate the overall claim that the Chican@ movement offers us a compelling case study for how to “resist and repel the influence of systematic whiteness in our politics” (193). Scholars such as Raquel Moreira (2025) posit the importance of critiquing the racial logic of mestiza consciousness, Lisa B. Y. Calvente (2025) illustrates the antiblackness of Latinx subjectivity, and Eva Margarita (2025) traces how the colonial roots of the census serve as an obituary for the Afro-Latinx subject.These criticisms notwithstanding, Becoming La Raza provides a valuable perspective that is generative in nature, whether by inviting scholars to examine the archival homes of the materials discussed, doing more research on taken-for-granted “truths” about Chican@ and other movements, or considering how aesthetic readings of artifacts provide nuanced insights and readings of social movements. Scholars will benefit from these discussions in their own work and graduate classes.
Diana Isabel Martínez (Mon,) studied this question.