An Ethnic Studies Evolution
A new generation of Mexican and Mexican-American students is turning
the tide of Chicana/o studies programs in unexpected new directions.
By Garry Boulard
As a student in the Chicana/o studies program at the University of Texas at El Paso, Jesse S. Arrieta decided that her classroom instruction about the culture and history of people of Mexican origin wasn’t enough.
“For me, what I was studying and reading never truly resonated until I went into the community,” says Arrieta, 27, who graduated from UTEP in 2002 before earning a master’s in American history from the University of California, Irvine. As part of her undergraduate honors thesis, Arrieta interviewed Mexican-American women who had been involved in labor organizing in the 1960s and beyond. She did nearly the same thing after moving on to graduate school in California. There, she talked to Mexican-American women who were active in the Bus Riders Union, a group dedicated to promoting public transportation for low-income people in the Los Angeles area. That project would ultimately become her master’s thesis.
Arrieta, now teaching U.S. history in UTEP’s Chicana/o studies program, says her goal was twofold in both cases. She wanted to “find a place for such stories within the larger context of Chicano studies,” while also doing what she could to “alter perceptions that these types of programs are mostly masculine in their focus.”
