Mexico City
A thousand Chicana and Chicano scholars came to this
ancient Aztec capital in June, as participants in The National
Association of Chicana and Chicago Scholars’ (NACCS) annual meeting, to
ponder the future of their discipline and to become reacquainted with
Mexico.
For Estevan Flores, director of the Latino/a Research and Policy
Center at the University of Colorado-Denver, simply having the
conference in Mexico was important because many of the students and
scholars participating had never been to the country.
“It was great to be meeting in buildings that existed even before
there was a United States,” says Dr. Julia Curry, a University of
California-Berkeley professor and head of the NACCS program.
This year, the struggle in Chiapas was foremost in the minds of
many scholars who attended. However, another primary concern was the
brewing conflict at home about the future of ethnic studies programs,
particularly Chicano/Chicana studies. University of California Regent
Ward Connerly recently called for a review of ethnic studies, with an
eye toward eliminating the discipline.
“Do we have the will to fight?,” asks Dr. Adaliza Sosa-Riddell, a
member of the faculty in the Chicano Studies Department at U.C.-Davis.
“Chicano studies is one of our lasting legacies [from the civil rights
movement]. Everything else has been squashed. It’s the last vestige
that has any meaning.”
The NACCS has sent a resolution to the University of California
Regents, according to Flores, stating that the association considers
Connerly’s statements an assault on academic freedom.
