I recently found out where UC Irvine was located at, next to some creek and on the edge of some rolling hills. Can't say I was really impressed, rather disappointed as I expected something like UCLA's architecture that made you believe you were seeing something ancient or at least well kept up.
Fortunately with a handicap pass as I now chauffuer a person with health issues, I was able to park closely to the bookstore and peaked at their Chicano Studies books and was I disappointed. Actually I began my disappointment in the Spanish section and realized those professors were using similar books I had to read back in the late 80's while at USC. No innovation in their book collection. I'm not sure I would pay big money again to read books about the Mexican Revolution or others from Spain. You would think there would be a better collection considering the population of generic Spanish speaking countries is quite high. I know their Spanish is all different but it seems much like the Chicano movement activists or artists who seem to be the same five people always competing. Here they were the same five books.
Then I moved to the Chicano Studies section and out of 10 authors, 8 were immigrant authors from Mexico. One was interesting about the Mexican American race formation while the other one was from my former boss Graciela Limon but still based on the immigrant Mexico. To be honest, I am tired about the immigrant Mexican infiltrating Mexican American Studies. Can't they tell there is a difference? Mexican Americans are born in the US, northern people. Immigrant Mexicans are not and maybe I would be sympathetic if they were border people from northern people because they would be in the terrain of the deserts but not these people who move from Zacatecas, Jalisco, Guerrero, Colima, Michoacan that are not even desert lands.
They act like they are the first ones here and no other Mexicans were present before they stepped foot on Mexican American realm. It's like if they show up to Mexicali on the Baja side and write their narrative as if nobody else was living there. They do bother me as they lament their immigrant narrative onto the rest of us. Why don't they write about their culture shock in Mexico of moving to a region they are not from even within Mexico?
It bothers me to see that the weak intellegentsia believe that the Chicano narrative is undocumented or foreign and for us born here, the word Chicano only referred to Mexican Americans and nobody else. What don't they understand that there is a difference between people born 1300 miles south to somebody born in California? We are not the same and neither are my children who are Apaches so far back that their descendents cannot be traced to anywhere other than the US. And if that is what is being taught I rather my children not learn that immigrant narrative which has nothing to do with them.
I left disgusted.
