Eastside Imaginaries: Towards a Relational and Transnational Chicana/o Cultural History

• In Event: Latino/a Crossings: Towards a Relational Understanding of Latin@ Pluralities in the United States and Beyond.

Abstract

Drawing on examples from L.A.’s Eastside, this paper examines the history of relational and transnational impulses in Chicana/o culture since World War II. It shows there was a postwar stream of Chicana/o cultural politics determined less by racial or territorial logic than by multi-racial and hemispheric, even global, social and political currents. With its diverse and iconic history, East L.A. may seem an obvious place to make such a case. Perhaps less obviously, I focus on the production of Chicana/o culture by those who were not Mexican American. I consider, for instance, the role of a Jew in the 1950s Eastside music scene, a Puerto Rican-Hungarian in Movimiento era TV, and a Japanese in the more recent globalization of Chicana/o music. More than historical oddities, these figures reveal the racial and geographic crossings of Chicanas/os and their cultural politics. They underscore how postwar consumerism and commercialized leisure served as incubators for oppositional memory and utopian hopes at the same they highlighted political limits and cleavages in Chicana/o pop culture. More to the point, they demonstrate how those presumed to be on the ethnic, racial, or national margins of Chicana/o culture helped fuel its circulation to render a reordering of Chicana/o identity and politics. From this disorienting angle, there are few assumptions about who is or isn’t considered Chicana/o, where Chicana/o history happens, and what constitutes Chicana/o politics. This outside-in sightline helps us see that Chicana/o cultural history must account for how the Chicana/o experience was imagined to be part of a relational and transnational matrix of struggles over race, civil rights, and everyday life.

Author

• Luis Alvarez, University of California/San Diego