Reflections on the Field

Reflections on the Field

Deena J. González

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Vol 35, No.1 (Spring 2010).

If a Chicano scholar had fallen into a coma in 1969 and just now awakened, what a strange and wonderful world he would find. First, the word “Chicano” would always be followed or preceded by “Chicana.” Might he be puzzled by the persistent use of the slash mark, as in Chicana/o studies? Feminist scholarship began embedding itself by 1975—soon after our male scholar fell asleep—and by 1985 it was reshaping the old boys’ labor and economic renderings of past and present, from Aztec to high-tech, as the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña puts it. Feminist scholars of the Euro-American tradition speak about waves, and the first wave of feminist scholarship either extends back to the first landings on the Atlantic seaboard or begins somewhere close to Abigail Adams.