The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico

Gomez has contributed substantially to our understanding of the transnational Chicana/o Left, and to broader currents in the emergence of Latina/o identity during the 1970s....It will be of use both in Trump-era social movements and in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, especially history and Latina/o studies offerings that focus on social movements, borderlands, and/or cultural studies. Latino Studies

More than any of its predecessors, this book provides a new cartography of the Chicana/o Movement. It is a tour de force that illumines a rich and contradictory web of cultural politics, anti-imperialism, anticapitalism, and feminism in a Chicana/o Movement that was as internationalist and multiracial as nationalist and ethnic-based. Luis Alvarez, University of California, San Diego, author of The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II

In this long overdue work, Alan Eladio Gómez recovers the lost progressive history of our Chicano/Mexicano community, and, by placing it in context, rediscovers who we are. His research is not only groundbreaking and multifaceted, ranging from cartographies to teatro, but it expands our vision and imagination of what the Chicano/Mexicano community truly is: revolutionary, progressive, and with a multilayered history in which we stand not as victims, but as creators of history. The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico is destined to be the standard in Chicano/Mexicano history for a long time to come. An excellent text for anyone in the field of Chicano studies. Alejandro Murguía, Chair of Latina/Latino Studies, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Poet Laureate

In The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico, Alan Eladio Gómez illuminates the capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions of the constellations of struggle that propelled the Chicano movement of the mid-twentieth century. Deftly blending empirical depth with theoretical breadth, Gómez explains the movement as not merely a political cartography of national resistance and refusal, but also, and centrally, a transnational project of emancipation aimed at creating new social relations and social identities. His identification of the theatrical stage as a key locus of popular education and political mobilization powerfully illuminates how the ferocious theatricality of state violence provokes aggrieved groups to produce new kinds of oppositional signs, symbols, and spectacles. George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

In this luminous work of historical recovery and interpretation, Alan Eladio Gómez revives the most expansive vision for Greater Mexican solidarity in the hemisphere. Refusing the constraints of nationalism and protectionist labor movements, Chicana/o artists and activists of the 1970s invented novel political forms for contesting state violence and economic exploitation. The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico combines impressive archival discovery with deft analysis to provide a new narrative for understanding the tumult and contradictions of the Chicana/o Movement. Gómez offers insightful readings of how popular theater, poetry, and feminist critique became vehicles for unleashing new social agency in diverse sites of popular mobilization, with effects that often exceeded the formal politics of the larger movement. Through Gómez’ account, we may appreciate the methodological innovation and political daring with which radical unionists and teatro artists constructed new cartographies of interdependence and struggle against class power and racial subjection. More important, Gómez makes visible the longstanding connections and aspirations to transborder unity that continue to animate the communities of Greater Mexico in our time. A landmark work in Chicana/o history, this book opens new vistas for students of social movements in the Americas. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands