SAN ANTONIO — In 26 years of annual meetings, the National Assn. for Chicana and Chicano Studies has taken on a host of scholarly topics, including immigration, bilingual education and the legacy of the Mexican War.
But this year, in a conference that concluded Sunday, the focus of attention was on a much different set of questions: the "Latina rage" personified by Lorena Bobbitt, the secret lives of lesbian women in small Mexican towns and the messages about gender in "Chicano rap" music.
Sexuality, including the study of sexual orientation and sexual "outlaws," eroticism and machismo, is today at the forefront of Chicano studies, reflecting a trend seen in all disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.
Those applying "gender studies" to the Latino experience have found a wealth of topics in a culture with traditionally rigid ideas about masculinity and femininity. While a vocal minority of pundits and professors has attacked the spread of gender studies, saying it has trivialized the academy, nothing has managed to stop its advance in Chicano studies.
The theme of this year's conference--attended by about 1,000 scholars at the local campus of the University of Texas--was "Missionary Positions," a wry comment on sex, imperialism and the submissive position of Latinos in U.S. history.
Professor Deena Gonzalez of Pomona College called her presentation to the conference "Lorena was Latina: Raging Against the Missionary." Bobbitt, an Ecuadorean immigrant, sliced off her husband's penis, saying he repeatedly raped her.
"I'm sure there are other cases of women in the U.S. who commit violent acts in response to violence," Gonzalez said. "But here's the one Latina we hear about."
Questions of sexuality are a common motif in Gonzalez's course on Chicano history, reflecting her own experience as a lesbian and those of a new generation of students who are coming of age when the last constraints on sexual freedom and expression have been removed.
This new generation is 30 years removed from the birth of the "Chicano Movement," when Mexican-American activists first pushed for the Chicano studies programs that now exist at dozens of universities, including at least 15 in Southern California.
With gender studies displacing Marxism and nationalism as the dominant "paradigm" on college campuses, the new heroes in Chicano studies are feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros and Cherrie Moraga, both of whom read their work to rapturous applause at this year's conference.
