ABSTRACT
When I first started to teach Chicano history (now often referred to as “Chicana/o” to incorporate gender explicitly vis-à-vis the term “Chicano”) 1 almost 50 years ago, there was no sense of the periodization of this history. When did Chicano history begin? What were the different historical periods? Did these periods coincide with the larger history of the United States? Fortunately, the work of Carey McWilliams, the “godfather of Chicano history,” provided a framework. As a journalist by profession, he had written the first history of Mexican Americans in 1948: North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948, [1968], [2016]). He provided the initial generation of Chicana/o historians some sense of the historical periods. For example, he starts in the Spanish colonial era (1598–1821) in places later conquered by the United States that became the American Southwest from Texas to California, including states such as New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. These were the initial Spanish settlements, thus locating the origins of what we would call Chicana/o history in this formative period. Later, given the Chicano movement’s emphasis on the Indigenous background, we historians began our discussion of Chicano history by introducing the Aztecs and other major Indian civilizations in Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest. McWilliams also focused on the U.S.-Mexico War (1846–1848) and the post-war period up to the late nineteenth century. Into the twentieth century, he noted the beginning of mass immigration from Mexico, mainly into the Southwest between 1900 and 1930, linked to the extension of American capitalist economic activities in the region, such as the development of railroads, mining, and agriculture. The effects of the Great Depression, particularly the deportation of thousands of Mexicans from the United States, is still another period he described. Finally, he not only covers the effects of World War II on Mexican Americans as thousands went to war, but also the racial tensions of the war as witnessed by the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943. He concludes his periodization with thoughts about the conditions and aspirations of Mexican Americans following the war and the beginning of the Cold War. As early Chicana/o historians we could not have taught our early classes without McWilliams; North from Mexico became our bible.
