Mexico City

A thousand Chicana and Chicano scholars came to this ancient Aztec capital in June, as participants in The National Association of Chicana and Chicago Scholars' (NACCS) annual meeting, to ponder the future of their discipline and to become reacquainted with Mexico.

For Estevan Flores, director of the Latino/a Research and Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Denver, simply having the conference in Mexico was important because many of the students and scholars participating had never been to the country.

"It was great to be meeting in buildings that existed even before there was a United States," says Dr. Julia Curry, a University of California-Berkeley professor and head of the NACCS program.

This year, the struggle in Chiapas was foremost in the minds of many scholars who attended. However, another primary concern was the brewing conflict at home about the future of ethnic studies programs, particularly Chicano/Chicana studies. University of California Regent Ward Connerly recently called for a review of ethnic studies, with an eye toward eliminating the discipline.

"Do we have the will to fight?," asks Dr. Adaliza Sosa-Riddell, a member of the faculty in the Chicano Studies Department at U.C.-Davis. "Chicano studies is one of our lasting legacies [from the civil rights movement]. Everything else has been squashed. It's the last vestige that has any meaning."

The NACCS has sent a resolution to the University of California Regents, according to Flores, stating that the association considers Connerly's statements an assault on academic freedom.

While Connerly's statements are a threat, Flores believes "the attacks give us a focal point to build a united front in support of ethnic studies."

In addition to whether ethnic studies will continue to find a home at the University of California, Sosa-Riddell says one of the issues not resolved within Chicano studies is the relationship between Chicano and Latino scholarship. Many people fear that Chicano studies will one day be subsumed by Latino or Latin American studies. The problem with that, she says, is that Chicano studies is its own paradigm, whereas Latin American studies or Latino studies do not represent new paradigms.