Chicano Professionals

Book excerpt: First published in 1998. Writing about Chicano professionals in Los Angeles proves timely for many reasons. Anthropologists now venture into the ethnic borderlands of their own western countries rather than encroach on the flexing ethnicities of the third world as they have traditionally done. The story of this ethnic elite begins in the 1960’s and 1970’s when Mexican American students from blue-collar backgrounds first entered California colleges and universities in significant numbers. This generation of Mexican American students is important, however, not merely for its increased numbers, but rather for the culture it created, the culture of "Chicanismo", the culture of the nationalist Chicano Movement.