Assault on Mexican American Collective Memory, 2010–2015

Acuña (emer., Chicano studies, California State Univ., Northridge) organized five years of collective political writings that contextualize current events within Mexican and Latino populations in Arizona and California. His writings focus on Tucson, Arizona, ethnic studies cultural wars and various campus issues in the CSU system. The collection documents and challenges the various status quo political attacks on the Mexican and Latino population and communities. Acuña contributes a strong introductory chapter that outlines the general purpose of this collection of political writings. His historical perspectives and sources, which make the book original and organic, highlight 50 years of the author's contributions to the field of Chicana/o studies. Acuña's leadership is a major contribution for future research and scholarship on this critical subject. Every library should obtain a copy of this book for its ethnic studies and history collections. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. * CHOICE *
Acuña’s book is a powerful counternarrative that carefully documents the struggles over Mexican American studies and the barring of Occupied America from Arizona classrooms. . . In telling these stories, Acuña refuses to become mired in the politics of despair or of hope. Instead, he focuses on the challenges at hand and offers good advice: be morally outraged but disciplined; be organized and persistent. * Journal of American History *
Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuña, like the late Dr. Howard Zinn, is an important and a prolific historian in academia and beyond. More specifically, he’s an indispensible historian of the marginalized, the maligned and the ignored by the oppressive U.S. state. With his 1972 book publication of the classic Occupied America—among many other books, essays and social commentaries—Acuña has become one of the premier historians of the Chicana/o people. In this topical and timely book, Acuña produces another exceptional, well-written and well-cited book. In his life-long efforts to recover/preserve the Chicana/o collective memory, in this must-read book, he thoroughly documents and analyzes current and past unjust attacks against Chicana/os and Mexican immigrants by racist politicians, government officials and public figures in states like Arizona, Texas and California. In doing so, Acuña also sheds light on the heroic resistance and social activism by the attacked—i.e., millennials, students, teachers, activists, immigrants, community members, etc.—to defend their/our basic human rights, dignity and self-respect in their/our ancestral lands. -- Alvaro Huerta, California State Polytechnic University
Rodolfo F. Acuña's latest book is a powerful and urgent response to the advantageous erasure and co-optation of Mexican American experiences by powers that be. At a moment when facts are made up and used to serve those deeply invested in maintaining a hierarchal order of things, Professor Acuña offers us an arsenal of indisputable historical evidence we must use to fight back. -- Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside
This is another of those amazingly far-reaching, yet full of specifics, works by the “godfather of Chicana/o Studies,” or as the younger scholars would say Chicanx Studies. Roaming across the terrains of labor, across state lines, beginning in the Arizona battleground for the right of Chicanx youth to know their histories, taking up the challenges of the changing face of public education, particularly the state of CA’s Cal State universities (CSUN where Prof. Acuña has spent the bulk of his academic career), and as we would come to expect, attending to both labor and laborers, this work walks us through key issues facing borderlands communities of color especially in public and higher education. As author and historian of many other important works, this one adds to Acuña’s interests and line-up of contemporary issues, Dreamers, immigration debates, and the role of fear and terror in political action. Some things have changed and others not at all, is one message running through much of this scholar’s work. Hope lies in historical memory and the refusal to erase the past, is another. The work functions as testimony and recording, bending toward social and political justice, educational access, and concern for the histories of Mexican-origin people across the continent. -- Deena J. González, Loyola Marymount University