“Youth, Identity, Power” is the classic study of the origins of the 1960s Chicano civil rights movement. Written by a leader of the Chicano student movement who also played a key role in the creation of the wider Chicano Movement, this is the first full-length work to appear on the subject. It fills an important gap in the history of political and social protest in the United States.
Carlos Muñoz places the Chicano Movement in the context of the political and intellectual development of people of Mexican descent in the USA, tracing the emergence of student activists and intellectuals in the 1930s and their initial challenge to the dominant white racial and class ideologies. He then documents the rise and fall of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, situating it within the 1960s civil rights and radical movements and assessing the Chicano Movement's contribution to the development of the Mexican American population and the Latino population as a whole.
In an afterword to this new edition, Muñoz charts the burgeoning growth of US Latino communities, assesses the nativist backlash against them, and argues that Latinos must play a central role in a new movement for multiracial democracy.
"The first major book on the Chicano movement by one of its leaders, who is also a first-rate scholar. Youth, Identity, Power is certain to be a benchmark for all future work on the subject. An important ... contribution to the history of the 1960s, it ... should be required reading."
Clayborne Carson
"A very important and powerful book, documenting American history ... without question, one of the lodestones in reference to the 'movimiento.'"
