Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1479
The civil rights movement in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s inspired a solidarity and common cause among a diversity of racial, ethnic, and marginalized minorities. Chicanos—people of Mexican heritage born in the United States—were part of this struggle. But in addition to suffering the exclusions, privations, and insults that many minorities endured, for Chicanos there was a cultural issue larger than outright discrimination: in the national imagination, the very presence of Chicanos was scarcely recognized. Concentrated in the Southwestern states, Chicanos were not nearly as visible nationally as African Americans, and typically their bearing was dealt with as a regional or local issue among school boards, election supervisors, and other civic bureaus that controlled participation in the American ideal of self-governance. Even after the reforms of the civil rights era were implemented and began to take hold, Chicanos remained a largely unrecognized presence within American society. The cultural commentator Harry Gamboa Jr. addressed the near-invisibility of Chicano culture in the American cultural landscape. Citing Los Angeles as a case in point, Gamboa argued that the obscured presence of Chicano culture even in a city with a large Chicano population "stems from the limited flow of information that has filtered through the established mass media. The media's hit-and-run attitude has generally relegated the influence by Chicanos on Los Angeles to that of a phantom culture." 1 Many first-generation Chicano activists devoted remarkable energies to overcome that phantomlike condition by articulating, depicting, and celebrating Chicano culture. Carlos Almaraz painted countless images of Los Angeles as if it were imbued with a magical, radiant spirit; Frank Romero made images of lowrider street life and public events, such as the police closing of Whittier Boulevard in 75 HOWARD N. FOX • Carlee Fernandez, Self-Portrait: Portrait of My Father, Manuel Fernandez, 2006 THEATER OF THE INAUTHENTIC