#seniorseminar Leah Sauceda & “The Creation of a Chicano Political Identity in California, 1930s-1970s”

Tell us a bit about yourself!

A big influence on my life was that I moved with my parents to Honduras at a very young age, and I had the privilege of living in Central America for five years. Those five years were a very politically tumultuous time for Honduras, the 2009 coup against the sitting president happened on my brother’s birthday for example.

My father has always been a very politically active person who pushed me to care about the things around me. We were very involved in Honduran politics as my father was one of the few people with a car in our town who volunteered to take people to vote, even if it meant driving long distances, and I grew up understanding the power of direct and personal involvement.

I am a first-generation student. My parents wanted us children to receive a higher education. That was very important to them. My parents moved the family back to the U.S. so that we children could pursue a college education. I followed my brother to FSU. Right now, my major is International Affairs, but I will add History for my dual degree.

What made you take this senior seminar?

I was taking “Latin American History through Film” in fall 2023, and that was the one class that captivated me that semester. Dr. Herrera’s passion for the subject and his way of teaching was compelling. When he said toward the end of the semester that he was teaching a senior seminar on Latinx for the last time, I knew that I wanted to take that and write a more detailed paper under Dr. Herrera’s guidance. And even though I was not a History major or a senior, we made it work.

What is your specific project about?

I researched the creation of a political identity for Chicanos and Chicanas in California from the 1930s to the 1970s. I began by wanting to work on how Latinos forged a political identity – but that was far too broad and nebulous a topic. Dr. Herrera urged me to find a timeline, a space, and a specific people on which to work.

I decided to work on the Chicanos and Chicanas of California because I am also half Mexican. I have always wondered how different I would have felt if I had been raised in California and not in South Florida. One of the very first books we read in the class, City of Inmates by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, focused on California, Los Angeles specifically, and it pushed me toward working on that region.  I have been hearing the phrase “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” all my life, and I have been interested in questions like “What is America?”, “Who is an American?”

What sources did you look at?

The Chicano movement became prominent when the first generation of Chicanos went to college. There they had the opportunity to socialize with each other, attend forums, and create networks. At the same time, printing culture came into its own and a lot of their posters, manifestos, and songs of protests were printed and are available for consultation. I loved working with these primary sources, to feel their power and messages. The movement was created through the dissemination of these different pamphlets, their ideas, that allowed Chicanos and Chicanas at different colleges to connect and to realize that as a group they needed to push for more space for themselves.

These primary sources were all available online, but there were also many books that featured material and periodicals and newspapers from the time. 

What is the main argument of your paper?

The foundation of the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1929 was critical to the creation of the Chicano Student Movement as this was the oldest Hispanic and Latin American civil rights organization in the U.S. It followed an assimilationist ideology; its members did not want to be different from any other American citizens, they did not want to be seen as a racialized other, a racial minority.

Over time, Latinx voices diverged from this perspective and pointed to the fact that assimilation did not end racial discrimination. It became clear to the Chicano generation that they had to disrupt the system that was oppressing them and find a way through this rupture. This is where the Chicano Student Movement emerged. They rejected assimilation. They embraced their culture and the language that had been stripped of them. To this day, you can say that Chicanos are “more” Mexican than Mexicans. They understood themselves as a nation within the nation.

In this sense, education was the most powerful thing to overcome divisions and systems of inequality.

The Chicanas were more prolific than Chicanos in printing demands and articulating their thoughts. They played crucial roles in organizing, developing consciousness, and networking for the Chicano Movement. The Chicanas had to fight not only the inequalities in the U.S. system but also the sexism of the Latino patriarchy. They had to tackle the cult of hypermasculinity too. Young Chicanos were vulnerable to signing up for military service having been socialized to follow the same career paths as their fathers and grandfathers that had afforded them first-class citizen status. This reinforced the aspect of violence within the conception of masculinity.

Was it difficult to write such a long paper?

It was difficult. I felt that I had collected so much material, that when I sat down to write, my brain felt full. I did not know how to organize the paper or how to start writing. But Dr. Herrera reassured me that it is good to feel that you have too much material, because that means that you will write a very detailed paper.

Dr. Herrera suggested that we do free writing, which was a hard concept for me. I like to have my work completely thought out so that it is well structured the first time I write it down. But I gave free writing a try, and I found that it helped me a lot with this project.

I had divided my books into three piles, the LULAC and other early movements pile, the Chicana pile, and the war pile. I took the books from the pile that I was working on, then went through them, and extracted the main ideas. Based on those, I wrote the different sections. I revised everything later to edit my writing and to keep adding more information.

We had to submit a preliminary bibliography and an abstract early on in the semester. Then the draft paper was due in week 12. That alongside the conversations we had in class helped me stay on track.

In the beginning of the class, we read books together and discussed them. We had to submit three precis that needed to include leading theses, arguments, strength & weaknesses of the reads. When I started writing my paper, I reflected on those assignments, and I realized these were all components that needed to be included in my paper.

What surprised you about your research project?

The amount of material I found on this topic really surprised me. I am looking at the Chicano Movement over only a 40-year timespan, but so much happened during that time.

Another thing that struck me was the impact of the Chicano Student Movement on the civil rights movement. It was interesting to see the connections. For instance, the case Mendez v. Westminster (1947) that declared the segregation of Mexican American students into separate ‘Mexican schools’ unconstitutional was crucial for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that outlawed racial discrimination in public schools more broadly.

I was also surprised by how events across borders influenced the Chicano movement. The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was an important catalyst upon the movement.

I have come to look at History through the lens of historical materialism as argued by Walter Benjamin which states that nothing exists in its own bubble and that to try and understand history in a vacuum without the co-influences is ahistorical.

What was the hardest thing to do in that class?

The paper itself felt very daunting. I was the youngest person in my class, there were a lot of seniors who had taken many History classes. I did not want my paper to be the worst one. But I made a lot of friends in that class, as there is a group of us who have been following Dr. Herrera around and I recognized from the Fall course. When we all sat down to write together and it went well, it showed me that the issue was not a question of age but of preparation.

The daunting aspect of the paper fizzed out the more I read and sourced material, and I realized that I could write 6,000 word on this topic – and more.

How did you stay on top of the project?

I checked out a lot of books from Strozier Library. I kept them all by my nightstand as a constant reminder that this was something that I had to work on. And while I might not have been writing every day of the week, I was trying to consume some piece of media that was related to my paper daily. I either read an essay or read poetry or listened to songs of protest. I really fell in love with protest songs as it is such a beautiful way to get your point across. All of this kept me thinking about the topic, trying to understand all that I was putting together.

What advice would you give to students thinking about taking the senior seminar?

The project gets less scary once you have started it. When I started free writing, and I saw how quickly I had written 2,000 words, the thought of writing 6,000 words became a lot less scary. I always write my papers single-spaced, and then when I format them correctly and go to double spacing – they expand so much, and it feels like magic.

Hone in on your topic as soon as you can. I did not get there until week four or five of the semester, and that took out about a third of the class. It is already a tight fit to research and write this paper in 15 weeks, the sooner you can find your angle, the better.

If you can start your senior seminar already having an idea of what you want to write about, that will give you maximum time for research. Let the thoughts and opinions of the other students and your teacher help you shape your project. We went around the classroom discussing and critiquing everybody’s research question, and that helped me refine my ideas. I knew that I was interested in investigating the creation of a political identity but initially my focus was too much on the contemporary period, and gradually, based on the feedback I received from my peers, my focus narrowed to the Chicano Movement and went back in time.

What would you do differently if you could go back in time?

I would try to keep the focus of my research more on the Chicano movement itself. A lot of my work looked at the origins of that movement, at LULAC and other predecessors, and while that was important for understanding how the Chicano Student Movement developed, I feel I could have spent more time on this movement itself.