La Culture Cure

John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Tel: 617-496-0320; Fax: 617-384-9555; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k71111

Y

8

Neighborhoods; Civil Rights; Hispanic Americans; Activism; Immigration; Hispanic American Culture; Cultural Pluralism; Culture

1074-1917

In the early 1970s, it was not difficult for the American public to identify the Latino civil rights movement and what it stood for. On the West Coast, antiwar activists were leading the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, and on the East Coast, the Young Lords of New York were setting fire to trash the sanitation department had neglected to pick up in New York's Puerto Rican ("Nuyorican") neighborhoods. These were groups demanding to be respected for what they were: hard-working American citizens who deserved equal rights. It was also not hard to name the cultural and political figureheads of the movement, as they were visible at a mainstream level. Today, only a small percentage of Americans can name a Latino leader. Although Latinos form a greater percentage of the U.S. population today than they did forty years ago, their visibility in mainstream cultural spaces is less today than it was then. This is partly because insufficient attention has been given to the cultural actors in the political movement; their lack of visibility detracts from the movement's saliency and its ability to achieve the goal set out by the original Latino movement: the recognition of Latino civil rights.

ERIC

4

2012

EJ962525