ABSTRACT
The greatest failure of Chicano studies2 was its complicity with the hidden curriculum in U.S. higher education. The desired radical utopia of establishing an oppositional space within the academy became, at best, an alternative among a number of confined spaces (African American, Asian American, Native American, ethnic, cultural, and women’s studies, etc.). Chicano studies fell victim to the only “political correctness” that has ever existed in higher education: management of potential disruptive elements. In this chapter I examine how the university’s hidden curriculum contained the activism of Chicano(a) students.
