ABSTRACT
These articles grew out of a panel entitled ‘Chicano Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourse’, held at the NACS conference in downtown Los Angeles in the spring of 1989. The theme of the Seventeenth Conference was ‘Community Empowerment and Chicano Scholarship’. The narrative inscribed in the conference theme re-enacts a problematic which has been with us since the origins of the Chicano student movement, namely: how does Chicano studies enact, articulate, textualize the community and how does this narrativization translate into the empowerment of a community? Implicit within this problematic inherited by the Chicano intellectuals of the 1990s, and normalized in the course of the Chicano movement, is the age-old question of the relationship between theory, self-representation, and practice. In the course of daily institutional practice in Chicano studies this narrative is de-problematized to the extent that the evocation of the community as a central subject of Chicano studies operates as a litany which guides our daily academic practices and absolves us of the guilt stemming out of our distance from our nonacademic constituency-a distance which is a consequence of our own diaspora as intellectuals from the working-class populations in the factories, fields, and barrios. The implication is, of course, that the creation of a discourse in and of itself will guarantee the empowerment of those dispossessed and nonlegitimated sectors of our community. The assumption being that bringing these formally nonthematized subjects into representation will furnish the necessary conditions for Chicano liberation throughout Aztlan.
