UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — "Becoming La Raza: Negotiating Race in the Chican@ Movement(s)," written by José G. Izaguirre III and published by Penn State University Press in 2025, has been awarded the 2025 National Communication Association Latino/a Communication Studies Division and La Raza Caucus Outstanding Book Award.
In 1965, striking farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley sparked the beginning of the Chican@ movement. As the movement quickly gained traction across the southwestern United States, public frictions emerged and splits among activists over strategic political decisions. Izaguirre III explores how these disagreements often hinged on the establishment of a racial(ized) identity for Mexican Americans, leading to the formation of La Raza Unida, a political party dedicated to naming and defending Mexican Americans as a racialized community. Through close readings of figures, vocabularies and visualizations of iconic texts of the Chican@ Movement, Izaguirre III demonstrates that la raza was never singular or unified. Instead, he reveals a racial identity that was (re)negotiated, (re)invented and (re)circulated against a Cold War backdrop that heightened rhetorics of race across the globe and increasingly threatened Mexican American bodies in the Vietnam War.
Izaguirre III is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.