Key Components
What is an argument, method, evidence, and keyword(s)?
The ways in which categorizations of race are defined under colonial and imperialist regimes.
What is Racial Formation? (Briggs and Gomez, Ch. 2)
What is Aztlán?
Molina's approach to imposed scripts of concerning race and ethnicity.
What are counterscripts? (Molina 7)
A Puerto Rican musical artist whose reggaetón music video highlights Puerto Rico’s exploitation as a colony of the United States?
What is Bad Bunny's "EL APAGÓN?"
A theoretical approach in Latina/o studies rooted in language?
What is a keyword approach?
(Keywords, Introduction)
To be colonized twice and navigate both Spanish and American colonial regimes of race, gender, and sexuality.
an emphasis on a common (Chicano) culture and a rejection of assimilation into American culture.
What is Chicano Nationalism / Nationalism?
"... [a] multipronged system of laws at federal, state, and local levels that promotes a climate of insecurity and suffering among individual immigrants and their families”
What is Legal Violence? (Abrego and Menjivar, 2012, p. 1387)
A "Digital Memory Collective" and "group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era."
What is Chicana Por Mi Raza?
Define the concept (1-2 sentences) → Introduce the example (1-2 sentences) → Explain how the concept reveals how a larger system works (3-4 sentences)
What is a short-response "formula" to a keywords essay?
“The ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths.” (Molina, Introduction, pg. 6)
What are Racial Scripts?
People who have left their original homeland and have spread to other places.
What is Diaspora?
An academic study of peoples and people of Mexican descent within the United States. Interdisciplinary, intersects with history, culture, the arts, politics, education, and lived experience.
What is Chicana/o Studies?
A foundational text of the Chicano Movement, providing a framework for how early Chicana/o education activists defined the Chicana/o experience and how it can be a site of knowledge in the University.
What is El Plan de Santa Barbara?
Identifying what the object reveals about how something that works...
What is analysis?
The social and legal condition of being outside the law.
What is Illegality?
Frameworks used to study, interpret, and explain patterns in social and power structures, events, images, and experiences. A way of seeing and living in the world.
What is Theory?
Ways of archiving and preserving indigenous history, traditions, and culture that adhere to indigenous methods of knowledge-making and survival, rather than seeking legitimacy through colonial institutions of knowledge.
What are Mobile Archives of Indigeneity?
A Supreme Court case and ruling in 2025, stating that ICE and federal agents have the right to arrest and detain people based on how they look, where they live, what language they speak, and what kind of work they do.
What is Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo?
First, you introduce the case (1-2 sentences). Then, you introduce the concept briefly (1 sentence). And finally, you apply the concept to analyze the case in depth (4-5 sentences)....
What is the case-focused formula?
a physical and ideological sovereign state of territories. A mechanism of control, reinforcing and monitoring social, racial, and gender hierarchies.
What is Empire? (Briggs, Ch.1)
a metaphor suggesting that Aztlán is every Chicana/o/x person, including those who are femme, mixed, and queer.
What is Queer Aztlán?
names not that which is or has been, but that which is ever absent: nation, unity, liberation...
What is an empty signifier? (Perez-Torrez 133)
"In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage it also of the brutal "gringo" invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from when came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny..." (p. 181, 1969)
What is El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán?