Applying Alexander Collective Trauma Theory Applied To The Chicano Movement

Historical Trauma through Latinos

Throughout the history of this nation, there are strong roots of violent discrimination. Because of this, various minority groups have embarked many forms of suffrage resulting in trauma. In this paper I will be applying the Alexander collective trauma theory to Latino population and their suffrage throughout history. The theory consists of 16 principal points and will be applied to the Chicano Movement. The 1st point is cultural trauma; it is when “ when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways”. Latinos

How this applies to the Chicano movement, is the 1966 land grant movement. A man by the name of Reies Lopez Tijuana lead a movement against the government to honor Mexican land grants. Tijuana was shut down by the government in the courts, which caused him to perform an armed raid to the local courthouse to perform a citizen’s arrest to a district attorney. Tijuana was apprehended, however this was nationally publicized and sparked the beginning of the Chicano movement. The 6th principal is psychoanalytical thinking; having a deep unconscious trauma. This can be applied to Latinos who have many internal such as being uneasy or even petrified of police because of an unjustified harassment from police. The 7th principal of the collective theory is naturalistic fallacy. This states that trauma is a socially mediated attribution or in other words claiming something to “natural” can never be wrong. An example that can be applied to the Latinos is when Cesar Chavez led a strike against the Delano area table and wine grape growers for low pay and poor conditions. Chavez socially mediated the strike, which influenced a massive boycott. The 8th principal is the social process of cultural; trauma; this is when the collective no longer is experiencing pain from the trauma. This is when the trauma emerges its self with the collective actors self-identity and than they

A prime example of this with in the Chicano movement is when Cesar Chavez led a march from a town in central California called Delano, all the way up to the capital Sacramento. The media coverage can be considered the carrier group but the real heavy hitter was when senator Robert F. Kennedy met with Chavez 3 days before the march advocating his cause. The 10th principal is the audience and situation: speech act theory. How this applies to Latinos is speaker: Latino people, audience: the world, situation: institutional racism, discrimination, police brutality. Point 11th is the creation of trauma as a new narrative. In this point there are 4 major factors that make it up: the nature of pain, the nature of the victim, relation of trauma to victim to q aider audience, and the attribution of responsibility. In Latin Americans, the nature of pain was the discrimination and police brutality, and the nature of the victim where Latin American people. The wider audience was everyone in the country who witnessed this segregation and violence, and the attribution was institutional racism. The 12th point is institutional arenas, which are the representational process of creating a new master narrative. This applied to Latinos in the school systems up until the groundbreaking case of Mendez v. Westminster. Up until 1947 Mexican American students were segregated in public