Awards and Service
- Fulbright Senior Lecturing Award, University of Granada, Spain, 2001
- Director, SMU Ethnic Studies Program, 1998-2000
- Hispanic Educator of the Year nominee, University of Michigan, Affirmative Action
Office, 1985
- Pulitzer Prize nominee for The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest,1984
Books and Essays
- Beyond Empires: Homelands in the Changing Atlantic World (forthcoming)
- Memories and Migrations: Mapping Coricua and
Chicana Histories, edited with Vicki Ruiz,
University of Illinois Press, 2007
- Teaching Mexican American History with Neil Foley, American Historical Association, 2002
- Eastside Landmark: A History of the East Los Angeles Community Union Stanford University Press, 1998
- The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest University of New Mexico Press, 1984
In his work, Professor John Chávez systematically links two major theories to come out of scholarship
since the 1960’s. Internal colonialism gained popularity among social scientists while postnationalism emerged from literary/cultural theorists. Chávez synthesizes both theories into a framework for describing the ways that land and institutions have historically affected constructions of ethnic identity—and the postnational identities that are currently being formed.
Chávez explores how the United States acquired much of Mexico between 1846-1848 in his book,
The Lost Land.
The U.S. occupied the Southwest by conquering its indigenous populations, including native, Spanish-speaking, mestizo Mexicans. After 1848, Mexican Americans remained a conquered people living on occupied land within the United States, a situation of internal colonialism.
In his forthcoming book, Beyond Empires, Chávez notes that some Mexican Americans have recently been offered dual nationality by Mexico. Furthermore, in light of NAFTA, Mexican policy makers would like to encourage the practice of the European Union where many member states seek to minimize conflicts caused by exclusive notions of nationality by permitting citizens to move across borders without passports, based on a common legal European citizenship and identity.
Chávez thus finds that many individuals in both North America and Europe have developed postnational identities. They imagine themselves as members of continental federations, with concentric loyalties to localities, regional homelands, and national states.
In Eastside Landmark, Chávez uses postcolonial theory to describe how Mexican Americans in Los Angeles regained enough economic and political power, after the 1960’s, to claim some autonomy by controlling significant local and state institutions.
Along these lines, Chávez has also studied the residents of
Zacatecus, Mexico and of Granada, Spain. The
latter see themselves as citizens of the autonomous region of Andalucia, of the nation of Spain, and of the continent of Europe. A logical extension of such postnational identities and economic globalization would seem to be individual world citizenship.
[Page updated December 2007]
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