Semana de la Raza ““ a Latino cultural awareness week ““ kicked off yesterday, and with it UCLA once again sees the world come to its campus.
In the world of weeklong programming, Semana de la Raza lacks the boisterous arguments of Palestinian Awareness Week and it cannot match the swagger of Greek rush weeks, but it presents the campus with an amiable opportunity to get to know the Latino experience in the largest university in El Pueblo de Los Angeles.
Despite the Latino-centric nature of this event, it is a good time for all Bruins to share their cultural heritage, which is the first step to coexistence despite the burdening ambiguities of race.
Semana de la Raza, organized by its namesake the RAZA Coalition, brings together an array of student groups focused on attracting the Latino population at UCLA.
The planning roundtable is a nice menagerie of student leaders: Latino student professionals, activists, scenesters, frat boys and feminists come together to highlight their culture. And to sometimes gossip about each other.
“It’s definitely hard, with so many orgs with different purposes and commitments, but it’s also great to come together for events like this week,” said Gilberto Chacón, a fourth-year Latin American studies and Chicana/o studies student who serves as moderator of the RAZA Coalition. He added, “It’s important for us to share such a vibrant and complex culture with the rest of the UCLA community.”
The programming includes tonight’s film screening of the documentary “Made in L.A.,” which highlights the story of three Latina immigrants in a labor dispute with Forever 21.
A play and a comedy night later, the semana concludes on Saturday, with the 10th Annual Festival Latino, a day-long concert and carnival in Wilson Plaza, and a night of clubbing to raise funds for the DREAM scholarship, meant for UCLA immigrant students.
But with all the festivities around “La Raza,” the looming concerns over cultural changes also come to campus.
The term itself has been contentious. “La Raza,” literally translated as “The Race,” has been a preferred point of criticism for immigration conspiracy theorists, who are convinced that an evil alliance composed of a very liberal Mexican government, some very radical Communists and the very mustachioed Geraldo Rivera wants to reclaim Alta California for Mexico.
At its birth, the term had some of that supremacist flavor. José Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher and politician, wrote in the early 1900s of “la raza cosmica” (the cosmic race), or the deeply diverse and superior makeup of a Mexican population rooted in European, Native Aztec and African history.
The cosmic stuff of hard-core nationalism came to fade, but La Raza remained.
Nowadays, the term denotes, simply, the people, or “our people.” It represents a common history of adapting to a new place and maintaining a shared past together in a pot where nothing was ever really melting.
Among Latinos at UCLA, “La Raza” is just one of many terminology issues. Should it be Latinos instead? Chicanos y Chicanas? Hispanics? Mexican-Americans? I say all of the above, as long as people recognize their connections to others both inside and outside a racial checkbox.
Still, usage of the term “race” can be puzzling. In the era of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the popular blog “Stuff White People Like,” actual interracial progress does not come close to matching the time spent in discussions about race itself.
And in every awkwardly worded discussion, the confusion remains. Our own Royce Hall lends itself to such problems with the inscription on its proscenium arch, “Education is learning to use the tools which the race has found indispensable.”
“Which tools? Which race?” wondered Boniface Obichere, a long-time advocate of ethnic studies who served as director of the UCLA African Studies Center in the 1970s . His concerns were not unwarranted, as the history of this institution prior to his time could define “the race” as something exclusive, rather than multicultural.
The phrase, coined by UCLA’s first Provost and Vice President Ernest Carroll Moore, was intended to demonstrate the adaptability of education as a public good, rather than imply that a certain racial group would get the duty of determining it.
Now, Semana de La Raza kicks off in the same campus that Obichere and Moore once walked, and where countless racial controversies have raged. Once again, the opportunity for cultural exchange presents itself. Let’s not let it go to waste.
Wanna dance at Festival Latino? E-mail Ramos at mramos@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.