Researching Chicano Communities: Social- Historical, Physical, Psychological, and Spiritual Space

(Hardback)

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This is a multifaceted approach to understanding one of the nation's largest ethnic communities. Blea incorporates community social history, physical, psychological, and spiritual space. The book strives to teach the student how to do research in an ethnic community. It also describes what is already understood about those communities and defines the nature of the 25 year old discipline of Chicano studies. The use of the Chicana feminist perspective lends not only a gender role analysis, but also demonstrates the structure and function of the balance of personal and social control within the context of the community.

Reviews

Blea's work is significant because she is one of the first Chicanas or Chicanos who have raised apparently obvious questions that could be explored in more depth, but have been ignored. Blea deals with identity, as well as the usual sociological exercise of reviewing the literature, methodology, how to enter Chicano/a studies, how to analyze the field, Chicana feminist studies, and linking theory to practice. Discussion of these fundamental topics makes the book vaulable in understanding work on Chicanas/os...General readers; undergraduates.-Choice
Commendations to Praeger for publishing this unconventional text...Blea has written a guide that students with any racial or ethnic identity, feminists or not, should welcome....Analysis should lead to critical thinking, reconsiliation, the betterment of communities, and the healing of the nation.-MultiCultural Review
"Commendations to Praeger for publishing this unconventional text...Blea has written a guide that students with any racial or ethnic identity, feminists or not, should welcome....Analysis should lead to critical thinking, reconsiliation, the betterment of communities, and the healing of the nation."-MultiCultural Review
"Blea's work is significant because she is one of the first Chicanas or Chicanos who have raised apparently obvious questions that could be explored in more depth, but have been ignored. Blea deals with identity, as well as the usual sociological exercise of reviewing the literature, methodology, how to enter Chicano/a studies, how to analyze the field, Chicana feminist studies, and linking theory to practice. Discussion of these fundamental topics makes the book vaulable in understanding work on Chicanas/os...General readers; undergraduates."-Choice

Author Bio

IRENE ISABEL BLEA is the chairperson of the Department of Chicano Studies at California State University in Los Angeles. Blea received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and has been affiliated with the University of New Mexico, University of Texas at Austin, and Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her previous books include La Chicana and the Intersection of Race, Class and Gender(Praeger, 1991), Bessemer: A Sociological Perspective of a Chicano Barrio(1991), and Toward A Chicano Social Science (Praeger, 1988).