•Editor’s Introduction

•Editor’s Commentary
Compassionate Formalism

•Essays
Deconstructing Disney: Chicano/a Children and Critical Race Theory
Gabriel Gutiérrez

Hyenas in the Pride Lands: Latinos/as and Immigration in Disney’s The Lion King
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez

Latino High School Students’ Pursuit of Higher Education
Flora Ida Ortiz and Rosa Gonzales

On the Subject of Gang Photography
Richard T. Rodríguez

•Dossier: Disciplines and Institutions
The Ethnographic Component in Chicano/a Literary Discourse
Hector A. Torres

Self-Help Graphics: A Case Study of a Working Space for Arts and Community
Reina Alejandra Prado Saldivar

Chicano Studies and the Academy: The Opportunities Missed
David E. Hayes-Bautista

•Artist’s Communiqué
Mermaids, Butterflies, and Princesses
Alma Lopez

•Reviews
Goddesses, Sirenas, Lupes y Angel Cholas— The Work of Alma Lopez
Reina Alejandra Prado Saldivar

The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. By Emma Peréz.
Dionne Espinoza

•Contributors

Editor’s Introduction

    “Hey Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, you’ve just turned thirty, what are you going to do next?”

     “Go to Disneyland!”

     On the occasion of our thirtieth anniversary, we start with two essays that consider the Walt Disney Company in relation to Latino viewers and cultural politics. With its “family” image juxtaposed to a mercenary corporate strategy, Disney is perhaps the exemplary case for a study of Latino representation within global media. Gabriel Gutiérrez charts the shift in corporate ideology from conservatism to neo-liberalism, considering the possibility of childhood agency through cultural consumption with respect to the English- and Spanish-language releases of The Lion King. Manuel M. Martín- Rodríguez provides an extended close reading of The Lion King—with its antagonism between lions and hyenas—as an allegory for border conflict.

     Education remains a (and perhaps the) central mechanism for redressing Latino underrepresentation within both the national imaginary and key sectors of society. Sadly, the main thing that has changed in the past thirty years has been the erosion of programs and policies that ensure minimal Latino admission and hiring within higher education. Flora Ida Ortiz and Rosa Gonzales evaluate recent efforts designed to prepare Latino students for University of California (UC) eligibility.

     Finally, returning to questions about the relationship between visual representation and social practice explored in the first two essays, Richard T. Rodríguez reconsiders Chicano gang photography as a genre that includes documentary images, self-representation, and police photography. Challenging the usual aesthetic and personal approaches, he draws upon ethnography, media studies, and cultural studies in order to expose the dialogue between gang photography, its “subject,” and surrounding sociopolitical forces. These images are evidence, not through a simple indexical relationship to reality, but as a necessary part of a more conflicted set of relationships among societal stereotypes and expectations, self-representation and identity, and criminality and state power.

     The dossier for this issue, “Disciplines and Institutions,” offers an eclectic mix of essays related to the original and continuing concerns of Chicano studies: its disciplinary boundaries and methodologies and its relationship to the community. Each essay starts from within a particular discipline or institution and reaches out for broader relevance, whether in search of a methodology (Torres), a place for the artist between market and community (Prado Saldivar), or the relationship of Chicano studies to the larger society and its needs for social services and political leadership (Hayes-Bautista). The two reviews (Espinoza and Prado Saldivar) explore critical and aesthetic issues of cultural identity, gender, and sexual politics.

     Finally, Alma Lopez provides the cover art as well as an artist’s communiqué. Her digital images represent a new direction in Chicano art that is at once technological and aesthetic. She recontextualizes major icons of Mexican and Chicano cultures, bringing lesbian desire into relationship with nationalist myth, border culture, political economy, and the built environment. Her work underscores something implicit in all the essays in this issue: if you cannot imagine someone or some group, then you will not see them. Her work—as with Chicano studies scholarship more generally—seeks the new imaginings that make social visibility possible. It is not enough to point out the histories and opportunities that have been missed; one must also address why they have been rendered invisible within the academy and national culture. One must provide a new image. That is the mission for Chicano studies—and for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies—as we enter the twenty-first century.
     In the name of Aztlán, we reclaim Disneyland!
     Of course, now that we are over thirty, we cannot be trusted, so please read everything here with a grain of salt. It is only under the gaze of a self-critical eye that the journal can hope to fulfill its original and evolving mission to serve the Chicano community.