Before Their Time: Tracing the Emergence of the Figure of La Pachuca, 1910-1930s

Abstract

The emergence of la pachuca, as an agent in Chicanx cultural production, directs attention to the process of meaning making which draw from elements of the past. The period between 1910 and the 1930s, which span the Mexican Revolution, the interwar period, to the Great Depression provide social and economic contexts to understand the formation subjectivity and identity formation. This essay underscores the role of gender as critical in an analysis of emergent nationalisms; the steady pull of industrialized labor; migration and settler expansion; to consider these as arenas in which historical agents negotiated subject formation amid ideologies of citizenship, belonging, and modernity. By exploring the relationship between these histories of gender, sexuality and identity formation, in relation to overlapping, often competing, nationalisms and the legacies of settler colonialism, we may better understand pachucos as well.