The college student driven, Chicano Movement

The college student driven, Chicano Movement, so popular in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, provided an environment for Mexican-American leadership germination. “Antiwar protests, civil rights marches, and boycotts of grapes and lettuce in support of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers were commonplace” (Herbaly, 1977, p.61). The late 1970’s gave way to a general apathy of students, only to be reborn in the late 1990’s. Two peer-reviewed research articles which address Latino leadership development in the 1990’s and student attitudes of the late 1970’s will be summarized and the lessons learned from the articles will be discussed.

Marco Davis, in an article in the National Civic Review, addresses the issue of the lack of Latino leadership. “The Latino population is not well understood in the United States, partly because of its small number of nationally recognized leaders. For these and other reasons, leadership is a crucial component for the population” (Davis, 1997, p.227).

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Davis defines leadership development and states that exclusivity and a dearth of diversity has defined traditional routes to leadership. In his view, the current Latino generation has undertaken the task of studying leadership in order to understand its development and increase the numbers of capable Latino leaders (Davis, 1997). Davis concludes with the statement that Latino leadership will begin again with Latino student organizations and gives two recent examples of successful organizing events. The student opposition to Proposition 187 in California produced student organized protests, rallies and marches and the 1997 La Marcha in Washington was coordinated by student organizations (Davis, 1997). The research methodology used in the article was a review of the literature.

David Herbaly was enrolled in the MBA program in 1977 at the University of California in Berkley when he was approached by Business Horizons to write an article about the prevailing attitudes...