Chicano Movement

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The Chicano Movement, also called the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, and El Movimiento, is the part of the American Civil Rights Movement that sought political empowerment and social inclusion for Mexican Americans.

The Chicano Movement encompassed all political, social, and cultural movements by Mexican Americans. The political movements included the struggle for the restoration of Spanish-era land grants to their original owners in New Mexico, to desegregate schools, for the election and appointment of Mexican-American governmental officials, against police brutality, and for the collective bargaining rights of agricultural laborers, many of whom were Mexican and Mexican-American.

Socially, the Chicano Movement addressed negative stereotyping of Mexicans in mass media and the American consciousness through the creation of works of literary and visual art that validated the Mexican-American ethnicity and culture.

The roots of the Chicano movement go back to the Mexican-American War, when, contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans found themselves disenfranchised and dispossessed of their lands. With no means for redress, social banditry became the means of symbolic resistance. Figures such as Tiburcio Vasquez and Joaquin Murietta became folk heros to Mexican Americans for their refusal to submit to Anglo-American authority. Such banditry, however, was the exception rather than the rule, as the vast majority of Mexican Americans continued to live under oppression. During the Mexican Revolution, large numbers of Mexicans fled the violence and instability of their homeland to settle in the United States, where they performed menial labor, especially in agriculture, as a means of survival. Many were repatriated during the Great Depression during an operation known as the Repatriation Movement. The repatriations often coincided with union activity, and deportation soon became a way to break and weaken unions. Another wave of repatriations occurred after World War II, but by this time, Mexicans had established deep roots and strong family and community network inside the United States, resulting in the "repatriation" of many United States citizens.

Efforts to combat the racism and exploitation began early. The League of United Latin American Citizens, the first civil rights organization for Hispanic Americans, was formed in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929. Its stance was assimilationist: Latinos, it held, could advance by learning English, becoming citizens, and educating themselves. To this end, the first struggles of LULAC were for the official reclassification of Latinos as "Whites", so they could not legally be discriminated against as Blacks were. Similarly, in California, challenges to educational discrimination against Mexican Americans brought about the ruling by 1947(Mendez v. Westminster) that Mexican Americans could not be segregated on the basis of their Mexican ancestry or lineage. Despite this ruling the separate and unequal education of Mexican American children continued unabated in many jurisdictions.

The assimilationist ethos began to change after World War II. Many Mexican-Americans fought in the war, and were thus eligible for an Army-funded college education under the GI Bill. It was in institutes of higher learning that they began to uncover their own history, a history that was never taught and often deliberately hidden in American public schools. This knowledge allowed for a radical assessment of the history and status of Mexicans in the United States.

Rodolfo Gonzales in Denver, Colorado and Reies Tijerina in New Mexico, two of the early leaders of the Movement, embraced a form of nationalism that was based on the failure of the United States government to live up to the promises that it had made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In that account, Mexican-Americans were a conquered people who simply needed to reclaim their birthright and cultural heritage as part of a new nation, which later became known as Aztlán.

That version of the past did not, on the other hand, take into account the history of those Mexicans who had immigrated to the United States. It also gave little attention to the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States in the 1960s — not surprising, since immigration did not have the political significance it was to acquire in the years to come. It was only a decade later when activists, such as Bert Corona in California, embraced the rights of undocumented workers and helped broaden the focus to include their rights.

Instead, when the movement dealt with practical problems most activists focused on the most immediate issues confronting Mexican-Americans: unequal educational and employment opportunities, political disenfranchisement, and police brutality. In the heady days of the late 1960s, when the student movement was active around the globe, the Chicano movement brought about more or less spontaneous actions, such as the mass walkouts by high school students in Denver and East Los Angeles in 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970.

The movement was particularly strong at the college level, where activists formed MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, which promoted Chicano Studies programs and a generalized ethno-nationalist agenda. The student movement produced a generation of future political leaders, including Richard Alatorre and Cruz Bustamante in California.

[edit] References

• Chicana community search page