How Does the Chicano Movemnet Help Influence Chicano Culture and Art

In the 1960s, a radicalized Mexican-American movement began pushing for a new identification. The Chicano Move, aka El Movimiento, advocated social and political empowerment through a chicanismo or cultural nationalism.

As the activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales alleged in a 1967 poem, "La raza! / Méjicano! / Español! / Latino! / Chicano! / Or whatever I call myself, / I look the aforementioned."

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales speaking outside a police force edifice to members of his organization, the Crusade for Justice, 1969.

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Leading up to the 1960s, Mexican-Americans had endured decades of discrimination in the U.South. West and Southwest. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo put an end to the Mexican-American State of war in 1848, Mexicans who chose to remain on territory ceded to the Us were promised citizenship and "the right to their belongings, language and culture."

But in most cases, Mexicans in America––those who later immigrated and those who lived in regions where the U.South. border shifted over––found themselves living as second-grade citizens. Land grants promised after the Mexican-American War were denied past the U.South. government, impoverishing many country-grant descendants in the area.

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Not White, But 'Chicano'

Throughout the early 20th century, many Mexican-Americans attempted to assimilate and fifty-fifty filed legal cases to push button for their community to be recognized as a class of white Americans, so they could gain civil rights. But past the late 1960s, those in the Chicano Motion abased efforts to blend in and actively embraced their full heritage.

Past adopting "Chicano" or "Xicano," activists took on a name that had long been a racial slur—and wore it with pride. And instead of only recognizing their Spanish or European groundwork, Chicanos now too historic their Indigenous and African roots.

Leaders in the movement pushed for alter in multiple parts of American society, from labor rights to education reform to land reclamation. Every bit Academy of Minnesota Chicano & Latino Studies professor Jimmy C. Patino Jr. says, the Chicano Movement became known equally "a move of movements." "In that location were lots of unlike issues," he says, "and the farmworker upshot probably was the beginning."

Chávez Leads Fight for Farmworkers' Rights

UFW co-founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, 1968.

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César Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became United Farm Workers (UFW) in California to fight for improved social and economic conditions. Chavez, who was born into a Mexican-American migrant farmworker family unit, had experienced the grueling conditions of the farmworker commencement-manus.

In January 1968, Chávez lent his vocalisation to a strike for grape workers, organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino labor organization. With the help of Chávez's advancement and Huerta'due south tough negotiating skills, as well as the persistent hard work of Filipino-American organizer, Larry Itliong, the marriage won several victories for workers when growers signed contracts with the union.

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"We are men and women who accept suffered and endured much and non but because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor," Chávez wrote in his 1969 "Letter of the alphabet from Delano." "The color of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our slain in contempo wars—all these burdens generation afterward generation have sought to demoralize us, nosotros are non agricultural implements or rented slaves, nosotros are men."

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Tijerina and the Push for Land Reclamation

Reies Lopez Tijerina, circa 1968.

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Side by side to labor, the land itself held important economic and spiritual significance among Chicanos, according to Patino. And civil rights activist Reies López Tijerina led the push to reclaim country confiscated past anglo settlers in violation of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Tijerina, who grew upwards in Texas working in the fields as young as age 4, founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Land Grant Alliance) in 1953 and became known equally "King Tiger" and "the Malcolm X of the Chicano Movement." His grouping held protests and even staged an armed raid on a small town in New Mexico, trying to reconquer properties for the Chicano community.

While efforts to repatriate state got caught up in the courts, Patino says, "it had this large effect in terms of mobilizing young people to sympathize the means the U.Southward. took land from Mexico—and from Mexican landowners in particular—and how this kind of empire-building was how Mexicans became part of the U.S."

Student Movement Embraces 'Aztlán'

The Aztec 'Codex Azcatitlan,' written betwixt the mid-16th and 17th centuries, detailing the history of the Mexica from their migration from Aztlán to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Christianization.

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Meanwhile, a parallel endeavor, led by poet and activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, organized Mexican-American students across the state. In a March 1969 gathering, some ane,500 attended the National Youth and Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado. At the conference, the students looked to their indigenous ancestors of the Aztec Empire and identified a land chosen "Aztlán."

In Aztec folklore, Aztlán was believed to have extended across northern Mexico and perhaps farther n into what is now the U.S. southwest. The students embraced the concept of Aztlán every bit a spiritual homeland and drafted El Program Espiritual De Aztlán as their manifesto for mass mobilization and system.

Ultimately, the Chicano Move won many reforms: The creation of bilingual and bicultural programs in the southwest, improved atmospheric condition for migrant workers, the hiring of Chicano teachers, and more Mexican-Americans serving as elected officials.

"A key term in Chicano Move activism was cocky-conclusion," says Patino, "the thought that Chicanos were a nation inside a nation that had the correct to self-determine their own future and really their ain decisions in their own neighborhood, in their own barrios."

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/chicano-movement

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