In the 1960s, a radicalized Mexican-American movement began to push for a new identification. The Chicano movement, aka El Movimiento, advocated social and political empowerment through chicanism or cultural nationalism.
As activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales said in a 1967 poem, “La raza! / Méjicano! / Español! / Latino! / Chicano! / Or as my name is, / I look the same. “
Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales speaking outside a police building to members of his organization, The Crusade for Justice, 1969.
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Until the 1960s, Americans of Mexican descent had suffered decades of discrimination in the western and southwestern United States. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexicans who chose to remain in territory ceded to the United States were promised citizenship and “the right to their property, their language. and their culture ”.
But in most cases, Mexicans in America – those who later immigrated and those who lived in areas where the US border moved – found themselves living as second-class citizens. The land grants promised after the US-Mexico War were refused by the US government, impoverishing many descendants of land grants in the region.
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Not white, but ‘Chicano’
Throughout the early 20th century, many Americans of Mexican descent attempted to assimilate and even filed lawsuits to lobby for their community to be recognized as a class of white Americans, so that they can obtain civil rights. But by the end of the 1960s, members of the Chicano movement gave up their efforts to merge into their entirety and actively embraced their full heritage.
By adopting “Chicano” or “Xicano,” activists took a name that had long been a racial insult – and wore it with pride. And instead of recognizing only their Spanish or European origin, the Chicanos also celebrated their indigenous and African roots.
Leaders of the movement pushed for change in many parts of American society, from labor rights to educational reform to land reclamation. As Jimmy C. Patino Jr., a University of Minnesota professor of Chicano and Latin studies, puts it, the Chicano movement has come to be known as “a movement of movements.” “There were a lot of different problems,” he says, “and the farm worker problem was probably the beginning.”
Chávez leads the fight for the rights of agricultural workers
UFW co-founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, 1968.
Arthur Schatz / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
César Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became United Farm Workers (UFW) in California to fight for better social and economic conditions. Chavez, who was born into a family of Mexican-American migrant farm workers, had experienced the grueling conditions of the farmer firsthand.
In January 1968, Chávez lent his voice to a strike by vineyard workers, organized by the Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino labor organization. With the help of Chávez’s advocacy and Huerta’s tough negotiating skills, as well as the hard work of Filipino-American organizer Larry Itliong, the union achieved several victories for workers when producers signed contracts with the union.
“We are men and women who have suffered a lot and endured a lot, not only because of our abject poverty, but because we have been kept poor,” Chávez wrote in his “Letter from Delano” of 1969. “La the color of our skin, the languages of our cultural and indigenous origins, the lack of formal education, exclusion from the democratic process, the number of our deaths in recent wars – all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, we are not farm implements or rented slaves, we are men.
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Tijerina and the push for land reclamation
Along with work, the land itself had significant economic and spiritual importance among the Chicanos, according to Patino. And civil rights activist Reies López Tijerina led the campaign to reclaim land confiscated by Anglo-Saxon settlers in violation of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s 1848 treaty.
Tijerina, who grew up in Texas working in the fields from the age of 4, founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Land Grant Alliance) in 1953 and became known as “King Tiger” and “Malcolm X of the Chicano Movement”. “His group staged protests and even organized an armed raid on a small town in New Mexico, trying to reclaim property for the Chicano community.
While land repatriation efforts have been overtaken by the courts, says Patino, “it had this great effect in terms of mobilizing young people to understand how the United States took land from Mexico – and from Mexican landowners in it. particular – and how this kind of empire building was how Mexicans became a part of the United States ”
The student movement adopts “ Aztlán ”
The Aztec “Codex Azcatitlan”, written between 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 effort, led by poet and activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, has organized Mexican-American students across the country. At a rally in March 1969, some 1,500 people attended the National Youth and Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado. At the conference, the students looked to their indigenous ancestors in the Aztec Empire and identified a land called “Aztlán”.
In Aztec folklore, Aztlán is said to have spread across northern Mexico and possibly further north into what is now the southwestern United States. The students adopted the concept of Aztlán as a spiritual homeland and drafted El Plan Espiritual De Aztlán as their manifesto for mass mobilization and organization.
In the end, the Chicano movement won many reforms: creating bilingual and bicultural programs in the southwest, improving conditions for migrant workers, hiring Chicano teachers and more Mexican Americans. as elected officials.
“A key term in the activism of the Chicano Movement was self-determination,” says Patino, “the idea that the Chicanos were a nation within a nation that had the right to determine for itself its future and really its own decisions in their own neighborhood, in their own barrios.
