Chicano Movement

Background

While young people agitating for civil rights in the late 1960s thought they were unique, in fact struggles for over a century demonstrated that Chicana/o movement activists inherited a long tradition of social activism and political engagement. The 1960s were unique, however, in creating and emphasizing a unique Chicana/o national identity as separate from that of other ethnic groups in the United States. A number of events coalesced to make this the moment for change: the black civil rights and Black Power movements; the election of President John F. Kennedy and the succession of President Lyndon B. Johnson, protests against the war in Vietnam; the Great Society and War on Poverty programs of the 1960s, the lapse of the Bracero Program, a Chicano Renaissance among artists of various media; and increased numbers of Mexican American graduates from high schools and colleges.

Fundamental to El Movimiento was the notion of Chicanismo, or a unique national identity. Some movement activists were overtly separatists and rejected the tactics of previous generations of Mexican Americans who attempted to gain equality through assimilation, acculturation, or hybridization. Chicanas/os began referring to the southwestern United States as Aztlán, or the Chicano nation. Aztlán was the mythic homeland of the Mexican Aztecs and came to represent the land that was taken by the United States from Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–48) under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Leaders created a new sense of the American normative in which “brown was beautiful.”

Organizations

Major organizations of the Chicano movement ranged from labor and education to religious and professional, such as the United Farm Workers of America, founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in Delano, California, in 1962; the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, the Federal Alliance of Land Grant, founded in New Mexico under Reies Lopez Tijerina in 1963; the Denver, Colorado, Crusade for Justice founded by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales; and Partido de la Raza Unida, created from the Mexican American Youth Organization by José Ángel Gutiérrez in Crystal City, Texas, in 1970. The movement also included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), established in San Antonio in 1967, and a Chicana/o-liberation-theology-based organization out of Los Angeles called Catolicos por la Raza (CPLR), or Catholics for the Community. There were many other organizations across the country, but these are the most canonized within Chicano/a studies.

Key Events

A number of events highlighted the activism of the era and provided key documents to understanding the ideology and logic of the Chicano movement. In 1968, students in East Los Angeles, California, across south Texas, and throughout the southwest staged walkouts of educational institutions they found discriminatory and unequal, demanding greater voice in the content of the curriculum, the daily running of their schools, and the leadership they would follow. They converged at the Denver Youth Conference in March 1969, where they adopted El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a manifesto about the new emerging identity of Chicanas/os.

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