42 Facts About Chicano

Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States.

The label Chicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings.

The term Chicano was widely reclaimed by ethnic Mexicans in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent, diverging from the more assimilationist Mexican American term.

Chicano Movement faltered by the mid-1970s as a result of external and internal pressures.

Etymology of the term Chicano is not definitive and has been debated by historians, scholars, and activists.

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Chicano is believed by some scholars to be a Spanish language derivative of an older Nahuatl word Mexitli.

Demographic differences in the adoption of Chicano identity occurred; because of the prior vulgar connotations, it was more likely to be used by males than females, and less likely to be used among those of higher socioeconomic status.

Chicano identity was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s by Mexican Americans as a means of asserting their own ethnic, political, and cultural identity while rejecting and resisting assimilation into whiteness, systematic racism and stereotypes, colonialism, and the American nation-state.

Chicano identity was founded on the need to create alliances with other oppressed ethnic and Third World peoples while protesting U S imperialism.

Chicano identity was organized around seven objectives: unity, economy, education, institutions, self-defense, culture, and political liberation, in an effort to bridge regional and class divisions among people of Mexican descent.

Chicano'spanic was first promoted in the late 1970s and was first used on the 1980 U S Census.

Chicano'spanic was first defined by the U S Federal Office of Management and Budget's Directive No 15 in 1977, which defined a Chicano'spanic as "a person of Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South America or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.

From a popular perspective, the term Chicano became widely visible outside of Chicano communities during the American civil rights movement.

Chicano ethnic identity is born out of colonial encounters between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Alfred Arteaga writes how the Chicano arose as a result of the violence of colonialism, emerging as a hybrid ethnicity or race.

Black and Chicano communities have engaged in close political interactions "around civil rights struggles, union activism, and demographic changes, " especially during the Black Power and Chicano Movement struggles for liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alberto Varon writes that, while Chicano nationalism "created enduring social improvement for the lives of Mexican Americans and others" through political action, this brand of Chicano nationalism privileged the machismo subject in its calls for political resistance, which has since been critiqued by Chicana feminism.

At certain points in the 1970s, Chicano was the preferred term for reference to Mexican Americans, particularly in scholarly literature.

Chicano fell out of favor as a way of referring to the entire population in the 1980s following the decline of the Chicano Movement.

Reies Tijerina, who was a vocal claimant to the rights of Latin Americans and Mexican Americans and a major figure of the early Chicano Movement, wrote: "The Anglo press degradized the word 'Chicano'.

Central aspects of Chicano culture include lowriding, hip hop, rock, graffiti art, theater, muralism, visual art, literature, poetry, and more.

Chicano culture has had international influence in the form of lowrider car clubs in Brazil and England, music and youth culture in Japan, Maori youth enhancing lowrider bicycles and taking on cholo style, and intellectuals in France "embracing the deterritorializing qualities of Chicano subjectivity.

Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War was one of the largest demonstrations of Mexican-Americans in history, drawing over 30, 000 supporters in East L A Draft evasion was a form of resistance for Chicano anti-war activists such as Rosalio Munoz, Ernesto Vigil, and Salomon Baldengro.

Chicano communities have engaged in numerous forms of protest and direct action against the colonial education system, such as walkouts.

However, by the mid-1970s, much of the radicalism of earlier Chicano studies became deflated by the colonial academy, which aimed "to change the objective and purpose" of Chicano Studies programs from within.

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Not aspiring to assimilate in Anglo-American society, Chicano youth were criminalized for their defiance to cultural assimilation: "When many of the same youth began wearing what the larger society considered outlandish clothing, sporting distinctive hairstyles, speaking in their own language, and dripping with attitude, law enforcement redoubled their efforts to rid the streets of this emerging predatory class.

Chicano men develop their identity within a context of marginalization in Anglo society.

Chicana women in the normative Chicano family are relegated to a secondary and subordinate status.

Chicano spirituality has been described as a process of engaging in a journey to unite one's consciousness for the purposes of cultural unity and social justice.

Lowrider car clubs have emerged, most notably in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Maori youth enhancing lowrider bicycles and taking on cholo style, and elements of Chicano culture including music, lowriders, and the arts being adopted in Japan.

Chicano culture took hold in Japan in the 1980s and continues to grow with contributions from Shin Miyata, Junichi Shimodaira, Miki Style, Night Tha Funksta, and MoNa.

Chicano film is rooted in economic, social, and political oppression and has therefore been marginalized since its inception.

Scholar Charles Ramirez Berg has suggested that Chicano cinema has progressed through three fundamental stages since its establishment in the 1960s.

Second wave of Chicano film, according to Ramirez Berg, developed out of portraying anger against oppression faced in society, highlighting immigration issues, and re-centering the Chicano experience, yet channeling this in more accessible forms which were not as outright separatist as the first wave of films.

Second wave of Chicano film is still ongoing and overlaps with the third wave, the latter of which gained noticeable momentum in the 1990s and does not emphasize oppression, exploitation, or resistance as central themes.

Chicano literature tends to incorporate themes of identity, discrimination, and culture, with an emphasis on validating Mexican American and Chicano culture in the United States.

Chicano writers focus on challenging the dominant colonial narrative, "not only to critique the uncritically accepted 'historical' past, but more importantly to reconfigure it in order to envision and prepare for a future in which native peoples can find their appropriate place in the world and forge their individual, hybrid sense of self.

Chicano expanded his repertoire to include songs written in traditional genres of Mexican music, and during the farmworkers' rights campaign, wrote music in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

Chicano artists were beginning to develop their own style of hip hop.

Chicano rap is a unique style of hip hop music which started with Kid Frost, who saw some mainstream exposure in the early 1990s.

Chicano rock crossed paths of other Latin rock genres by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, such as Joe Bataan and Ralphi Pagan and South America (Nueva cancion).

Oppositional current of Chicano art was bolstered in the 1980s by a rising hip hop culture.