Chicano

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rdf:langString Chicano

rdf:langString 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. While Mexican-American identity was related to encouraging assimilation into White American society and separating the community from the African-American political struggle, Chicano identity emerged among anti-assimilationist youth. Some belonged to the Pachuco subculture, and claimed the term (which had previously been a classist and racist slur). 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 (with many using the Nahuatl language), diverging from the more assimilationist Mexican American term. Chicano Movement leaders collaborated with Black Power movement. Chicano youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance. The Chicano Movement faltered by the mid-1970s as a result of external and internal pressures. It was under state surveillance, infiltration, and repression by U.S. government agencies, informants, and agent provocateurs, such as through COINTELPRO. At the same time, the Movement had a hyper-fixation on masculine pride and machismo, which excluded Chicanas and queer Chicanos from the movement. In addition, young people had fading interest in Chicano nationalist constructs, such as Aztlán. By the late 1970s and 1980s, assimilation and economic mobility became goals of many Mexican Americans in an era of conservatism, who instead began to identify as Hispanic or Latino. The term Hispanic emerged from a collaboration between the U.S. government and Mexican-American political elites in the Hispanic Caucus of Congress, who wanted to encourage assimilation into 'mainstream' American society by departing from the radical politics of Chicano identity and to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be the 'militant' Black Caucus. Chicano had "lost its fire", as summarized by Earl Shorris. However, Chicanos continued to participate in building the foundations of the feminist, gay and lesbian, and anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s, which maintained the term's relevance at the grassroots level. After a decade of Hispanic dominance, Chicano student activism amidst the early 1990s recession and the anti-Gulf War movement provoked a revival of Chicano identity and a demand for the expansion of Chicano studies programs. Chicanas, rather than Chicanos, became active at the forefront of Chicana movements and were critical in elevating Chicana identity. Though they faced critiques from "movement loyalists", Chicana feminists worked to address social problems of employment discrimination, environmental racism, healthcare, sexual violence, and capitalist exploitation in their communities and in solidarity with the Third World. While there had previously been widespread repression of the non-masculine and non-heteronormative Chicano subject in the Chicano Movement, Chicana feminists critiqued Chicano patriarchal authority as a legacy of colonization. They worked to "to liberate her entire people"; not to oppress men, but to be equal partners in the movement. Xicanisma, coined by Ana Castillo in 1994, gained some recognition among Chicana feminists, scholars and artists by the early 2000s and indicate efforts to shift away from the patriarchal overtones of Chicanismo. The X was also a symbolic gesture toward acknowledging Indigenous roots while recognizing the need to support Indigenous sovereignty. Building solidarity with undocumented immigrants also became important, despite issues of legal status and economic competitiveness at times working to maintain distance between groups. In the 2000s, the Chicano worldview increasingly became transnational, informed by and expanding upon earlier traditions of anti-imperialism and Third World solidarity in the Chicano Movement. Chicanas connected U.S. foreign interventions abroad with domestic racial politics, and committed themselves to "the struggle for social justice of citizens and non-citizens". They emphasized that, while their struggles were not identical, they were "equally rooted in power imbalances between the First World and the Third World." In the 2010s, the Chicano identity was revived based on ethnic pride, Indigenous consciousness, cultural expression, defense of immigrants, and the rights of women and queer people; some even referred to it as a 'renaissance'. In the late 2010s, Xicanx identity emerged, indicating another shift. The term has been described as openly inclusive to people beyond Mexican origin and representative of a connection to Indigeneity, decolonial consciousness, deconstructing the gender binary, and transnational solidarity.