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           Chicano/a/x & Latino/a/x Movimientos                                        

           La Offrenda mural by Yreina Cervantes

                                                  "La Offrenda" (por Dolores Huerta) by Yreina Cervantes

Mexican Americans can rightfully claim deeper roots in certain regions of the United States than most other citizens, yet they are often confused with and portrayed as “illegal aliens.” Maintaining their cultural heritage while becoming citizens of the United States was a complicated process involving sporadic open conflict (like the Mexican American outlaws who fought white ranchers stealing their land), as well as subtle daily acts of resistance over many generations. The process of “becoming Mexican American,” as George Sánchez named it, was long, complex, and multifaceted.

Before the 1960s, many Mexican Americans, especially those in a small but influential middle class, believed that the best way to be accepted as Americans was to deny much of the Mexican and Indian side of their heritage and to assimilate into the white or “Anglo” world. But that world was most often hostile and exploitative rather than welcoming. Despite legal gains made by Mexican American civil rights groups like LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens, a group similar to the NAACP), the veterans’ group GI Forum, and others, Mexican Americans entered the 1960s segregated in barrios (Spanish for “neighborhoods”), with inferior schools and services, high unemployment, and a staggering rate of poverty. They were routinely subject to racist insults to their culture, as well as brutality from the police and discrimination from employers.

The once open border between the United States and Mexico had become a zone of harassment separating families and loved ones, and subjecting both Mexican visitors and Mexican American citizens to constant threats of deportation or refusal of reentry. But resistance was also present amid assimilation and acquiescence. The popular front social movement of the 1930s, driven by labor union struggles, shaped many future leaders of what would become the Chicano movement.

When the new “Chicano generation” rose to prominence in the 1960s, it had to negotiate the complications of multiple identities, challenging assimilation, building on activist models laid by predecessors, improvising new elements, and exorcising elements of internalized racism that hindered the creation of a newly politicized sense of self and community. Despite these difficulties, the efforts made by people of Mexican descent living in the United States to claim the right to their own dignity, identity, language, and culture broadened in the 1960s to become el movimiento, the Chicano movement. Later the movement came to recognize the central role that women (chicanas) always played in the movement, and still later recognized the presence of more than two genders such that the term chicano/a/x has become the more inclusive term.

Key movement groups furthering this process include the United Farm Workers led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in California, the Crusade for Justice in Colorado, La Raza Unida Party, the formation of the student groups MEChA and MAYO, the Brown Berets. Each of these groups brought particular regions, generations, constituencies and ideologies to bear on the process of extending the rights and power of Mexican Americans. 

Movements by other peoples of Latin American descent, collectively known as Latino/a/X, also arose in the 1960s. Groups like the Puerto Rican Young Lords in New York City and Chicago brought similar energy and organizing to work for their communities. While differences among and within Hispanic/Latino/a/X groups remain, in recent decades there has been increasing recognition of the need for coalitions to fight for the rights of both citizens and new immigrants from Central and Latin America.

While Chicano/a/X and Latino/aX movement artists worked and continue to work in many media, and while artists from many other racial and ethnic backgrounds have produced murals, most historians and critics of the Chicano/a movement note a special affinity between that movement and the community mural movement. Some sense of this affinity is conveyed by the fact that in the Los Angeles area alone , more than a thousand murals have been created since 1965. Chicano/LatinaX murals can also be found in great numbers throughout Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and in some midwestern cities, like Chicago, where large numbers of Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as/Xs live.

Featured Site

  • Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). Major site for the production and documenting of murals that play a key role in the Chicano/a/X movimiento and the wider world of multicultural progressive art and organizing. The Center's work includes the magnificent half-mile long Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, a segment of which is pictured below. The Wall was started in 1974 by Judith Baca and is the product of over her work with over 400 community youth.

                  Great Wall of LA mural section

Featured Books:

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jennifer Gonzalez, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo. (Duke University Press, 2019). Excellent collection of essays full of insights into the role of visual art in the Chicano/a/x movimiento.

Printing the Revolution: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, edited by Carlos Ramos. (Princeton U Press, 2020). Traces the long history of Chicanx graphic protest art from the 1960s to the present. Catalog accompanying the Smithsonian Museum exhibit of the same name, with one 100 images.

Some Key Sites

Books and Articles

  • Acuña, Rodolfo. A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–1975. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.
  • ——. Occupied America: A History of the Chicanos. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Long the standard movement-bred history.
  • Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Cara: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990. Excellent collection of woman-of-color creative theorizing in the spirit of Anzaldúa and Moraga’s classic This Bridge Called My Back.
  • Arredondo, Gabriela, et al., eds. Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Excellent collection. Most directly relevant isthe essay by Maylei Blackwell on Chicanas in the Chicano movement and Ana Nieto-Gomez’s response.
  • Bardacke, Frank. Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. London: Verso, 2011.
  • Betout, Lee. Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies. Minneapolis: U Minn P, 2011. Traces the symbolism (esp. Mexican and Indian) used in the Chicano/a movimiento.
  • Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie. “I Throw Punches for My Race but I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chica-Nos (Girl, Us) Chicanas—into the Movement Script.” In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg. New York: Routledge, 1992, 81–96. Classic essay that includes reflection on Chicana murals as political theory.
  • Chavez, Ernesto. “¡Mi Raza Primero!” (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Fine study of the Los Angeles Brown Berets and their movement context.
  • Cockcroft, Eva, Weber, John, and Cockcroft, Jim. Toward A People’s ArtNew York: Dalton, 1977.
  • Cockcroft, Eva, and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, eds. Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals. Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990. Four excellent, richly illustrated essays on the mural movement in the context of the Chicano/a movement culture.
  • Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing in the Immigrant Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
  • Delgado Bernal, Dolores. "Chicana School Resistance." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999.
  • Garcia, Jerry and Gilberto Garcia (Eds). Memory, Community and Activism : Mexican Migration and Labor in the Pacific Northwest. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005.
  • García, Alma M., and Mario T. Garcia, eds. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. Traces the evolution of Chicana feminism from the early movement days to the 1990s.
  • García, Ignacio. Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Brief overview study that gives short shrift to Chicanas but offers useful explanations of major ideologies in el movimiento.
  • ——. United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Full-length study of the major attempt of the southwest branch of the movement to enter the electoral arena with a third party.
  • Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Chicano Art inside/outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Brilliant interpretative study of the major Chicano art exhibit of the 1990s, analyzing the history of race, class, gender, and sexuality dynamics in the history of the Chicano/a movement as embodied in the art works.
  • ——, ed. Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003. Excellent collection on Chicano/a sexual and gender politics in “rasquache aesthetics” in such often-dismissed art genres as painting on velvet; includes discussion of this aesthetic’s impact on the Chicano/a movement.
  • Goldman, Shifra M. Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Important study comparing and showing links between the politics of U.S. and Latin American murals and other visual arts.
  • Gomez-Quiñones, Juan. Mexican Students por la Raza: The Chicano Student Movement in Southern California, 1967–1977. Santa Barbara, CA: Editorial La Causa, 1978.
  • Gonzalez, Jennifer, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo, eds. Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019).
  • Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky.” In Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001. Major writings of Denver’s most well known Chicano activist.
  • Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. Rich contextualization of the first major exhibit centering on the Chicano/a movement as an artistic force.
  • Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Historical study that places el movimiento into the context of long-range struggles by Americans of Mexican descent.
  • Gutierrez, Jose Angel. The Making of a Chicano Militant. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
  • Gutiérrez, Ramon A. “Community, Patriarchy and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History,”The American Quarterly 45/1 (March 1993): 44-72.
  • Martinez, Elizabeth (Bettita). “De Colores” Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. Boston: South End Press, 1998. Excellent activist-focused work on the future of Chicano/a activism in relation to wider movements.
  • Mendoza, Marisa B., "Canciones del Movimiento Chicano/Songs of the Chicano Movement: The Impact of Musical Traditions on the 1960s Chicano Civil Rights Movement" (2012). Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 129.
  • Muñoz, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso, 1989. Influential early overview of the Chicano/a movement.
  • Navarro, Armando. Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Full-length study of MAYO, the major Chicano/a youth group in Texas and parts of the Southwest.
  • Pardo, Mary S. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance In Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
  • Perez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Brilliant reconceptualization of Chicano/a history that places Chicanas at the center of the movement and the wider arc of history.
  • Quesada U, Gomez L and Vidal-Ortiz S. Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latinao LGBT Activism. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015
  • Rosales, F. Arturo. ¡Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996. General history to accompany the documentary film series of the same name.
  • Tijerina, Reies López, and Jose Angel Gutierrez. They Called Me “King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000. The story of the Hispano land grant movement straight from the tiger’s mouth.
  • Treviño, Jesús Salvador. Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement. Houston, TX: Arte Público, 2001. Interesting take on the movement from a filmmaker involved in the struggle.
  • Vigil, Ernesto. The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Comprehensive study of Colorado’s most influential Chicano/a movement organization.
  • Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Brilliant reinterpretation of Chicano/a culture, including the role of murals as claims on public space.
  •  Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas. "The Chicano Movement / The Movement of Chicano Art." In Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Excellent overview of art in the movement.

Multmedia

"Art of Resistance." 1994. Directed by Susana Ortiz. Documentary film on the relations between Chicano/a art and the Chicano/a movement.

"Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985." Artist Round-Table Discussion. 1990. Video dialogue among artists from this pivotal exhibition.

"¡Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement". 1996. Four-episode documentary, including archival footage and interviews with many key activists and art activists.

Further Research