Chicano Movement Research Paper

Chicano - a political term made popular in the sixties with the Chicano Civil Rights Movement which followed the example of the Black Civil Rights Movement. The people of the Movement adopted the word Chicano for themselves just as the African Americans had adopted Black. The Chicano Movement fought for all people of the Southwest of Mexican descendancy. These people included those whose ancestors had been citizens in the southwest when it was Mexico before the United States occupied it in 1848. These people became citizens by default with all rights guaranteed to them under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Chicano Movement also included three waves of immigrants from Mexico: those who migrated because they were escaping the Mexican
This can be people who speak Spanish or whose ancestors spoke Spanish and includes, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other ethnic groups. It is a most unfair label because it denies the different histories, and dilutes the importance of each different culture by lumping them all under one umbrella. The term was given by the government during the Nixon administration.

Mestizo - for the scope of this class half-Spanish, half-Indian. When the conquistadores arrived in the Americas miscegenation took place between the Spaniards and the Indigenous women, thus produced a new race, the Mestizo, a mixture of Caucasian and Indian. Much of Chicano Literature is based on Indian folklore. The Mestizo is an element in Mexican American Studies -- meaning both the Indian and Spanish side of the Chicano. Therefore we will be studying literature that takes us back to ancient Mexico and Spain and brings elements of both cultures to produce Chicano
Their works were often inspirational and read at organizational meetings, boycotts and before protest marches.

The first Chicano poets included: Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado; Ricardo Sanchez and Alurista (Alberto Urista). Alurista coined the term Aztlan as the Chicano homeland. It gave Chicanos a sense of place. Aztlan had been the mythical homeland of the Aztecs which was north from Mexico, probably somewhere in the southwest United States.

In 1967 appeared the most influential Chicano Literary Magazine, El Gallo, initiating the publishing house El Quinto Sol (The Fifth Sun). El Quinto Sol emphasized the Chicano culture, language, themes and styles and a Mexica/Aztec identity and promoted the Spanish Language. The fifth sun referred to the Aztec belief in a period of cultural flowering that would take place some time in the future, in a fifth age that coincided with the rise of the Chicano movement. One of the first books published by Quinto Sol was an anthology in 1986, El Espejo/The Mirror, edited by Dr. Octavio Romano Paz and Herminio Rios. In 1970 El Quinto Sol instituted a national award for Chicano Literature, Premio Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun Award) which gave the winner $1000 and published their winning