- published: 01 Oct 2011
- views: 166678
The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, also called the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, also known as El Movimiento, is an extension of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement which began in the 1940s with the stated goal of achieving Mexican American empowerment.
The Chicano Movement encompassed a broad cross section of issues—from restoration of land grants, to farm workers' rights, to enhanced education, to voting and political rights, as well as emerging awareness of collective history. Socially, the Chicano Movement addressed what it perceived to be negative ethnic stereotypes of Mexicans in mass media and the American consciousness. Edward J. Escobar sleeder [1] from The Journal of American History describes some of the negativity of the time in stating, "The conflict between Chicanos and the LAPD thus helped Mexican Americans develop a new political consciousness that included a greater sense of ethnic solidarity, an acknowledgment of their subordinated status in American society, and a greater determination to act politically, and perhaps even violently, to end that subordination. While most people of Mexican descent still refused to call themselves Chicanos, many had come to adopt many of the principles intrinsic in the concept of chicanismo." Chicanos did this through the creation of works of literary and visual art that validated the Mexican American ethnicity and culture.
The terms Chicano/Chicana (also spelled Xicano/Xicana) are used as reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. However, those terms have a wide range of meanings in various parts of the world. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement, mainly among Mexican Americans, especially in the movement's peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Mexicans, "Chicano" meant "poorest of the poor" but during the Civil Rights movement, they used the word to unite themselves.
The origin of the word "chicano" is disputed. Some critics claim it is a shorterned form of "Mexicano" ("Mexican" in Spanish). The word "Mexico" as spoken in its original Nahuatl, and by the Spaniards at the time of the conquest, was pronounced originally with a "sh" sound ("Mesh-ee-co"), as opposed to current pronunciation, and was transcribed with an "x" as was the usage in Spanish at the time. The difference between the pronunciation and spelling of "chicano" and "mexicano" stems from the fact that the modern-day Spanish language experienced a change in pronunciation regarding a majority of words containing the "x" (for example: México, Ximenez, Xavier, Xarabe). The "sh" sound was dropped[clarification needed] and in most, but not all, cases accompanied by a change of spelling ("x" to "j"). The word "Chicano" in the US was evidently not affected by this change.