Chicano Movement

Goals

• Civil rights

• Empowerment = “Chicano Power”

• Larger goals of Chicano Movement were ambivalent

  • Based on cultural nationalism (bonding of an ethnic group based on common cultural heritage) focused on monolithic Chicano experience

Strategies

Significance

• Increase in Latino political influence

• Major reforms for Latinos

• Empowering ethnic identity

• Part of the history of advancing social justice

• Made Chicanos and other Latinos into major political actors for the first time

• More access to colleges and universities

• Advanced struggled for social justice and democracy in the US

• Farm workers’ insurgency lead to initial success of farm workers’ union

• Land grant movement upholding land rights of rural Mexican Americans in New Mexico

• Student movement

• Anti-war movement over U.S. role in the Vietnam War

• Promoted organization of the independent political party La Raza Unida Party

• Immigration, especially protection of the undocumented immigrants

• Chicana feminist movement

• Inspired major artistic and literary revival of artists, poets, and writers who supported the movement

Key Organizations

• UFW (1966)

• MEChA (1969)

• Brown Berets (1966)

Key People

• Rodolfo Gonzales

• Caesar Chavez

• Dolores Huerta

• Reies Tijerina

Key Events

• Began in 1930s, occurred between 1965 and 1975

• Grape Strike (1965)

Early Civil Rights Movement compared to the Mexican American Generation

• Organized Activism

• Use of Courts to Challenge discrimination

• School desegregation

• Voting rights and political representation

• Approach to Civil Rights (integration vs. community empowerment)

• Tactics and rhetoric (legal activism vs. militant and radical)

• Cultural identity (assimilation vs cultural nationalism)

• Goals for the furutre (equal rights within framework vs. broader structural changes)