What is it to be a Chicano and why are they so different from other Latinos in the US?
“Are you doing a report on Chicanos and have you come here? Well, there is no better place to start.”
We are in Chicano Park, in the heart of Barrio Logan, the oldest Mexican-American neighborhood in San Diego, and Roberto R. Pozos is showing us a mural.
The park, located under the freeway overpasses, houses one of the largest collections of outdoor paintings in the United States, reminding us that the place is a symbol of resistance.
“What you see was an appropriation, not something they gave us”, remarks R. Pozos.
The original neighborhood extended to the coast, and residents took advantage of the access to the sea. It was blocked at the beginning of World War II, when Navy bases were built.
With your comment dates back to the decade of 1087, when the construction of Interstate 5 and a bridge split the neighborhood in two. Part of its land was expropriated and more than 5. houses and businesses destroyed, replaced by the huge concrete columns on which today the colorful murals shine.
To compensate for what was lost, the neighbors demanded the construction of a park. But given that the municipal council had other plans for the plot and inspired by a civil rights movement that was gaining strength at the time, they occupied it.
They stayed there for twelve days, until they managed to stop the works, and they planted cacti, flowers and native trees. It was 1970.
“It is probably the only time in most of our lives when we had a voice, a voice about something we wanted,” said José Gómez, one of the leaders of the protest, in the documentary by 1960 titled Chicano Park . “You know, it’s not a big park, but it’s our park.”
Alejandro Morales and Roberto R. Pozos in front of one of the Chicano Park murals financed by Brown Image Car Club.
That claim of belonging, the cry to become visible and being heard, the spirit of resistance and defiance on which the park was built is the very DNA of the Chicano identity.
But what does Really? Who are the Chicanos?
Let’s go by parts.
First, what is it not?
Chicano/Chicana is an identity, but not ethnic or national.
“It is not connected to a nation”, Axejandro J. Gradilla tells BBC Mundo, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
So what is it?
“It is a point of view, how you see the world and how you interact politically and culturally”, one elected political identity, Gradilla clarifies.
Although the term was already used in The United States in a pejorative way, as a synonym for “street”, “rude”, “rogue” or “rogue”, acquired this other dimension in the decades of 1960 Y 1970.
It did so closely linked to an activism that encompassed a whole series of demands —from the resumption from land concessions and the vindication of the rights of agricultural workers, to the right to a quality education or to vote—and whose objective was to empower to the American population of Mexican descent.
“To empower oneself first it was it is necessary to call oneself “, explains Jennie Luna, also a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies but at California State University, Channel Islands.
Cristina is painting a representation of Mother Earth in Chicano Park.
“You had to look for a way of being called that would escape the colonial logic, that would not respond to the logic of the nation-state and would not be imposed by a government or borders”, he continues.
But why?
After all, they were the descendants of the native population from those US territories that previously belonged to Mexico (California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming), or from those who arrived in different migratory waves.
Which are the territories of Mexico that passed into the hands of the United States and why
What would Mexico be like if the United States had not appropriated more than half of its territory in the 19th century?
“They had been here for generations and they weren’t exactly Mexican. Many have never been to Mexico, their only link to the country was their grandparents, some didn’t even speak Spanish,” he explains.
The notion of border is what defines the Chicano community.
“We are in-between people“, he says in Spanglish Bill Esparza, journalist and food critic, who was born and raised in Northern California, “we are in the middle”.
“We were Americans, we grew up with that culture, but at the same time we had our own, and neither Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin nor Mexicans they saw us as part of them”, he explains.
The one chosen to give a name to that identity of those who were not “or from here or from there” was Chicano, with the same logic with which the African-American civil rights movement appropriated “ne gro”, giving value to a term that was often used to insult them, says Gradilla.
“I’m Latino, I don’t speak Spanish and I’m ashamed of it”
And where does it come from?
“There are different theories, but the most accepted suggests that it derives from the word mexica, the name given to themselves by the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan. Calling them Aztecs came later”, says Luna.
That is, those indigenous people who founded the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, who after conquest and independence is the country we know today.
Aztecs or Mexicas: who founded Mexico (and why is it confusing)?
Then, we all Are Mexican-Americans Chicanos?
“No, not all Mexican-Americans feel Chicanos. As always happens with questions of identity, this is not monolithic”, explains Luna.
For some, the term continues to have a pejorative connotation and they prefer not to be associated with it.
“I identify with it, although I didn’t grow up using it,” Melissa Hidalgo, who grew up on the border between Los Angeles and Orange County, tells BBC Mundo. , received her Ph. )The movement for the civil, agrarian and educational rights of the 21 Y 70 inspired the fight for Chicano Park.
“In my family Chicano was considered a dirty word — dirty word she says in English. They just wanted to work. For us, Chicanos were people who got into trouble—some trouble makers —. My parents tried to keep us away from that: according to them, we were Americans. They didn’t teach us Spanish “, he continues. “It was clearly the response to a factor of racism.”
Hidalgo, who was born in 1970 and belongs to a generation after the activism we talked about earlier and is known as the Movement Chicano, came to be labeled as such later. “I got there through my identification as a lesbian and feminist, by reading Chicana authors,” she says.
“But my sisters, my cousins, much of my family still doesn’t use the term. ‘What’s that? I’m Hispanic, or just American,’ they say. It is wanting to be assimilated, not wanting to be seen as something else”.
Neither it is synonym for Hispanic And Latino?
“In recent years, both Hispanics and Latinos have acquired the political connotation that Chicano already had, while that refer to a marginalized population”, points out Gradilla, looking for points in common.
“But the first two evoke a European lineage, while Chicano appeals to the indigenous root, native to the Americas”, he clarifies.
Hildago goes further: “It is important to reclaim the Chicano identity now, when we have umbrella terms like latinx that threaten to flatten or erase all our differences
“.
That of the “low riders”, who modify classic cars, is an aesthetic manifestation of the Chicano. “They didn’t want to see us, because we are going to make ourselves very obvious,” says Gradilla.
And what makes Chicanos different from other Latino communities in the US?
“What makes us different is that we are not an immigrant community“, answers Hidalgo.
“We cannot be associated with those who are now trying to cross the border, with the domestic workers who came from different Latin American countries and are being exploited in the US, we have nothing what to do with the Venezuelans or with the Cubans who sought asylum here”, he elaborates.
“We have been in this place for generations, some of us speak Spanish and others are not, we are assimilated although at the same time we continue to be victims of racism”, he continues.
“We are from the area of northern Mexico and southern California. That border region is what truly defines what it is to be Chicana.”
Back in Chicano Park, in San Diego, Cristina paints a representation of Mother Earth at the base of one of the columns that support the highway.
“Chicana is our blood, what we are. It means that we are native here and it manifests itself in everything we do, such as art, music, gastronomy”, she sums up.
“The border crossed us,” says Roberto R. Pozos in front of a part of an original Chicano Park mural.
“It is a spirit that we share with other communities that live in border areas: the coexistence of two cultures, the idea that the border crossed us,” he says otherwise R. Pozos, up on the scaffolding.
You were right: Chicano Park was a good starting point.
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