Response 123

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9 Chicana, Chicano, Chican@, Chicanx Sheila Marie Contreras

Self- naming is political, ideological, and resistant.

“Chicano” remains thus inflected, true to its emergence

in activist communities of the 1960s and 1970s to

signify self- determination, working- class origins, and

a critique of social relations of power. Although not

entirely clear who first appropriated “Chicano” for this

usage, it is generally accepted that at one time the word

circulated in Mexican Spanish as a negative reference to

the “lower classes.” Its appropriation by students and

activists transformed it into an empowering alternative

to “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” or “Hispanic.” To

name oneself as “Chicana” or “Chicano” is to assert a

gendered, racial, ethnic, class, and cultural identity in

opposition to Anglo- American hegemony and state-

sanctioned practices of representing people of Mexican

descent in the United States. As it evokes the “radical”

politics of cultural nationalism, “Chicano” stands

against the institutionally normative “Hispanic,” as

well as the linguistically insistent “Latino” (Alcoff 2005).

Always associated by Chicanas and Chicanos with

State attempts to classify, homogenize, and deracinate,

“Hispanic” is typically linked to conservative political

values, even as it is often the name chosen in English

by many in the U.S. Southwest who in Spanish might

call themselves tejana or mejicano. In the U.S. Southwest,

“Mexican American” most often appears in academic

program names and Chicana and Chicano studies

scholars tend to use “Mexican American” and “Chicana/

Chicano” interchangeably.

Conventional wisdom holds that a “Chicana” or

“Chicano” is a Mexican American who knows their own

history. “Mexican American” is understood to refer to

a person of Mexican descent born in the United States,

while “history” refers both to the sixteenth- century

Spanish conquest of Mexico and to the nineteenth-

century Anglo- American colonization and settlement

of the southwestern United States. The meaning is ex-

panded to include those who may have migrated from

Mexico as children, but were socialized and educated in

the United States. Journalist Rubén Salazar, in an article

published after his death in 1970, wrote that “a Chi-

cano is a Mexican- American with a non- Anglo image of

himself” (1970, B7). His definition establishes the speci-

ficity of Chicana and Chicano identity in relation to

other Spanish- speaking communities, and also implies

that most people of Mexican descent in the U.S. do not

know their own history. Salazar’s emphasis on historical

knowledge is a commentary on the absence of Mexican

American content across the K- 12 curriculum, which is

again being recognized in the U.S. popular media (Rich

2012). This suppression of historical and cultural knowl-

edge enforced what Salazar and others would call “An-

glo images” of Mexicans that exist in popular culture.

Neither positive nor uplifting, the representations have

been simplistic and narrow, focusing on impoverished

workers, lawless gangsters, and female vixens, to name

a few (Berg 2002). Consequently, the structuring and

packaging of curricular material throughout the U.S.

education system, in which people of Mexican descent

have had little input, has assured the alienation of Mexi-

can Americans.

Chicano educational activists began focusing on

curricular content during a period of U.S. political ac-

tivism from the 1960s to the early 1980s known as “the

Chicano movement,” or “el movimiento.” The ideologi-

cal base was cultural nationalism, modulated at times

Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah R. Vargas, et al., New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=5358074. Created from socal on 2021-08-20 20:24:12.

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C h I C A n A , C h I C A n o , C h I C A n @ , C h I C A n x S H e i l a m a r i e C o n T r e r a S 33

by Marxist social critiques of capitalist class systems or

new appreciations for Indigenous ancestry and history.

The Indigenist forms of Chicano nationalism, originally

influenced by post- revolutionary Mexican cultural pol-

itics, have been most enduring. In art, literature, and

cultural practices such as danza, activists and artists

reclaimed Indigenous influences on the historical mes-

tizaje, or mixture, that produced present- day Mexicans

and Mexican Americans, or mestizas/os (mixed- race or

mixed- blood people). Filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza

elaborates in the “Pride and Prejudice” episode of the

PBS television series Latino Americans (2013): “When we

identified with the word ‘Chicano,’ our understanding

was that it was the same word that is the root word for

‘Mexico,’ which is the name of the Aztec Indians, and

their name was ‘Mexica.’ . . . And when you drop off the

first syllable, ‘Me,’ you get ‘Xica,’ which becomes ‘Chi-

cano.’ MeXICANO. And that’s what we were.” The “X”

is here pronounced “sh,” a feature of Mexican Spanish

that documents the impact of the Indigenous language

of Nahuatl on the European language of the colonizers.

Los Angeles high school teacher Sal Castro became

a formative influence on Esparza and other students

when he started to integrate educational material that

affirmed Mexican cultural identity. He was instrumen-

tal in the 1968 Chicano student walkouts, or “blowouts,”

modeled on the huelgas, or labor strikes, used as a ne-

gotiation tactic by the United Farm Workers. Students

walked out of class in protest of treatment by school-

teachers and administrators, curricula that did not

include Mexican American history, art, or literature,

and the school- to- military and school- to- prison pipe-

lines. Their demands included more Mexican American

content in classes and the hiring of Mexican Ameri-

can teachers and administrators. Their efforts also im-

pacted higher education as Chicano studies programs

and departments were established, primarily in the U.S.

Southwest, and especially at the community college

level in California (Acuña 2011). But “Chicano studies”

was never the term of choice on the East Coast of the

United States, where Latina/o communites had origins

throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. And as

political conflict and military repression forced the mi-

gration of thousands of Central and other Latin Ameri-

cans in the 1980s, Latina/o communities throughout

the United States became more diverse. In California,

however, the demographic reality had already been

uniquely acknowledged and documented in San Fran-

cisco State University’s early decision to forgo “Chicano

Studies” in favor of “Raza Studies” and, later, “Latino

Studies.” Similarly, in Detroit, Wayne State University’s

1972 program began as the “Center for Chicano/Boricua

Studies.” Other Chicano studies programs in California

and the Midwest have made recent name changes to re-

flect more accurately the populations they serve and to

move beyond narrow definitions of the field. Over the

last decade, we have seen a preference for “Latino” (or

Latina/o) in academic program names in recognition of

the diversity of Spanish- speaking people in the United

States (U.S. Census Bureau 2015). This reconfiguring of

Chicana/o studies to Latina/o studies has broadened the

scope of scholarly activity, transforming teaching con-

tent and enriching the experiences of students, faculty,

staff, and community engaged in and by the study of

U.S. Latinas/os.

The blowouts show the transformative potential of

positive curricular intervention and the significance

of formal education as a site of identity- formation and

politicization. It is true that many Mexican Americans

“become” Chicana or Chicano in college, but these

identity shifts have been made possible by social move-

ments. The political activism of the Chicano movement

created academic communities of students and faculty

and resulted in curricular material that included U.S.

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Mexicans. Nevertheless, most academic knowledge con-

tinues to emanate from a perspective that is decidedly

European, heterosexual, and male.

As a term of self- identification, “Chicano” is not ac-

cepted by all who could claim it. There is considerable

debate about the extent to which the larger Mexican-

descent community ever adopted “Chicano.” Some

scholars hold that it was popular primarily among

students, with little acceptance outside of academic

activist circles, as Albert Camarillo wrote in 2013. Mau-

rilio Vigil (1977) argues that older, more conservative

Mexican Americans did not accept the radical politi-

cal ideology associated with “Chicano,” while Juan

Gómez- Quiñones contends that the term was “rejected

as pejorative on the political right and by middle class

people while at the grass roots it was questioned be-

cause Mexicano was preferred” (1978, 13). José Limón

(1979) dismisses the notion that Mexican Americans

were simply political conservatives who did not like

the “radical” ideology of “Chicano.” Instead, he writes,

the broader range of Mexican- descent people did not

identify with the “style” of its usage, which was “funda-

mentally a rejection of a performance context judged as

inappropriate for this essentially folkloric term” (1979,

20). But Martha Cotera, in her introduction to her 1976

Diosa y Hembra (Goddess and Woman), announces that

“the term Mexicana, Chicana, Mexican American and

Hispana woman is used throughout interchangeably

simply because the author and the Central Texas com-

munity she lives within does exactly this” (1976, 2).

Membership in the group of those who would call

themselves “Chicano” was thus self- regulated by in-

dividual choice, but it was also regulated by the col-

lective. Not all Mexican- descent subjects were readily

incorporated into these nationalist, activist communi-

ties; women and those who were gay, lesbian, bisexual,

or trans* tended to be excluded. Richard T. Rodríguez

reminds us that “gay, lesbian, and feminist struggles

were often seen as antithetical to Chicano liberation”

(2011, 113). Dominant Chicano political and activist

critique of social relations of power did not willingly or

easily extend to analyses of how gender and sexuality

inflected power, a reality exposed by Cotera and other

Chicana feminists. And when it appears here, the use

of the masculine form of the noun “Chicano” is inten-

tional, meant to reflect the truth of el movimiento: it was

heteronormative, male- dominated, and male- centered.

Language purists may argue that the use of the mas-

culine “Chicano” is simply the correct standard Span-

ish grammar for mixed- gender groups of people. Early

Chicana feminists never accepted this logic, and were

critical of masculinist politics from the beginnings of

movement activism (A. García 1997; Blackwell 2011).

Angie Chabram said it brilliantly: “And she enters move-

ment discourse with her own name, a name which

constructs her both as Chican- a and a woman and sub-

verts the twin myths of malinchismo and assimilation”

(Chabram- Dernersesian 1992, 86). Chabram, like many

Chicana feminists, critiques nationalism while still

claiming national belonging. She speaks to the power

of self- naming, while also countering misogynist inter-

pretations of the life of one of Mexico’s most significant

female historical figures, La Malinche / Doña Marina,

interpreter and advisor to Hernán Cortés. Inserting this

feminine form of the noun— ChicanA— into Chicano

movement discourse demanded inclusion and chal-

lenged sexism in the movement, while at the same time

refusing to negate community.

This Chicana critique of Chicano politics circulated

through verbal interventions at local, regional, and

national conferences, as well as in publishing venues

(Cotera 1976; Martínez 1998). Adelaida del Castillo’s

groundbreaking 1974 essay on La Malinche was es-

pecially transformative (1977). Poetic challenges to

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movement patriarchy have existed since the 1970s pe-

riod of Chicana literary history; examples include Lorna

Dee Cervantes’s 1975 “Para un Revolucionario” (1993)

and Carmen Tafolla’s 1978 “La Malinche” (1993). The

choice of whether or not to align with feminist prin-

ciples, however, was a topic of intense debate among

women in the movement (Longeaux y Vásquez 1997). In

1982, women created Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cam-

bio Social (MALCS) to provide space for initiatives and

agendas that they were at that time unable to pursue in

the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Stud-

ies (NACCS).

Over time, these critiques have become more cen-

tral to the field as scholars have refused to forget Chi-

cana feminist inter ventions, acknowledging their

foundational impact on contemporary scholarship

and research. This recognition became evident as aca-

demic convention shifted, for the sake of brevity, to

“Chicana/o” in place of the longer “Chicana and Chi-

cano.” Around the turn of the last century, a new itera-

tion emerged, “Chican@,” part aesthetic response to the

cumbersome punctuation of the former abbreviation,

part recognition of emergent digital identities, and part

as an instance of queering or making queer. Another

variation, which has been in use since at least the 1980s,

is “Xicana” or “Xicano,” a reference to the Indigenous

origins of Mexican- descent people. Poets Alurista (1981)

and Cherríe Moraga (2011) have used this spelling in

work that spans thirty years.

More recently, language and letters have again

shifted. A new iteration gaining acceptance and usage

recenters the exploration of race, class, gender, sexual-

ity, and relations of power: “Chicanx.” The “x” signifies

fluidity and mobility, setting aside the conventions of

ideological, philosophical, and medical binaries that

assign humans to one gender identity out of two when

they are born. The “x” in “Chicanx” is nonbinary; it

acknowledges self- determinations that refuse immov-

able assignments of identity. This transformation of

“Chicano,” from its beginnings in narrow understand-

ings of subjectivity and experience, contains within

it these histories of internal critique and oppositional

struggle. The “x,” now at the end, rather than the be-

ginning, urges us onward, advancing a social analysis

that honors mobile, uncategorized ways of being and

expression.

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