Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.Video. NLCC Educational Media, 1996.From Chicano!The 1960s was a turbulent decade in American history, fraught with conflicts over isssues from Civil Rights to the war in Vietnam. The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, one of the least studied social movements of the 1960s, encompassed a broad cross section of issues—from restoration of land grants, to farm workers rights, to enhanced education, to voting and political rights. The video documentary Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, a four-part documentary series, corrects this oversight. Ground-breaking for the material it covers, the series is one of the few to address the history of Mexican Americans in general and that of the Chicano Movement in particular; it is an indispensable resource for scholars and students.
Chicano Movement For Beginners 11
Not only do the four segments illuminate distinct aspects of the movement (land, farm workers, politics, urban issues, education), but they also attempt to delineate the diversity of the Chicano Movement not merely through causes, but also through geography and demographics. The viewer learns of rural problems in California which are in stark contrast to those of New Mexico. The documentary distinguishes between issues surrounding the high school walk outs in L.A., as opposed to those behind the Crystal City, Texas walk outs. The former occurred over drop-out rates and lack of recognition of Chicano culture and history, the latter due to Chicanas being barred from cheerleading. The students from L.A. never really had their concerns addressed, while the students in Crystal City won their cause, leading in part to the galvanization of the Raza Unida Party. We learn of the differing political agendas of Chicano leaders across the Southwest: Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and California (Arizona is conspicuously left out of the equation).
While the discussion of the broad spectrum of issues across the Southwest is a strength of the series, it is also a weakness. Those whose only exposure to Mexican American history is through this series, would be left with the impression that Mexican Americans only live in the Southwest and that only the states covered had active Chicano movements. This, of course, is not the case. Alurista From Chicano!Strong Chicano and Mexican American communities exist throughout the country and nearly all of them, particularly those in the Midwest, agitated for change. They all had their own movements at the local level and participated in activities at the national level. This shortcoming is, of course, a function of the series' length, and the filmmakers do make token references to other parts of the country. For example, during a segment on the Crusade for Justice and the first Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in 1967, the poet Alurista remarks how he was amazed to see so many Chicanos from all over the country, even Kansas. "I didn't know," he remarks incredulously, "there were any Mexicans in Kansas!" Similarly, in the series' discussion of the growth of La Raza Unida Party, narrator Henry Cisneros notes that chapters of the party proliferated throughout the country, even in Nebraska.
Chicanos and Mexicanos who have pride in who we are do not want to be Hispanic or European. Chicanos are people of Mexican descent born in the United States. Some Central Americans identify with or (see themselves) as Chicano. Mexicanos are Mexicans born in Mexico. Mexicano comes from the word Mexica (Meh-chi-ca), which is what the original people of Mexico called themselves. Chicano comes from the word Mechicano. Chicano is more of an aggressive, proud and assertive political and cultural statement than Mexican American.
Unlike most civil rights books, Civil Rights For Beginners focuses less on major leaders and more on the ordinary African Americans who provided the backbone of the successful protests and demonstrations. Moreover, it deals with the expressive culture of the movement, surveying key developments in literature, music, visual art, and film, all of which served both as integral features of the movement as well as contributing to its enduring legacy.
The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies is the academic organization that serves academic programs, departments and research centers that focus on issues pertaining to Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Latina/os. The Association was formed in 1972, during the height of the Chicana/o movement, calling for the development of a space where scholarship and Chicana/o students could develop their talents in higher education. For more than 30 years, students, faculty, staff, and community members have attended the NACCS annual conference to present their scholarly papers--many of which have spun into important intellectual pillars.
Diego Velázquez was born in Seville, Spain and was a prolific painter of the Baroque movement. He had many prominent patrons, the King and the Pope among them. Other famous artists from Spanish-speaking countries have painted their versions of Las Meninas such as Pablo Picasso and Fernando Botero.
David Alfaro Siqueiros a leading personality of the muralism art movement in Mexico and Latin America. He was convinced that art was one of the main vehicles to create and transmit popular consciousness.
Known simply as Goya, he was born and raised in Spain but also lived in France and Italy. He was a great admirer of Diego Velázquez and started-off his career imitating his artwork. Francisco was the precursor of the impressionist movement.
Chicano Movement was the answer from Mexican Americans to the challenges of the entire Civil Rights era. Chicanos recognized that they were also oppressed in terms of labor opportunities, education quality, and were treated as second-class citizens. Their political fight, thus, was aimed to achieve positive upheaval in three main directions: rights of farmworkers, restoration of land, and educational reforms. Although many Chicano initiatives and protests failed, Mexican Americans gain a needed social offset and foothold to continue the movement, which is still ongoing to some extent. The goal of this paper is to find out and discuss the main achievements of the Chicano Movement, which is an essential legacy for current Mexican Americans.
In the 1960s, Mexican Americans were fighting for unionization for agricultural workers to achieve equal rights and higher wages. Dolores Huerta, a famous labor leader of the movement, created the Agriculture Workers Association, which in 1959 was incorporated in AWOC (Montoya 42). Cesar Chavez, who was raised by impoverished farmworkers, established the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, another prominent organization (Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez 95). He found this organization after the CSO refusal to back his initiative to organize farmworkers. Together with Huerta, he had been building the union for three years, meeting with farm laborers across California.
In 1964, Chavez, along with other community leaders, put pressure on the government what helped to end the Bracero program. Moreover, in 1965 two leading organizations united to organize a famous grape growers boycott in Delano. The aim of roving pickets of grape pickers, which targeted different fields every day, was to raise the wage for workers and make growers recognize United Farm Workers as a union (Montoya 59). The movement applied various methods of striking, such as calling upon the consumers not to buy table grapes, organizing a 25-day hunger march to Sacramento, attracting media attention, etc. Those civil rights efforts were rewarded only in 1970 when growers conducted deals with UFW, recognizing them as a union.
As a result, the movement made employers sign union contracts and reorganize the industry what put an end to the discrimination and favoritism of growers. The activists achieved better pay, housing, and working conditions for Chicano workers. The UFW actions were successful due to its dual nature of civil rights and union struggle. It seemed that this organization was the first union of farmworkers, which could last for a long time.
Tijerina encouraged hundreds of Mexican Americans to demand land restitution and popularized the property rights movement in the 1960s with the help of the newspaper column and radio program (Montoya 70). In 1963, he founded the Federal Alliance of Land Grants, which initially dealt with 800 members possessing 48 grants. In 1966, La Alianza gained national attention due to their attempt to seize the San Joaquin land, which was reclaimed as the republic.
As a result, young Chicanos realized that their right to have proper education was violated, and they started to demand reforms from the government (Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez 125). They were conscious of the discriminatory nature of the educational system and claimed that schools are guilty of helpless and poor generations of Mexican Americans. Another issue that intensified the movement was the Vietnam War, criticized for a higher rate of Chicano casualties in comparison to others in the army.
The Chicano youth, who had an important place in the movement due to their activism, radicalism, and energy, formed a chain of various student organizations, which they titled the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. It consisted of such famous organizations as the Mexican American Youth Association and the United Mexican American Students (Montoya 107). In 1968-1969, the members of those groups organized school walkouts in Los Angeles and Denver, demonstrating against the exclusion of the Spanish language, high dropout rates among Mexican students, and inappropriate curriculums. Moreover, they had been putting pressure on the government to include Mexican American history in the syllabus and increase the number of Chicano teachers. 2ff7e9595c
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