Borderlands La Frontera

The Chicano Movement, or El Movimiento, was not a single movement but rather a group of campaigns, organizations, and ideas that arose in response to the racism, poverty, and exploitation that many Chicano people (Mexican Americans who live near the US-Mexico border) faced in the mid-20th-century US. Among the most famous of those campaigns was the United Farmworkers Movement, spearheaded by labor organizers César Chávez and Dolores Huerta to improve working conditions and guarantee union rights for agricultural workers. However, while many Mexican Americans did work in agriculture, so too did many white and Filipino Americans, so the Farmworkers Movement remained somewhat distinct from other elements of the Chicano Movement.

Notable among these was José Ángel Gutiérrez’s founding of the Raza Unida party, which ran on a platform of Chicano nationalism and working-class rights in areas throughout the Southwest. It also organized campaigns by students, parents, and educators to make bilingual education available and to integrate discussion of Chicano history into the curriculum. In fact, it was the 1969 Denver Youth Conference, organized by Chicano leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in part around issues of education, that resulted in two key developments in the movement: the coining of the term “Chicanismo” to refer to the emerging ethos of the Chicano Movement and the adoption of Gonzale’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, which called for self-determination for Mexican Americans, who are understood to be descendants of the Indigenous Aztec residents of Aztlán (roughly, the Southwest US).

Recovery of and identification with Indigenous ancestry was thus key to the Chicano movement, as it is to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. It is important to note, however, that while Anzaldúa uses the terms “chicana” and “mestiza” semi-interchangeably, they are distinct. Chicano/chicano was a pejorative term for Mexican American people that was reclaimed during the Chicano Movement. By contrast, Mestizo/mestiza comes from the Spanish word for “mixed” and dates back to the colonial era, when it denoted people with both European and Indigenous ancestry. Such people exist throughout the Americas—not merely Mexico and the US—and not all Mexican people have Indigenous and/or European heritage. This conflation of Mexican American identity with ancestral Indigeneity is at the heart of claims that Anzaldúa and other figures associated with the Chicano Movement erase the presence of Indigenous Mexicans/Americans in contemporary society and/or the existence of other ethnic and racial groups (e.g., Black Mexicans) with longstanding ties to the region (Trevino, Wendy and Chris Chen. “Mexican Is Not a Race.” The New Inquiry, 6 Apr. 2017).