The Chicano Movement: Mexican American History and the Struggle for Equality

Abstract

The Chicano/Chicana movement was a product of the global eruption that took place in 1968. A critical understanding of this movement requires that it be put into a historical context and theoretical framework of an indigenous people who were internally colonized by the expanding us Empire after the end of the us-Mexico War of 1846-48. Violent and nonviolent struggles took place prior to the 1960s over the issues of land, social justice, and civil rights. The first nonviolent and largest Mexican American mass protest in us history occurred in the Spring of 1968 in East Los Angeles, California, where over ten thousand Chicano high school students walked out of their inferior and racist barrio high schools. The student walkouts ignited the emergence of the Chicano civil rights movement. The movement’s positive contributions and failures will be discussed. Discussion will conclude with a critical analysis of Mexican American struggles in the present age of “Trumpism”.

LHS+ Medical Student History and Heritage of the U.S. Southwest Region

“…Postwar time would follow cycles of discrimination where American workers felt as though Mexicans were taking away their jobs. The sentiment was followed by xenophobic rhetoric in favor of restricting immigration [10]. These emotions bled into the educational system that children of immigrant workers would enter.…”

“…Muñoz notes how the American educational system encouraged students to assimilate into the American way, showing students the "'virtues of American democracy, ' [and] that Mexican culture was a major factor in the "backwardness" of Mexican Americans." [10] Dr. Héctor Pérez García was a physician that grew up in South Texas during these times, attending a segregated Mexican school. Similar to Dr. Headley Treviño de Edgerton, through his hard work he graduated cum laude from the University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston in 1940; however, "every hospital in Texas rejected him because he was 'Mexican.'"…”