Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who have a non-Anglo self-image, embracing their Mexican Native ancestry. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture. In the 1960s, Chicano was widely reclaimed in the building of a movement toward political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of indigenous descent. Chicano developed its own meaning separate from Mexican American identity. Youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their own identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance. The community forged an independent political and cultural movement, sometimes working alongside the Black power movement.
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also administers Hunter College High School and Hunter College Elementary School.
The masculine term Latino, along with its feminine form Latina, is a noun and adjective, often used in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, that most commonly refers to United States inhabitants who have cultural ties to Latin America.
El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education is a 155-page document, which was written in 1969 by the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. Drafted at the University of California Santa Barbara, it is a blueprint for the inception of Chicana/o studies programs in colleges and universities throughout the US. The Chicano Coordinating Council expresses political mobilization to be dependent upon political consciousness, thus the institution of education is targeted as the platform to raise political conscious amongst Chicanos and spur higher learning to political action. The Plan proposes a curriculum in Chicano studies, the role of community control in Chicano education and the necessity of Chicano political independence. The document was a framework for educational and curriculum goals for the Chicano movements within the institution of education, while being the foundation for the Chicano student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA).
Chicano/a studies, also known as Chican@ studies, originates from the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and is the study of the Chicana/o and Latina/o experience. Chican@ studies draws upon a variety of fields, including history, sociology, the arts, and Chican@ literature. The area of studies additionally emphasizes the importance of Chican@ educational materials taught by Chican@ educators for Chican@ students.
The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) was founded in 1969 to foster multidisciplinary research efforts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It is one of four ethnic studies centers established at UCLA that year, all of which were the first in the nation and have advanced our understanding of the essential contributions of people of color to U.S. history, thought, and culture. The centers remain the major organized research units in the University of California system that focus on ethnic and racial communities and contribute to the system's research mission.
The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) 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." Unlike many professional academic associations, NACCS "rejects mainstream research, which promotes an integrationist perspective that emphasizes consensus, assimilation, and legitimization of societal institutions. NACCS promotes research that directly confronts structures of inequality based on class, race and gender privileges in U.S. society." The association is based in San Jose, California.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Bilingual Review Press is an American publishing house specialising in the publication of scholarly and literary works by Hispanic and Latino American authors and researchers. It was founded in 1973 as the publisher of The Bilingual Review/La revista bilingüe, a new academic and literary journal with a focus on Spanish-English bilingualism, bilingual studies and Hispanic literature that was first issued in 1974. Under the imprint name Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe the press also publishes and distributes book titles by or about Hispanic and Latin American authors, covering literary fiction, poetry as well as non-fiction titles relating to Chicano and Latin American studies. Bilingual Press publishes from 8 to 10 titles annually, with an accumulated back catalogue of more than 150 titles under the imprint in both English and Spanish as well as some bilingual editions. The publisher is also a distributor of related titles from other presses, as of 2008 numbering over a thousand releases.
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian is a full professor at the University of California, Davis.
Luz María "Luzma" Umpierre-Herrera is a Puerto Rican advocate for human rights, a New-Humanist educator, poet, and scholar. Her works pans a range of critical social issues, including activism and social equality, the immigrant experience, bilingualism in the United States, and LGBT matters. Luzma has made significant contributions to literature, authoring six poetry collections and two books on literary criticism, in addition to having many essays featured in academic journals.
William Anthony Nericcio, aka Memo, is a Chicano literary theorist, cultural critic, American Literature scholar, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Currently Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program, he is the author of the award-winning Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America,The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works Plus, and Homer From Salinas: John Steinbeck's Enduring Voice for the Californias. Nericcio is also a graphic designer, creating book covers, film posters, and websites, most notably for SDSU Press and Hyperbole Books, where he oversees the production of cultural studies tomes. His Text-Mex Gallery blog investigates the pathological interrogation of Mexican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, "Hispanic," Mexican-American, and Latin American stereotypes, political, and cultural issues. He is also the curator of the text-image exhibition entitled “MEXtasy,” which has been displayed at numerous institutions, including University of Michigan and South Texas College. Currently working on his follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, his most recent publication is Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, co-authored with Frederick Luis Aldama, for the Ohio State University Press.
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
There is a very large Mexican American community in the Chicago metropolitan area. Illinois, and Chicago's Mexican American community is the largest outside of the Western United States.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella’s career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella’s research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, "I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans"Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Iris López is a contemporary professor, anthropologist, sociologist, and author, whose work focuses on feminist, Latino, and Latin American studies. She has one full-length book published, an ethnography about sterilization within female Puerto Rican populations, titled Matters of Choice. She received both her Masters and Doctoral degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University. Currently, López teaches sociology at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she has been the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program since 2016.
Jorge Alfonso Huerta is a Chicano scholar, author, and theater director. He specializes in Chicano and United States Latinx Theatre. He has written and edited several books specializing in Chicano theatre and is considered to be an authoritative expert in his field.
Refugio I. Rochin is an American professor emeritus in agricultural and resource economics and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, director emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and instructor at Pennsylvania State University World Campus. He is an expert on rural Latinas/os and Latina/o Studies.
Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.
Ana Celia Zentella is an American linguist known for her "anthro-political" approach to linguistic research and expertise on multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language intolerance, especially in relation to U.S. Latino languages and communities. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
