Chicano rock, also called chicano fusion, is rock music performed by Mexican American (Chicano) groups or music with themes derived from Chicano culture. Chicano Rock, to a great extent, does not refer to any single style or approach. Some of these groups do not sing in Spanish at all, or use many specific Latin instruments or sounds. The subgenre is defined by the ethnicity of its performers, and as a result covers a wide range of approaches.
The Revolt of the Cockroach People is a novel by Oscar Zeta Acosta. It tells the story of a Chicano lawyer, "Buffalo Zeta Brown", fictionalizing events from Oscar Acosta's own life, including the East L.A. walkouts at Garfield High School, the founding of the Brown Berets, the Christmas protests at St. Basil's church, the Castro v. Superior Court decision of 1970, Acosta's run for sheriff of Los Angeles County later that year, the Chicano National Moratorium, and the death of Ruben Salazar, who is referred to as "Roland Zanzibar" in the novel. The novel is written in the style of Gonzo journalism, which he helped codify the conventions with American journalist and friend Hunter S. Thompson. The story of Buffalo Z. Brown, a persona of the author, satirizes the East L.A. Chicano movement through the eyes of a participant observer. Acosta uses the historical events of the late 1960s and early 1970s "as the context for the construction of a Chicano identity and the realization of a revolutionary class consciousness."
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Josefina López is a Chicana playwright, perhaps best known as the author of the play Real Women Have Curves. López is also the Founding Artistic Director of the CASA 0101 theater located in Boyle Heights, California, which began in 2000.
Helena Maria Viramontes is an American fiction writer and professor of English. She is known for her two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them, and is considered one of the most significant figures in the early canon of Chicano literature. Viramontes is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University.
Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement, theory, and praxis that scrutinizes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections impacting Chicanas and the Chicana/o community in the United States. Chicana feminism empowers women to challenge institutionalized social norms and regards anyone a feminist who fights for the end of women's oppression in the community.
Daniel Anthony Olivas is an American author and attorney.
Luis Javier Rodriguez is an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist. He was the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, identifying himself as a native Xicanx writer. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and has been controversial on school reading lists for its depictions of gang life.
Nash Candelaria was an American novelist. He was known for a tetralogy of novels about the Rafa family. He has been called the "historical novelist of the Hispanic people of New Mexico."
Graciela Limón is a Latina/Chicana novelist and a former university professor. She has been honored with an American Book Award and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.
Manuel Muñoz is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Manuel Luis Martinez is an American novelist and literary critic. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of four novels: Crossing,, Drift,, Day of the Dead, and Los Duros. His fiction deals primarily with the lives of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, and explores the themes of migration, contemporary urban life, and the experience of dislocation. He is also the author of a book of literary criticism, Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera,.
Chicana literature is a form of literature that has emerged from the Chicana Feminist movement. It aims to redefine Chicana archetypes in an effort to provide positive models for Chicanas. Chicana writers redefine their relationships with what Gloria Anzaldúa has called "Las Tres Madres" of Mexican culture by depicting them as feminist sources of strength and compassion.
“The Moths” is a short story written by Helena Maria Viramontes. It was first published in 1985 in Viramontes’ first book, The Moths and Other Stories, by Arte Publico Press in Houston, Texas.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
Asco was an East Los Angeles based Chicano artist collective, active from 1972 to 1987. Asco adopted its name as a collective in 1973, making a direct reference to the word's significance in Spanish ("asco"), which is disgust or repulsion. Asco's work throughout 1970s and 1980s responded specifically to socioeconomic and political problems surrounding the Chicano community in the United States, as well the Vietnam War. Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio "Gronk" Nicandro, Willie F. Herrón III and Patssi Valdez form the core members of the group.
Under the Feet of Jesus is a 1995 book by Helena Maria Viramontes and her first published novel. It was released in the United States by Plume and follows the lives of a Mexican-American migrant family working in the California grape fields.
Sandy Rodriguez was born in 1975 in National City, California. She is a Los Angeles based artist who grew up on the US-Mexico border, in Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. She has exhibited her works with numerous museums and galleries, including the Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, MOCA Busan Busan Bienniale, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Art+Practice, and Self Help Graphics. Her work focuses on the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events in the Los Angeles area and along south-west US-Mexico border. A transitional moment for Rodriguez happened in 2014 on a visit to Oaxaca, a southern Mexican Region, where she first procured a red pigment called cochineal, coming from the pre-Columbian era. Prior to this, Rodriguez had painted exclusively in modern paint. The encounter with cochineal happened at the same time she was painting fire paintings and the protests began in Ayotzinapa Mexico in response to forty-three missing college students, which included setting fire to palacio nacional and an Enrique Peña Nieto effigy pinata. The alignment of content, form, and the materials magnified how material can signal cultural identity, history, and politics. A goal of her work is to disrupt dominant narratives and interrogate systems that are ongoing expressions of colonial violence witnessed regularly, including Customs Border Enforcement, Police, and Climate Change.
ChismeArte was an avant-garde Chicano magazine published by the LA Latino Writers Association (LALWA) and produced by the Concilio de Arte Popular, a California statewide arts advocacy group of Chicano arts organizations headed by Manazar Gamboa. The magazine began publication in 1976. It was produced by Guillermo Bejarano in the early 1980s. Manazar Gamboa served as Director of LALWA and Editor of ChismeArte from 1981-1983. Organizational members of the People's Art Council included The Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista, The Royal Chicano Air Force in Sacramento, Mechicano Art Center in Los Angeles, and The Galeria de la Raza and The Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and The Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego.
Patricia "Pat" Gomez is a Chicana visual artist based in Los Angeles best known for incorporating text within her art. She is currently the Civic Art Project Manager at Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.
