Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States. The label Chicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings. While Mexican American identity emerged to encourage assimilation into White American society and separate the community from African-American political struggle, Chicano identity emerged among anti-assimilationist youth, some of whom belonged to the Pachuco subculture, who reclaimed the term. Chicano was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent, diverging from the more assimilationist Mexican American identity. Chicano Movement leaders were influenced by and collaborated with Black Power leaders and activists. Chicano youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance.
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. 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 Chicana literature.
Michael Angel Nava is an American attorney and writer. He has worked on the staff for the California Supreme Court, and ran for a Superior Court position in 2010. He authored a ten-volume mystery series featuring Henry Rios, an openly gay protagonist who is a criminal defense lawyer. His novels have received six Lambda Literary Awards and critical acclaim in the GLBT and Latino communities.
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, CA, 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 in the United States that analyzes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections of women that identify as Chicana. Chicana feminism empowers women and insist that they challenge the stereotypes and boundaries that Chicanas face across lines of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality. Most importantly, Chicana feminism is a movement. It is also a theory and praxis that helps women reclaim their existence between and among the Chicano Movement and American feminist movements.
Daniel Anthony Olivas is a United States author and attorney.
Luis Javier Rodriguez is a 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. He identified himself as a native Xicanx writer in his most recent book. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. It has been the subject of controversy when it was included in school reading lists in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas, due to its frank 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."
María Amparo Escandón is a Mexican-born American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, advertising creative director, and film producer. Her award-winning literary work is known for addressing bi-cultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States. Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative and brand new style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries.
Caballero: A Historical Novel, often known only as Caballero, is a historical romance coauthored by Jovita González and Margaret Eimer. Written in the 1930s and early 1940s, but not published until 1996, the novel is sometimes called Texas's Gone with the Wind.
Manuel Muñoz is a novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Rabies has been the main plot device or a significant theme in many fictional works. Due to the long history of the virus as well as its neurotropic nature, rabies has been a potent symbol of madness, irrationalism, or an unstoppable plague in numerous fictional works, in many genres. Many notable examples are listed below.
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. Chicano art was influenced by post-Mexican Revolution ideologies, pre-Columbian art, European painting techniques and Mexican-American social, political and cultural issues. The movement worked to resist and challenge dominant social norms and stereotypes for cultural autonomy and self-determination. Some issues the movement focused on were awareness of collective history and culture, restoration of land grants, and equal opportunity for social mobility. Throughout the movement and beyond, Chicanos have used art to express their cultural values, as protest or for aesthetic value. The art has evolved over time to not only illustrate current struggles and social issues, but also to continue to inform Chicano youth and unify around their culture and histories. Chicano art is not just Mexican-American artwork: it is a public forum that emphasizes otherwise "invisible" histories and people in a unique form of American art.
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.
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 Manual "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.
