The sun stands overhead. A place that should be a desert overflows with life – a fire that reaches toward change and understanding. The heat beats down on skins of all colors, but they’re here for one thing – equality and the end of institutions that stand only to tear apart families and sow discord among communities.
But we’ve been here before.
At the heart of this very country’s founding, we threw their cursed tea overboard. In the 1870s, railroad workers fought for proper pay. In the 1910s, women stormed the streets for their very own suffrage. And in the 1960s, Black people marched for civil rights — but they did not fight alone, nor just for their own.
Of the many groups that came together, the Chicanos were the closest to my heart. Were they the closest to my city? To Chicago? Perhaps not, or perhaps their impact here was enough to ignite this cold swamp into a second, mini-Mexico.
But what is Chicanismo?
Arising in the late 1960s and throughout the ‘70s, it began as a movement largely within Latine student populations.
“The way I understand it is to talk about them in comparison to the previous generation of Mexican Americans — the World War II generation were much more associated with the LULAC organization which had a clear understanding of assimilation into the USA,” said Cesáreo Moreno, visual arts director and chief curator at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) located in Chicago’s own Pilsen. LULAC, or the League of United Latin American Citizens, was the main coalition fighting for Latin rights, before the Chicano movement which helped integrate segregated schools in California — but held the goals of losing their culture to fit in with those in the US.
“Whereas the Chicanos were their children, or nephews, or their nieces which I often associate more with the Vietnam War – the generation that feels assimilation doesn’t work, we are who we are, and we’re also US citizens and a part of this society. It’s that break with assimilation … which identifies the Chicano movement with social justice, civil rights, and protests.” Historian and professor at DePaul University Dr. Miguel Angel Castañeda similarly painted Chicanos as, in Ruben Salazar’s terms, “Mexican Americans with a non-Anglo image of themselves.”
This non-Anglo image quickly took root through movements like Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and Chicano Blowouts, student walkouts aimed at fighting educational disparities against Mexican Americans within the wider Latine community in much of the southern U.S. and, eventually, Chicago.
Of course, by the 1920s there was no shortage of Mexican Americans up in the north – in fact, by 1924, there are so many Mexicans working in the factories and living in the city that the Archdiocese of Chicago has to open its first bilingual church so they can baptize their children, have funerals and get married all in their own language.
As Moreno puts it, “The seeds of the Chicano Movement had already been in existence in the Southwest and in California, but they did not arrive really to Chicago until much later.”
Although the movement does not take off here exactly as it does in the more southern parts of the US – parts which develop slogans like “we didn’t cross the border – it crossed us” – the branches do come to reach into Chicago’s cold winters.
Who brought it over?
Moreno credits the “university students, professors, writers and the artists. They go down there to see about what is this that’s happening in Texas, what is this that’s happening in California, about the Mexican American Chicano movement – and then they bring it back up to Chicago, but not as, robust, let’s say.”
The movement up north remains connected to universities, connected to arts movements, but because most of the Mexicanos in Chicago during that time were relatively recent arrivals, they don’t come to identify as Chicanos as much.
“And if you would have asked them, are you a Chicano? Even if they had been born in Chicago, they would have said, I’m not a Chicano,” Moreno said.
Slowly, but surely, Chicanismo trickled its way up.
Castañeda gives us a couple of specific political figures – people like Eliseo Medina, who had worked with Cesar Chavez and brought with him plans to boycott grapes and other such products, goods braceros down south slaved away for, often severely underpaid and poorly treated. Rudy Lozano who spent much of his student life riling up university centers, joining unions and, eventually, joining Centro de Acción Social Autónoma, Hermanedad General de Trabajadores (Center for Autonomous Social Action, General Brotherhood of Workers), also known as CASA, which would provide welfare services and pushed for education for undocumented workers.
Moreno mentions Luis Valdez — a playwright and film maker; Carlos A. Cortez – a poet, muralist, and illustrator; and Ray Patlan – another muralist known as a trailblazer in the Chicano style.
Much of Chicano philosophy and art came to embrace its indigenous roots, even coming to “mythologize” many old stories, as Castañeda puts it.
Prime among them was the tale of Aztlan – the very origin for the Mexica empire.
“When they (the Aztecs) settled in the Valley of Mexico, they weren’t actually native to the central valley of Mexico. Their story of origin goes that they were from the North and that their gods told them to leave that area, migrate south until they find an eagle on top of a cactus eating a serpent… so the flag of Mexico, if you see it, that’s precisely the image that’s there.” explained Castañeda.
The Chicano movement, the poets, especially one poet by the name of Alhurista, found this myth and conceptualized Aztlan as their ancient homeland – the land once theirs taken by the US.
Moreno followed up: “They pick up on these poetic, romantic ideas that they are the children of Aztlan, that their ancestors are the ones that built pyramids and had, you know, cosmologies and belief systems that predated any Europeans in the Americas. By doing that, by connecting with that civilization and ancient indigenous people, they sort of get to bypass nationality, right?”
If they could not bind the disconnect between them and Mexico – or knew not of their initial roots – they could turn to this “land of their ancestors” and make it their truest place of belonging.
By the 1970s, although not all was under the Chicano banner, the very air contained traces of some kind of movement.
As immigrants came in, demographics changed … and Pilsen went from primarily Bohemian, Polish or Czechoslovakian to almost entirely Latine.
There, the Brown Berets turned what was once known as the Howell House into Casa Aztlan — or “center of artistic creativity in Chicago” as described by Humberto Salinas, executive director of Casa Aztlan.
Its outside featured a mural by Ray Patlan – and the inside housed both the arts and community-oriented exercises along with clinical care and student aid.
“So again, it is artwork for the community, by the community — you end up with a lot of Aztlan and ancient indigenous imagery going on in there, as well as the glyphs and sort of the elements from pyramids or textiles that were woven in Mexico. He (Parlan) also becomes very familiar with the Mexican muralist movement, Orozco, one of the Grandes from Mexico. He emulates him and his technique and his style. These early Chicano murals really become emblematic of La Raza.
“It doesn’t necessarily have, you know, art theory or Western art, ideals in them because it’s for people who never went to college. It’s for people who are maybe illiterate, but they’ll understand what the mural is saying, by looking at it in a way similar to the stained-glass windows in European medieval cathedrals.”
And so Casa Aztlan opens up, sparking the openings of other clinics and hubs for La Raza — largely by the Brown Berets, but also by members of CASA and the Young Lords.
Although the Young Lords were not under Chicanismo, as they represented the Puerto Rican American struggle, they often worked closely and were often in similar areas.
Another big impact Chicanismo had was a hand in was the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor – Harold Washington – and helped establish Chicago as a sanctuary city.
“Here, Rudy Lozano turned CASA much more into a social movement organization, right, where they were organizing protests or they were helping organize immigrant tortilla factory workers, which happens in Pilsen and Little Village. They are doing the kind of service organizing and helping immigrants in their legal stuff, but they’re also building alliances with the Black Panther Party and going into political coalitions with Harold Washington,” Castañeda said.
And through these long-woven connections in his community and others, he strung together just enough Latine votes to let Washington win by just a 1.72% majority.
In turn, Washington would extend office jobs, city jobs, city government appointments and even campaign aid for people running for office – people like Luis Gutierrez and Jesus Garcia for alderman.
And it would be Washington who named Chicago a sanctuary city in 1985 – helping ease the worries of a community integral to his rise.
Lozano himself would run for the alderman office that very same year for the 22nd Ward, but would ultimately lose by a mere 17 votes and then suffer an untimely demise as he was murdered just one year after.
Washington said Lozano “was a man driven by a search for unity among people … If the coalition of Chicago which came with my election is due to anyone, it is due to Rudy Lozano.”
Sadly, much of the flame contained within the movement seemed to die out with him. If there is anything that is certain, chief among them can be people’s refusal to accept change.
But the flame of an entire people can never be extinguished – especially not the people of the sun.
Header Image by Luis Caro.
Be First to Comment