Chicano, A Community That Has Overcome

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The Chicano community has endured and overcome many struggles since the conquest by conquistador in 1491 and eviction from Atzlan. Race was used by the white community as tool to structure inequality for the Chicano community by classifying the Chicano community as white but treat them as a minority community. Chicano activist during the Mexican American generation found community self-determination by becoming actively involved in their community and taking hold of their own destiny. The Mexican American activists created a new way of seeing themselves by taking the term Chicano and making the term a symbol for who they truly are and who they want to become. The new ethos of the new identity of a Chicano is community self-determination; it is a community that is in total control of its own destiny.
The Chicano community has been racially profiled according to their race and skin color, but they were legally seen as white because of their surname. Spanish surnames such as Garcia are what create the misconception that Chicanos are Spanish. Surnames such as this became incorporated into the Chicano society when the Spanish colonized the New World. Once there the Spaniards gave the locals an option to assimilate or be forced into the lower class and work as the slaves of the Spaniards (Gonzalez). In Racism on Trial Ian Lopez tells he reader how the jury and the judges “did not recognize Mexicans as a racial groups” (Lopez 43).By classifying the Chicanos as Spaniards the judges in a way denied Chicanos of their constitutional rights provided by the fourteenth amendment. This allowed the other communities to continue the racial profiling of the Chicano community. This racial profiling was especially devastating to the youth through...

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...ult journey ahead of them they have accomplished many tasks such as escaping extreme racial profiling by being active in the community. Chicanismo is more than just a race it is a way of life; the Chicanismo must be earned by contributing back to the Chicano community.

Works Cited

"Chicano! PBS Documentary - The Struggle in the Fields." YouTube. PBS, 30 Sept. 2011. Web. 02 Nov. 2013.
Gonzalez, Araceli. “Discussion #2.” Chicano Studies 10. University of California Davis. Wellman 229. 8 October 2013.
Ian F. Haney López. Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003
Jackson, Carlos. “Lecture #7.” Intro to Chicano Studies 10. University of California Davis. Keliber 3. 22 October 2013.
Rosa Linda Fregoso. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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