xicanismo:

nepantlastrategies:

mujerdelsol:

yaqui1991:

Y que!!

Uhm no. There ARE other indigenous populations you knooowwwww. -.-

“For Chicano nationalists of the 1960s and ‘70s, a central political gesture involved explicit territorial claims to the US Southwest as their lost homeland. Yet these claims squarely overlapped the claims of Native American nations to the same lands. Furthermore, the ‘real’ Aztlán of Aztec myth probably, unromantically, lay far to the south of the contemporary US Southwest, somewhere in the Mexican state of Nayarit. …

Yet Native Americans made solely cameo appearances in Chicano nationalist discourse. Critiquing John Chávez’s Lost Land specifically, Alarcón notes how ‘Native Americans are not included in his discussion about the region, except when he requires their presence in order to legitimate Chicano claims to the Southwest’. Native Americans cast only blurry shadow-figures, functioning as a ‘dehistoricized fetish’ that gave “a veneer of ‘origin’ and ‘authenticity’” to Chicano nationalist discourse.”

http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/noarchive/price.html

(via jotosexuality)

dreamactivist-pennsylvania:

ch0chalapan0cha:

Celebrating graduation from Bryn Mawr with Jessica Hyejin Lee! #undocumented #unafraid #unapologetic

DreamActivist Pennsylvania members made political statements on the day of their graduation from Bryn Mawr College by decorating the top of their caps with a message to their community and family members. Undocumented student Jessica Hyejin Lee’s cap read, “Undocumented, Unafraid, and there should be more of us here at BMC”. Undocumented student Erika Guadalupe Nunez’s cap read “Undocumented, Unafraid, Unapologetic. I am one of 7.5%.” Both caps are a commentary on the accessibility of higher education for undocumented youth. 

thinkmexican:

In Support of ‘Corky’ Gonzales

“I am Joaquín.
I must fight
and win this struggle
for my sons, and they
must know from me
who I am.”

- “I Am Joaquín,” written by Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales

Denver city officials and community leaders are debating the naming of a new library after hometown hero and Chicano civil rights leader Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales.

Corky Gonzales, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 76, is best known for his activism and community organizing as the founding member of Denver’s Crusade for Justice. Many consider his epic poem, “I Am Joaquín,” a seminal text in Chicano literature which is still inspiring many today.

Former Crusade members, students and community leaders cite Escuela Tlatelolco, a culturally-based school founded by Gonzales in 1970, as his greatest legacy and contribution to the children and community of West Denver.

Gonzales, a former boxing champion, is being opposed by some who point to violent clashes his organization, the Crusade for Justice, had with the Denver Police Department in the 60s and 70s during a tumultuous time in the city’s history.

The City of Denver and the Denver Library Commission should honor the public’s wishes and name the city’s new library after Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales, a leader, educator, and a great man.

Photo via the Denver Post

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White America will always demand that our brown heroes be saints. What do they care if some of their own were villains? The statues are built, the plaques are set—history lesson over. If they were smart, though, they’d let us have our monuments too. Those dead white men have had the benefit of decades of pigeon shit to whitewash their sins. No doubt, we’d look a shade more manageable in marble. You know we’d look good in bronze!  I think they’d get used to a library here, a street there. What they can’t get used to, what they really won’t stand for, are flesh and blood Chicanos and Chicanas shaking things up, demanding to be heard.  So once we’ve got those plaques up, let’s not forget to be a pain in their ass.

(via elcoyoteonline)

nezua:

easybeat310:

Chicano Student WALKOUTS- March 6th-9th, 1968

march 6, my birthday

“Education not eradication!”

(via elcoyoteonline)

“Mi Madrecita” por Al Hurricane y Tiny Morrie

borrachaa:

yospeakespanol:

jayjacobo:

This week in Chicano history: 1947 - The Mendez vs. Westminster School District case was the first successful challenge to an 1896 U.S Supreme Court doctrine that allowed “separate but equal” public facilities. thus ending the segregation of Latinos attending public schools & entering all white businesses in California, & being the reference case that eventually, 7 years later, allowed Roe vs. Wade Brown vs. Board of Education to end segregation of all minority’s from any institutions & public areas, in America.

African-Americans weren’t the only ones..

exactly^

(via elcoyoteonline)

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

offwhitelikeme:

Recently I’ve been reading Jose Gutierrez’s autobiography and I love his candid expression of life in South Texas during the early to mid sixties. Reading this memoir I am reminded that the radicalism of that era wasn’t that radical, when one considers the fact that what made a “militant chicano,” militant was getting la raza (the people) to vote. However, it is important to note that Gutierrez re-iterates, the voter registration of Chicanos (Mexican-Americans) was conducted under constant threat and intimidation by local law enforcement and business owners.

An excellent book.   Gutierrez isn’t content to be nostalgic, he lets us in on the dirty details of making a movement.  Add this to the list of great Chicano memoirs.  

a-la-maquina:

I Am Joaquin (1969)

“I Am Joaquin is a 20-minute short film based on an epic poem published by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in 1967. Gonzales’ poem weaves together the long tangled roots of his Mexican, Spanish, Indian and American parentage and a past mythology of pre-Columbian cultures. The film is important to the history and culture of Chicanos in America, spotlighting the challenges they have endured because of discrimination. Luis Valdez, often described as the father of Chicano theater, produced and directed “I Am Joaquin” as a project of Teatro Campesino (the Farmworkers Theater), which he founded in 1965 to inform, encourage and entertain Chicano farm workers. Valdez later directed the Chicano-themed “Zoot Suit” in 1981, a retelling of the early 1940s Los Angeles race riots, and “La Bamba” in 1987.”

This could turn into a Dolores Del Rio blog real easy-like.

willigula:

Like Venice, the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán was built on a series of marshy islands, though it was located in a mountain basin rather than a lagoon. This hand-colored woodcut map was the first picture Europeans had of the city, printed in Nuremberg, 1524

Tenochtitlán from the European view.

(via ffactory)

Back view of the “Teocalli of Sacred Warfare” depicting an eagle perched on a nopal sprouting from the recumbent Chalchiuhtlicue.  The eagle does not hold a snake as in later depictions, it is the glyph for war, atl-tlachinolli, the burning water.  Together they represent the foundation of Tenochtitlan at the behest of Huitzilopochtli.

From Cronica Mexicayotl by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc (via Tecpaocelotl)

“O Quauhcoatl, you have seen all there is in among

the reeds,

In among the rushes,

You have beheld it.

But hear this:

There is something you still have not seen.

Go, go and look at the cactus,

And on it, standing on it, you shall see an eagle.

It is eating, it is warming itself in the sun,

And your heart will rejoice,

For it is the heart of Copil that you cast away

Where you halted in Tlalcocomoco.

There it fell, where you looked, at the edge of the spring,

Among the rushes, among the reeds.

And from Copil’s heart sprouted what is now called Tenochtli.

There we shall be, we shall keep guard,

We shall await, we shall meet the diverse peoples in battle.

With our bellies, with our heads,

With our arrows, with our shields,

We shall confront all who surround us

And we shall vanquish them all,

We shall make them captives,

And thus our city shall be established.

Mexico Tenochtitlan:

Where the Eagle Screeches

Where he spreads his wings,

Where the Eagle feeds,

Where the fish fly,

And where the Serpent hisses

Mexico Tenochtitlan!

And many things shall come to pass.”

ABOVE:  “The Mexica depart from Aztlán” from the 16th-century Codex Boturini or “Tira de la Peregrinación”

BELOW:  “Aztlan” from the Codex Aubin, 1576 (via The British Museum)

from Wikipedia

The various descriptions of Aztlán are seemingly contradictory. While some legends describe Aztlán as a paradise, the Aubin Codex says that the Aztecs were subject to a tyrannical elite called the Azteca Chicomoztoca. Guided by their priest, the Aztec fled, and, on the road, their god Huitzilopochtli forbade them to call themselves Azteca, telling them that they should be known as Mexica. Ironically, scholars of the 19th century—in particular Alexander von Humboldt and William H. Prescott—would name them Aztec. Humboldt’s suggestion was widely adopted in the 19th century as a way to distance “modern” Mexicans from pre-conquest Mexicans. […] According to the legend, the southward migration began on May 24, 1064.

Chicomoztoc, “the place of the seven caves”

An Illustration from the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca, A post-Cortesian codex from 1550 written by the people of Cuauhtinchan to sustain their right to their lands under the Spanish Colonial authorities. They wrote their history from A.D. 116 through 1544 using a mixture of European and prehispanic styles.  

from Wikipedia

Nahuatl legends relate that six tribes lived in Chicomoztoc, or “the place of the seven caves”. Each cave represented a different Nahua group: the Xochimilca, Tlahuica, Acolhua, Tlaxcalan, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Mexica. Because of a common linguistic origin, those groups also are called “Nahuatlaca” (Nahua people). These tribes subsequently left the caves and settled “near” Aztlán, or Aztatlan.

“Braceros sit in a truck and wait to leave the Hidalgo Processing Center, Texas” (1956)

Photo by Leonard Nadel from the Bracero History Archive, Item #3005, 

The Bracero History Archive is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Brown University, and The Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.