The word comes from a native Native Mexican / Native word for “Nahuatl” (Aztec) word “native”. Chicana, an identifiable, feminine form of Mexican-born people born in the United States of America. Chicano or Jicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican-Americans, and both names exist in the United States as the chosen identity in the Mexican-American community.
Here is a definition according to the Texas Educational Handbook: “According to one explanation, the pre–Columbian tribes (Aztecs) in Mexico called themselves Meshicas, and the Spaniards, employing the letter x (which at that time represented a “sh” and “ch” sound), spelled it Mexicas. The Indians later referred to themselves as Meshicanos and even as Chicanos, thus giving birth to the term Chicano.”
The Chicano community made a strong political and cultural presence in response to many years of social oppression and discrimination in Caucasian American society. The earliest source of this word is found in the 1930s and 1940s, when under the two-nation government treaty, poor, rural Mexicans, often Native Americans, were imported into the United States to supply cheap field labor. The term seems to have been first used in California fields as a joke of local Nahuatl speakers in the state of Morelos not being able to refer to themselves as “Mexicans,” and instead pronounced themselves “Mesacanos”. Their language rules (for additional information, refer to the Mexico file in this same sub-directory). Although Chicano had negative ideas as a term of contempt before the Chicano movement, Mexican Americans re-asserted self-determination and solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s when they publicly rejected the merger of a shared cultural, ethnic, and communal identity. All three have empowered the men and women of the community to fight for equality and demand social justice. Chicano identity reached a low point in the 1980s and 1990s as consolidation and economic mobility became the target of many middle-class Mexican Americans who instead adopted the terms Hispanic and Latino.
The success of a group in society depends on its perceived social standing. Thus, the way in which the Chicana / OS is understood in the United States plays an important role in psychological and social factors within the community. At the end of the 1990s, a change in Chicano identity by Zikana Feminists and others supporting the adoption of Zikana / and identity has emerged among members of the community. Focusing on the Chicano movement, political unrest, community unrest, and ethnic conflict raises awareness of “brown pride,” “Chicano power,” and Chicanism. The Chicana and Zikana identities have been resurrected in the 2010s, centered on ethnic pride, domestic consciousness, cultural expression, the protection of immigrants and the rights of women and Latin Latinx; Some even refer to it as the ‘Renaissance’. In particular, manifestations of the elite crisis, confusion of ethnic identity and marginalization began to take shape.
