The Chicano Movement

1
The Chicano Movement

• Mexican Americans and Politics
• Class 6
• January 26, 2006

2
From Last Time
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Economic Change, 1945-1965

• Sustained national economic growth
• Emergence of a new Mexican American middle class
• Expansion of educational opportunities,
  particularly higher education
• Labor shortages and new migration from Mexico
• Bracero Program
• Undocumented migration
• Particular growth in the Southwest and West
• Unions and division in Mexican American
  communities over immigration policy

4
Social Change, 1945-1965

• Heterogeneity among Mexican Americans
• Native and foreign born
• English and Spanish speaking
• Urban and rural
• Southwest and non-Southwest
• Class
• Degree of acculturation
• The first second generation
• Sleepy Lagoon, the Zoot Suit riots and the
  pathologicization of Mexican American youth

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Todays Discussion

• The Chicano Movement

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Culmination?

• After mid-1970s, rare to speak of a distinct
  Mexican American politics
• Mexican Americans continue to have distinct
  political interests and behaviors
• But, larger political system subsumes Mexican
  American interests into Latino/Hispanic politics
• Chicano Movement, however, is fitting culmination

7
The Era

• Chicano Movement part of a larger movement for
  social change
• Civil Rights Movement
• Anti-War Movement
• Early phases of Womens Rights and Gay Rights
  Movements
• Movements not formally connected, but shared some
  goals and strategies

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Economic and Social Ethos of the Era

• Economic
• Large middle class
• Economic growth
• Labor shortage
• New educational and employment opportunities
• Beginnings of large-scale immigration from
  countries other than Mexico
• Social
• New educated elite
• More social and residential integration
• Mexican American suburbanization

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Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil
Rights MovementTaking Back the Schools

• Questions to Consider
• What resources did students and parents have to
  challenge educational discrimination?
• What barriers did they face?
• Would they have been able to mount these
  challenges in 1945 or 1960? Why/why not?

10
For Next Time

1. How did the Chicano Movement organizations lay
   the foundation for the first Latino (or
   pan-ethnic) organizations?
2. What were the policy goals of the early Latino
   organizations?