Chicano Literature

Abstract

Chicano literature began as a critical and creative response to discrimination and prejudice that affected Mexicans who immigrated into the United States after the 1900s, as well as those naturalized citizens who became Mexican Americans with roots in the American conquest of the Southwest after 1848. The term “Mexicano” was initially pronounced “Meshicano” during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Centuries later, the “sh” sound became a harder tonal “ch,” spelling it with an “x” and linguistically evolving into a hard “ch” sound. Chicano then became a shortcut term for Mexicano as working-class youth adopted it. Thus, Chicano is pronounced “Xicano,” with a “ch” sound for the “x.” Many Mexican Americans who were naturalized Americans after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo used the term “Chicano” derisively to identify working-class Mexicans not fully accepted by their Mexican compatriots because they were mestizo, they lacked education, and they spoke a mixture of English and Spanish, forming clever neologisms. The term “Chicano” itself was also embraced by a growing base of Chicanos, who rejected Latin American, Mexican American, Hispanic, and even Latino (“I don’t speak Latin, therefore I am not Latino”) during the nascent Chicano movement, along with the farmworker movement. Although scholars tend to trace the embryonic origins of Chicano literature to writings that derive from the explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Hernan Cortés, these writers did not use the term “Chicano” in their references, nor did they call themselves “Chicanos.” What is striking, however, is that the tales, legends, and myths passed down orally manifested themselves in the folktales, legends, and stories of la llorona (the Weeping Woman)—a version of La Malinche, the betrayer of the Aztec Empire and paramour of Cortés, known as Dona Marina. Historically, these stories of conflict and conquest, of love and rejection, of heroes and traitors, of tragedy and comedy, become enmeshed in the social, geographical, and environmental landscape that eventually became Chicano literature. Chicano literature is therefore written by a group of people who identify with the political, cultural, and social Chicano movement, and who use expository writing, autobiography, fiction, poetry, drama, and film to document the history of Chicano consciousness in the United States. From this early Chicano movement, and the long marches of the United Farm Workers, emerged a literature giving voice to the disenfranchised, the working-class, the migrant worker, and the field hand, both male and female alike, as they fought for the right to tell their story in the growing body of American literature, just as the once rejected Walt Whitman fought to have his musings and writings accepted in the years following the American Civil War. The collective stories of sin and redemption, of territories lost and gained, of legends and myths ingrained in the greater Southwest are reflections of hundreds of years of human toil as Chicano literature evolved into another chapter of American literature.