When Sleeping Giants Awaken: Chicano Theatre in the 1960s

Abstract

The term “Chicano” is as politically charged today as it was in the 1960s, when contemporary Chicano Theatre was born. No one can trace the etymology of the term, which is neither Spanish nor English, but it was adopted as a self-identifier by mostly urban, politicized Americans of Mexican descent during the period. To call oneself “Chicano” meant that you were neither Mexican nor “American” but, rather, someone who recognized the various forms of oppression your communities were suffering. Then, as now, Chicanos scorned people who identified themselves as “Mexican Americans,” dismissing them as middle-class conservatives who were more comfortable “blending in.” On the other hand, Mexican Americans shunned “those Chicanos” as rabble-rousers and troublemakers with undue grievances. There was a class distinction at play in which working-class Chicanos criticized middle-class Mexican Americans as “sell-outs.”