Student Demonstrators during East LA walkouts
Today is the day that students walked out of East Los Angeles schools protesting their inferior education. Here is DailyHistory.org article on this event.
The 1960s and 1970s have been well documented and covered historically by scholars interested in the Black Liberation Movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, amongst other popular African American civil rights activists. What we know about the African American/Black civil rights movements are the obvious events leading up to the political revolutions that ensued. Segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the scars of slavery had all had their violent and discriminatory effects on the African American/Black population, especially in the South.
Unfortunately, the history of the powerful movement that was comprised of millions of Mexican and Mexican American individuals in the U.S. Southwest that happened concurrently to the African American/Black civil rights movement has been somewhat neglected. These individuals leading this movement eventually claimed the political identity of Chicano. Chicano had previously been a derogatory word used by Mexican and Mexican Americans in the U.S. for individuals who were poor and recent immigrants to the U.S.[1] In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos reclaimed the word in order to signify that their indigenous ancestry and culture were important to them, as well as to the land they had lost from Spanish and American imperialism.
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