Changes

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, there has been a silencing of the powerful movement that was comprised of millions of Mexican and Mexican American individuals in the U.S. Southwest that happened during the same time as the African American/Black civil rights movement. These individuals eventually came to claim the political identity, Chicano. Chicano had previously been a derogatory word used by Mexican and Mexican Americans in the U.S. for individuals who were poor and newly immigrated in to the U.S, but was rarely used at all. <ref>Richard Griswold del Castillo and Arnoldo de León, ''North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States'', (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 126.</ref> In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano’s reclaimed the word in order to signify that their indigenous ancestry was important to them and their culture, as well as to the land they had lost from Spanish and American imperialism.