Am I Chicana?
Tuesday March 13, 3am, the rain continues. Suddenly I think of the word Chicano, (go figure, why would I think of this at 3 o'clock in the morning?). I log into the web and pulled dozens of pages, looking for the meaning of the word and it's root. Chicano is a term I learned when I came to Brownsville. It was a term use to refer to people like me, who lives in the US, but speaks Spanish. Still, I really (and I am ashamed to say) did not know the real meaning of the word. So this morning, I learned that the Chicano term, In the early 30’s when Mexicans from the State of Morelos, who spoke Nahuatl called themselves “Mexicanos” sounded in their native language as “Mesheecanos” using the common pronunciation of their dialect. In the Mexican language, we don’t have a use for the “sh” as in the Nahuatl dialect, instead we make a use of the “ch” thus the sound became “Mechicanos” and later on “Chicano” for a short term. At that time, the term was use with a bad connotation as an insult to identify people by this name. But later in the 60’s The term was taken by the Mexican-American activists (i.e. Cesar Chavez and La Raza movement) to create a new identity for their culture and movement.
I like to use the term to reclaim my indigenous heritage broken when our ancestors were displaced by colonialism and our culture displace by imperialism. As the news writer Ruben Salazar (killed by the police during the National Chicano Moratorium March in 1970, in LA.) said: “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself”
That is what I am, an Indigenous Mexican-American, A Chicana!...
Viva La Raza!.
