page_title: Chicano
section_title: Rejection of borders
hierarchical_section_title: Chicano / Political aspects / Rejection of borders
caption_attribution_description: This is a monument for those who have died attempting to cross the US-Mexican border. Each coffin represents a year and the number of dead. It is a protest against the effects of Operation Guardian. Taken at the Tijuana-San Diego border.
context_page_description: Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for people of Mexican descent born in the United States. The identity may also appear as Xicano or Xicana. The identity is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican-American, although both terms have different meanings. In the 1940s and 1950s, prior to the Chicano Movement, Chicano/a was widely used as a classist term of derision, although it had already been adopted by some pachucos as an expression of defiance to Anglo-American society. Chicano/a was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent, diverging from the assimilationist Mexican-American identity. Many Chicano/a youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced pachuco/a and cholo/a identities as countercultural symbols of resistance.
context_section_description: Chicanas/os often reject the concept of borders through the concept of sin fronteras, the idea of no borders. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transformed the Rio Grande region from a rich cultural center to a rigid border poorly enforced by the United States government. At the end of the Mexican-American War, 80,000 Spanish-Mexican-Indian people were forced into sudden U.S. habitation. Some Chicanas/os identified with the idea of Aztlán as a result, which celebrated a time preceding land division and rejected the "immigrant/foreigner" categorization by Anglo society. Chicana/o activists have called for unionism between both Mexicans and Chicanas/os on both sides of the border.
  In the early 20th century, the border crossing had become a site of brutality and dehumanization for Mexicans. Protests in 1910 arose along the Santa Fe Bridge due to abuses committed against Mexican workers while crossing the border. The 1917 Bath riots erupted after Mexicans crossing the border were required to strip naked and be disinfected with various chemical agents, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, and Zyklon B, the latter of which was the fumigation of choice and would later notoriously be used in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. During the early 20th century, Chicanos used corridos "to counter Anglocentric hegemony." As described by Ramón Saldivar, "corridos served the symbolic function of empirical events and for creating counterfactual worlds of lived experience (functioning as a substitute for fiction writing)."
  Newspaper Sin Fronteras (1976–79) openly rejected the Mexico-United States border. The newspaper considered it "to be only an artificial creation that in time would be destroyed by the struggles of Mexicans on both sides of the border" and recognized that "Yankee political, economic, and cultural colonialism victimized all Mexicans, whether in the U.S. or in Mexico." Similarly, the General Brotherhood of Workers (CASA), important to the development of young Chicano intellectuals and activists, identified that, as "victims of oppression, Mexicanos could achieve liberation and self-determination only by engaging in a borderless struggle to defeat American international capitalism."
  Chicana theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa notably emphasized the border as a "1,950 mile-long wound that does not heal." In referring to the border as a wound, writer Catherine Leen suggests that Anzaldúa recognizes "the trauma and indeed physical violence very often associated with crossing the border from Mexico to the US, but also underlies the fact that the cyclical nature of this immigration means that this process will continue and find little resolution." Anzaldúa writes that la frontera signals "the coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference [which] cause un choque, a cultural collision" because "the U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds." Chicana/o and Mexican artists and filmmakers continue to address "the contentious issues of exploitation, exclusion, and conflict at the border and attempt to overturn border stereotypes" through their work. Luis Alberto Urrea writes "the border runs down the middle of me. I have a barbed wire fence neatly bisecting my heart."
caption: A monument at the Tijuana-San Diego border for those who have died attempting to cross the US-Mexican border. Each coffin represents a year and the number of dead. Many Chicanas/os reject borders and advocate against US colonialism and capitalism which fuels the border crisis.[142]
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