page_title: Mexican Americans
section_title: The Chicano movement and the Chicano Moratorium
hierarchical_section_title: Mexican Americans / The Chicano movement and the Chicano Moratorium
caption_attribution_description: English: A plaque honoring Ruben Salazar mounted in the Globe Lobby of the Los Angeles Times Building in Downtown Los Angeles.
context_page_description: Mexican Americans are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. As of July 2018, Mexican Americans made up 11.3% of the United States' population, as 37.0 million U.S. residents identified as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. As of July 2018, Mexican Americans comprised 61.9% of all Latinos in Americans in the United States. Many Mexican Americans reside in the American Southwest; over 60% of all Mexican Americans reside in the states of California and Texas. As of 2016, Mexicans made up 53% of the total population of Latino foreign-born Americans. Mexicans are also the largest foreign-born population, accounting for 25% of the total foreign-born population, as of 2017.
  The United States is home to the second-largest Mexican community in the world, second only to Mexico itself, and comprising more than 24% of the entire Mexican-origin population of the world. Mexican American families of indigenous heritage have been in the country for at least 15,000 years, and mestizo Mexican American history spans more than 400 years, since the 1598 founding of Spanish New Mexico.
context_section_description: In the heady days of the late 1960s, when the student movement was active around the globe, the Chicano movement conducted actions such as the mass walkouts by high school students in Denver and [[East Los Angeles, California] in 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970. The movement was particularly strong at the college level, where activists formed MEChA, an organization that seeks to promote Chicano unity and empowerment through education and political action, but also espouses revanchist ideals centered around "taking back" the American southwest for Mexican- Americans (Chicanos) through education. The new Chicano college graduate's ideal was to become empowered through education, return to his/her community and advise more chicanos to continue with their college education after high school. And upon graduation, the purpose was to return to their communities and advise other members of their families and ethnic groups to follow their footsteps. The communities political positions, and management positions were going to be reached by empowering chicanos through higher education and become involved in city councils, management positions, and politics (Pinzon, 2015)   
  The Chicano Moratorium, formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a broad-based but fragile coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Vietnam War. The committee was led by activists from local colleges and members of the "Brown Berets", a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged walkouts in 1968, known as the East L.A. walkouts, also called "blowouts".
  The best known historical fact of the Moratorium was the death of Rubén Salazar, known for his reporting on civil rights and police brutality. The official story is that Salazar was killed by a tear gas canister fired by a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the Silver Dollar Café at the conclusion of the August 29 rally.
caption: A plaque honoring Ruben Salazar mounted in the Globe Lobby of the Los Angeles Times Building in downtown Los Angeles.
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