page_title: Chicano art movement
section_title: Chicano movement
hierarchical_section_title: Chicano art movement / Chicano movement
caption_attribution_description: English: A mural from Chicano Park, Barrio Logan, San Diego, California, USA. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 12001192
context_page_description: The Chicano Art Movement represents attempts by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s. Chicano art was influenced by post-Mexican Revolution ideologies, pre-Columbian art, European painting techniques and Mexican-American social, political and cultural issues. The movement worked to resist and challenge dominant social norms and stereotypes for cultural autonomy and self-determination. Some issues the movement focused on were awareness of collective history and culture, restoration of land grants, and equal opportunity for social mobility. Throughout the movement and beyond, Chicanos have used art to express their cultural values, as protest or for aesthetic value. The art has evolved over time to not only illustrate current struggles and social issues, but also to continue to inform Chicano youth and unify around their culture and histories. Chicano art is not just Mexican-American artwork: it is a public forum that emphasizes otherwise "invisible" histories and people in a unique form of American art.
context_section_description: "The lasting significance of the Chicano Movement on contemporary Chicano/a writers and artists cannot be overstated."—Sharla Hutchinson
  Beginning in the early 1960s, the Chicano Movement, was a sociopolitical movement by Mexican-Americans organizing into a unified voice to create change for their people. The Chicano Movement was focused on a fight for civil and political rights of its people, and sought to bring attention to their struggles for equality across southwest America and expand throughout the United States. The Chicano movement was concerned with addressing police brutality, civil rights violations, lack of social services for Mexican-Americans, the Vietnam War, educational issues and other social issues.
  The Chicano Movement included all Mexican-Americans of every age, which provided for a minority civil rights movement that would not only represent generational concerns, but sought to use symbols that embodied their past and ongoing struggles. Young artists formed collectives, like Asco in Los Angeles during the 1970s, which was made up of students who were just out of high school.
  The Chicano movement was based around the community, an effort to unify the group and keep their community central to social progression, so they too could follow in the foot steps of others and achieve equality. From the beginning Chicanos have struggled to affirm their place in American society through their fight for communal land grants given to them by the Mexican government were not being honored by the U.S. government after the U.S. acquired the land from Mexico. The solidification of the Chicano/a struggles for equality into the Chicano Movement came post World War II, when discrimination towards returning Mexican-American servicemen was being questioned, for the most part these were usually instances of racial segregation/discrimination that spanned from simple dining issues to the burial rights of returning deceased servicemen.
  The formation of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), co-founded by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Gil Padilla, sought to unionize Mexican-American labor forces to fight for improved wages/working conditions through such forms as strikes, marches, and boycotts was a notable spike in the national awareness of El Movimiento. Using symbols, such as the black eagle and creating unique poster and union art, helped raise awareness of the social issues NFWA faced, even while the workers themselves were largely invisible.
  Aztlán is also another consistent symbol used by the Chicano Movement, the term unified the Mexican Americans under a term of inheritance of land and culture.  Along with this common rhetoric of land claims and civil rights, an alternative to the peaceful protesting of César Chávez, Reies Lopez Tijerina attempted to resolve the issues of communal land grants in New Mexico through the creation of Alianza Federal de Mercedes and eventually resulting in attempts to secede from the Union and form their own territory, Republic of Chama.
  The union then brought in thousands more lettuce and vegetable pickers in the Salinas Chicano Movement art developed out of necessity for a visual representation of the self perceived sociopolitical injustice that the movement was seeking out to change.  As in any movement there is a need for signage that brings awareness to the issues at hand, starting with murals.  Murals represented the main form of activism in Mexico prior to the Chicano Movement taking place in the United States.  The murals depicted the lives of native Mexicans and their struggles against the oppression of the United States, as well as, native problems to Mexico's poverty and farming industry.  Many of the images and symbols embodied in these classic Mexican graffiti murals were later adopted by the Chicano Movement to reaffirm and unify their collective under a specific light of activism.
caption: Chicano Park
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