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Chicano/a Literaturę

Those who entered the United States from the South Their ancestry: from the approximately 100,000 Mexicans who constituted the host culture of the Southwest and California when that area was taken from Mexico in the 1840s

Even morę came over in the successive waves of immigration: in the years after 1910, almost one-eighth of the population of Mexico, overwhelmingly rural, migrated to the United States; those who arrived after 1940 were particularly numerous, thanks to the much heavier inf!ux of immigrants during the fifty years of exceptional economic expansion in the Southwest that was initiated by the WWII victims of hostile immigration policies

subject to a kind of colonial situation: living in what has become known as occupied America, formerly Mexican land now owned and controlled by tne United States

a richly hybrid culture, one founded on mestizo or mixed origins a border territory, la frontera, where competing languages encounter each other; here notions of migrants and natives, the local and the national, the periphery and the core, appear to coalesce, come together in a potent mix of transcultural forms

The term chicano probably derives from the 16'*-century. corruption in pronunciation of mexicano or meschicano which then, with the dropping of the mes, becomes chicano - or, chicana.

Gaining momentum from the widespread civil rights activism of the