I. Background: A.What is Chicano?

The chicano culture is a border phenomenon. To fully understand it, one has to seriously look at the extension (3326km: 6 times the distance between Amsterdam and Paris; 200 km more than the distance between Lisbon and Copenhaghen), history and complexity of the border between México and the United States. Trying to be brief one could say that a Chicano is a politicized mexican-american. In other words, those daughters and sons of mexicans born in the United States and getting involved in a fight for political rights and power positions.



Normally, they claim their origins to be in a mythical land called "Aztlán", from where the aztecs were supposedly original. Their nationalist discourse also has strong tones of anti-colonialism, drawing strong attention to the text of the "Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty" (1848), which not only ended the 1847-8 Mexican-American War (along with the controversies of the 1836 Mexican-American War over Texas), but stripped México half of it's territory while claiming to protect the mexicans now to live under the U.S. flag full citizenship. In fact, the mexican settlers where dispossesed from their lands and treated as second rate citizens.

 

The Chicano Movement as such only started its full flight during the late sixties and early seventies. Self-determination was part of the spirit of change prevalent during those days. Though the movement was based on a national ideology pictured in Alurista's "Plan Espiritual de Aztlán" and Rodolfo 'Corky' González's I am Joaquín it always sought more social and political inclusion along with the full recognition of civil rights for the chicano community, rather than secession. The nationalist discourse was probably more of a tool to preserve the unity of the movement than anything else. 



Among the first great names of the chicano movement we can find Reyes López Tijerina, a preacher whom after having a dream decided to study international treaties to bring the lands of northern New México back to their original and legitimate owners (of mexican descent). His discourse radicalized after a while, and in 1967 he along with 20 other men protagonized de "Tierra Amarilla Raid" on the city's town hall. This was one of the first episodes that inspired the movement. Soon others would follow, such as Luis Valdez and his "Teatro Campesino" in support of the strike of the farmworkers against the Gallo Wineyards.
The struggle of the chicano movement keeps going until today, and it faces strong opposition from several conservative groups.




Performing lo chicano
In order to go a bit deeper into the significance of lo chicano as a background to Guillermo Gómez Peña's work and writtings, we will lay hands on Daniel Belgrad's analysis of it. In his article "Performing lo chicano" [MELUS, Vol. 29, No. 2, Elusive Illusions: Art and Reality (Summer, 2004), pp. 249-264 (Storrs, Conneticutt: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). http://www.jstor.org/stable/4141828 , accessed on Septemmber 3rd, 2009)], Belgrad charachterizes the chicano as "a more complex phenomenon than either nationalist withdrawal or cultural hybridization. It is, instead, an identity predicated on the dynamic interaction of those two impulses"(268).

Nationalist withdrawal would be a movement towards secession: self-determination taken up to its last consequences. On the other hand, "the discourse of cultural hybridity envisions the collapse of colonialism's structural inequalities into a polyglot global culture, where cultural difference becomes the basis for creative syntheses. Instead of a boundary line where different identities meet and conflict, it imagines a 'border zone' where identities mix and enrich each other"(249). This means that the chicano discourse has been used both as a mark of mixing and as a mark of separation from the dominant culture:

In the current struggle for cultural maintenance and parity within the Chicano community, there are two dominant strategies vying for ascendancy. On the one hand, there is an attempt to fracture mainstream consensus with a defiant 'otherness.' Impertinent representations counter the homogenizing desires, investments, and projections of the dominant culture and express what is manifestly different. On the other hand, there is the recognition of new interconnections and filiations (251).

How does this look in terms of 'cultural performance'? "performances of lo chicano enact a dialectic between accessibility (openness to the dominant culture) and inaccessibility (the assertion of difference), in which accessibility is shown to be necessary, but inaccessibility is finally insisted upon" (262). Gómez Peña, is a good example of such a seemingly contradictory strategy.