By Jonathan Hernández, VI Form

Chicanismo: Examining Mexican-American Culture, History, and Perspectives Through Photography

Editor’s Note: This project was made possible with the support of the Class of 1968 V Form Fellowship. At their 25th reunion, the Class of 1968 created a fund to provide grants to V Form students for independent study during the school year or, more commonly, during the summer between V and VI Forms. Their intent in establishing this fund was to reward independent thinking, ingenuity, and planning and to encourage the student in exploring non-traditional fields of inquiry or using non-traditional methods of investigation.

Student-Submitted Note: This past summer, I took part in The Class of 1968 V Form Fellowship and used my grant funds to travel to Los Angeles to look at Latinidad and Mexican-American identities and spaces through a photographic lens. I compiled what I learned (in addition to a bit of research I completed) in an academic reflection uploaded below.

“We cannot seek out achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.” — Cesar Chavez.

Chicana/o/x or Xicana/o/x (both pronounced the same way) refer to persons of Mexican descent who grew up in the United States. The experiences of these Chicana/o/x persons are notably different from the experiences of simply American or Mexican individuals as neither identity has wholly encapsulated their background. Chicanismo, what this grant project was built around, is pride in one’s Chicana/e/o/x heritage. With the completion of this project, it is my hope to share what I have learned about the spaces I visited to provide insight into Mexican-American history, culture, and perspectives. 

It is believed that Chicanos descend from indigenous groups who lived in Aztlán – the American Southwest region encompassing Arizona, California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma. As part of Spain’s colonial efforts, a racial hierarchy was instituted through a caste system called the “Castas” system. The Castas system unlike America’s system of race accounted for cultural mixing and recognized that Spain’s colonization of the Americas promoted cross-cultural interactions and allowed different groups of people to interact, trade, and marry with each other. Yet, the Castas system did not only organize persons based on their outward appearance but also on their parents’ individual races. For instance, a  child with a West African father and Indigenous mother would most likely work as a laborer or farmer. Still, a child with an Anglo father and Meztic mother would most likely live an educated noble life. In fact, the practice of interracial marriage was so popular or so prominent that in the First Census of Los Angeles in 1978 a significant majority of the citizens identified as Mestizaje or of “mixed blood” (Webber 33-34). Thus, for many Mexicans and Latinos, it has proven difficult to identify wholly with one race over another because of interracial marriage and mixing throughout the decades. 

After the Mexican Cession and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US gained territory in what is today the American Southwest. In states like Texas, New Mexico, California, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada which belonged previously to Mexico (and before that the Native American peoples in the region), about one hundred thousand people who decided to stay in the territories became U.S. citizens. Thus, began the formation of the Mexican-American identity.