ABSTRACT
Throughout Mexican American history, resistance has been a key concept in the formation of ‘Chicano’ identity. Encompassing practices of protest and tactics of social change, acts of resistance, in their most basic sense, according to Paul Routledge, are “assembled out of the materials and practice of everyday life, and imply some sort of contestation, some juxtaposition of forces” (Routledge 1997, p. 69). Posing challenges to unjust or oppressive systems of power within the context of nonviolent actions, campaigns, and movements, Chicanas/os have aimed at changing the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures. When Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that the U.S.-Mexican border was “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 25), she referred to the borderlands that the Chicano movement in the 1960s declared a contested space. Chicanas/os were born of a land once Mexican territory, children of people disenfranchised, and born from the effects of oppressive socio-historical forces that sought to render generations of people voiceless. To become Chicana/o meant responding to the haunting of historical trauma such as that inflicted by the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded over half of Mexico’s territory to the United States, with further loss in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase, which established southern New Mexico as U.S. territory. Redolent with colonialism, the treaty established a border that currently maintained not only the geographical boundaries of the U.S. nation-state, but the maintenance of national discourse on what it meant to be part of the United States. Alongside the sealing of the acquisition of Mexican lands, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was to guarantee full U.S. citizenship to Mexican nationals and Indigenous peoples living north of the Río Grande. The river had been agreed as a so-called natural border, along with the assurance that property, ancestral land grants, language, and cultural and civic rights would be upheld for those who found themselves now strangers in their own land. In reality, very few of the promised provisions were abided by. When the treaty was ratified in the U.S. Congress on 10 March 1848, provisions put in place to guarantee civil rights and the protection of land grants were struck off, and it was only at this point that U.S. troops left Mexico City. In the mid- to late nineteenth century this removal of protections continued, with U.S. courts frequently siding with Anglo Americans in claims to land, water, and minerals, and within one generation of the annexation of Northern Mexico, the new ‘Mexican Americans’ were disenfranchised, poverty stricken, and landless (Haynes 2001, pp. 231–264 & 232–236 & Luna 2005, pp. 105–122). 374Today, communities of Mexican and Indigenous origin living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands still remain among the nation’s most desperately poor.
