Chicanos

Chicano or Chicana (also spelled Xicano, Xicana) is a chosen identity of some Mexican Americans in the United States. The term Chicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican-American. Both names are chosen identities within the Mexican-American community in the United States. However, these terms have a wide range of meanings in various parts of the Southwest. The term became widely used during the Chicano Movement by Mexican Americans to express pride in a shared cultural, ethnic and community identity.

The term Chicano had negative connotations before the Chicano Movement, and still is viewed negatively by more conservative members of this community, but it over time gained more acceptance as an identity of pride within the Mexican-American community in the United States. Still, many American-born Mexicans view the term to be distracting, as it often represents a refusal to identify with either Mexican or American identities, while Mexicans from Mexico usually are not familiar with or do not identify with the term.

The pro-indigenous/Mestizo nature of Chicano nationalism is cemented in the nature of Mexican national identity, in which the culture is heavily syncretic between indigenous and Spanish cultures, and where 60% of the population is Mestizo, and another 30% are indigenous, with the remaining 10% being of European heritage and other racial/ethnic groups. Ultimately it was the experience of Mexican Americans in the United States which culminated in the creation of a Chicano identity.

The Chicano poet and writer Tino Villanueva traced the first documented use of the term as an ethnonym to 1911, as referenced in a then-unpublished essay by University of Texas anthropologist José Limón. Linguists Edward R. Simmen and Richard F. Bauerle report the use of the term in an essay by Mexican-American writer, Mario Suárez, published in the Arizona Quarterly in 1947.

However, a gunboat, the Chicana, was sold in 1857 to Jose Maria Carvajal to ship arms on the Rio Grande. The King and Kenedy firm submitted a voucher to the Joint Claims Commission of the United States in 1870 to cover the costs of this gunboat's conversion from a passenger steamer. No particular explanation of the boat's name is known.

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