Xicana

Chicano or Chicana (also spelled Xicano or 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 over time it has gained more acceptance as an identity of pride within the Mexican-American community in the United States.

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and writer Tino Villanueva traced the first documented use of the term as an ethnonym to 1911, as referenced in a then-unpublished essay by University of Texas anthropologist José Limón.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.

In 1857, a gunboat, the Chicana, was sold 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.

The origin of the word "chicano" is disputed. Some claim it is a shortened form of Mexicano (from the Nahuatl name for a member of the Mexica, the indigenous Aztec people of Anahuac, the Valley of Mexico). The name Mexica as spoken in its original Nahuatl, and Mexico by the Spaniards at the time of the Conquistadors, was pronounced originally with a sh sound and was transcribed with an x during this time period. (All pronunciations that follow are English approximations of the original Spanish or Indigenous languages; roughly /mɛˈʃiːkə/ and /ˈmeɪʃikoʊ/, respectively.) According to this etymological hypothesis, the difference between the pronunciation and spelling of chicano and mexicano stems from the fact that the modern-day Spanish language experienced a change in pronunciation regarding a majority of words containing the x (for example: México, Ximenez, Xavier, Xarabe). In most cases the sh sound has been replaced with the h sound (thus /ˈmɛhikoʊ/) and a change of spelling (x to j, though this has not been done to Mexico and various other proper names). The word Chicano would have also been affected by this change. Many Chicanos replace the ch with the letter x, forming Xicano, due to the original spelling of the Mexica Empire. In the United States, some Mexican-Americans choose the Xicano spelling to emphasize their indigenous ancestry.

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