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Chicano history on the Web
Recent demonstrations addressing U.S. immigration policy drew thousands of Chicanos in Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston and put them in the national political spotlight. However, the media sobriquet of "sleeping giant" used to describe the Chicano community is not entirely true. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos participated in the struggle for civil rights, but beyond César Chávez and his work with the United Farm Workers (http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/07.html), many Americans do not know the names and events of the Chicano civil-rights movement. With Chicanos becoming a rapidly growing and influential force in America's social, cultural and political arenas, numerous Web sites offering rich primary documents, images, oral histories and video files on Chicanos provide historical context.
Used pejoratively in the early 20th century to describe people of Mexican descent residing in the United States, the term "Chicano" was reappropriated by Mexican-Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. Groups such as La Raza Unida Party (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/RR/war1.html) turned "Chicano" into a term of identity, empowerment and pride. Ricardo Salvador at Iowa State University provides a concise summary of the differences between the ostensibly interchangeable terms for Chicanos on his Web site, Are Chicanos the Same as Mexicans? (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rjsalvad/scmfaq/chicano.html).
Recently, several universities digitized their unique Chicano history collections. The Digital History Project hosted at the University of Houston (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/mexican_voices/mexican_voices.cfm) offers several basic overviews of significant people, organizations and events in Chicano history. Arizona State University offers a bilingual resource entitled The Chicana/Chicano Experience in Arizona replete with archival photographs and introductory histories (http://www.asu.edu/lib/archives/website/).
If you prefer to listen to or read oral history, the University of Texas at Arlington's Tejano Voices archives taped and transcribed recollections of Chicanos who fought for their human rights in Texas (http://libraries.uta.edu/tejanovoices/).
Organizations that played a huge role in the struggle for Chicano civil rights, like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (http://www.maldef.org/) and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (http://www.calstatela.edu/orgs/mecha/), still work on issues of equal rights, justice and education. These groups make primary documents, legal papers and histories available from their Web sites.
To learn more about such Chicano activists as José Angel Gutiérrez and Rodolfo "Corky"Gonzales, use the UB databases America: History and Life (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/am_history_life.html) and Ethnic Newswatch (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/ethnic.html). PBS aired an excellent four-part documentary, Chicano!: History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, which can be checked out at the Capen Multimedia Center (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/helpAZ/Multimedia-Center.html).
¡Disfrute sus investigaciones Chicanas y celebraciones del Cinco de Mayo! ¡Hasta luego!
—Dean Hendrix, University Libraries