Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States.[1][2] The label Chicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings.[3] [4][5][6] While Mexican-American identity emerged to encourage assimilation into White American society and separate the community from African-American political struggle,[7][8] Chicano identity emerged among anti-assimilationist youth, some of whom belonged to the Pachuco subculture, who claimed the term (which had previously been a classist and racist slur).[9][10] Chicano was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent (with many using the Nahuatl language as a symbol), diverging from the more assimilationist Mexican American identity.[8][11] Chicano Movement leaders were influenced by and collaborated with Black Power leaders and activists.[12][13] Chicano youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance.[14] The Chicano Movement faltered by the mid-1970s as a result of state surveillance, infiltration, and repression by U.S. government agencies, informants, and agent provocateurs, such as through COINTELPRO,[15][16][17][18] a hyper-fixation on masculine pride and machismo which excluded Chicanas and queer Chicanos from the movement,[19][20][21] as well as fading interest in Chicano nationalist constructs such as Aztlán.[22] The identity experienced a further decline by the late 1970s and 1980s as assimilation and economic mobility became a goal of many Mexican Americans in an era of conservatism, who instead identified as Hispanic.[
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