Being Chicano is a state of consciousness. Nevertheless, as a minority population and identity within mainstream U.S. culture, this designation represents a culturally determined role imposed on Hispanic Americans from the outside. Within the history of the struggle between U.S. and Mexican cultures, the struggle for identity, independence, and a unique voice remains as paramount an individual and group issue today as it did more than a century and a half ago. Despite advances across all socio-economic measures, Chicanos continue to be ostracized by mainstream American culture for failing to conform to ôwhiteö paradigms of being. The struggle to overcome imposed conceptual boundaries by mainstream America has historically placed Chicanos in an inferior position with respect to validating their own unique sense of culture, race, class, gender, and sexuality. This analysis will examine the post-Chicano movement with respect to the struggle to forge an identity that is unique in light of being forced to exist within the cultural boundaries imposed by mainstream, primarily white, American society.
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua (1999) provides a mestiza consciousness that attempts to provide a new ethos for Chicanos with the potential of smashing historically dualistic notions of ethnicity and race. The author discusses the way that culturally determined roles have been imposed on Chicanos from outside. When failure to conform to such roles occurs, Chicanos are often ostracized. Far from embracing and validating people of different races, cultures, classes, and sexual orientations, Anzaldua (1999) maintains that the ôAmerican Dreamö of U.S. society is not for all. As a mestiza, a white, Mexican and Indian, lesbian feminist, Anzaldua (1999) fashions a new mestiza consciousness: ôa new value system with images and symbolsö that will help narrow the gap between ôwhiteàand coloredàmale and femaleö in or...