Chicano: A Question of Identity between Memory and Social Practice.

“This is my home  this thin edge  of barbwire.” These lines are excerpts from the book by Chicano writer, artist, and activist Gloria  Anzaldúa entitled Borderlands/La Frontera.The New Mestiza. The text was extensively studied in the field of border studies, Chicano studies, decolonial studies, and above all, gender studies. Such deep attention from the academic world is since this 1987 book put in writing for the first time what  I tried to bring out in my previous work (The Conceptual Dimension of the Border: The Chicana/o Experience and the Development of Chicana/o Art), that is, the multitude of applications of the concept of border. However, for the purpose of the discourse I intend to carry on, it is more helpful to focus on what these three short verses express. From them, it is clear that, just like for visual artists, barbed wire was the symbol of every type of border for the writer, but also the indicator of a space that can be defined as a "home" and in wh...

  Chicana Poetry and  Music as an Act of Rebellion. Celeste De Luna Art~ "Tu Cuerpo Es Una Frontera." “To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.” Gloria Anzaldùa We continue our in-depth journey on the Chicana identity through poetry and music. In this context, I will involve two leading figures, the writer Gloria Anzaldua and the Chicano singer Lila Downs. The Chicano term originally used to indicate American natives of Mexican origin, or Mexico Americans, underwent a semantic evolution, taking on an explicitly political connotation, after the Second World War, when veterans who had fought in Europe in the name of freedom and equality, when they returned to the United States, their homeland, they found that they were still considered second class citizens, discriminated against and excluded from political representation. Therefore, with the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican-American community rose against the racial disc...

The Conceptual Dimension of the Border: The Chicana/o Experience and the Development of Chicana/o Art. R upert García, ¡Cesen Deportatión! , 1973, San Francisco (CA), Fine Art Museum. Fig. 1 - Charlie Chaplin Straddling the U.S. Mexico Border  – The Pilgrim (1923 ). An indecisive and frightened Charlie Chaplin straddles the borderline between  USA and Mexico (fig. 1) under a sign similar to the one drawn by Diego Rivera in his magazine  (fig. 2): it is the final scene of the film The Pilgrim, directed and starring Chaplin himself in 1923. The protagonist, Charlot, is an American prisoner who, to escape the authorities, pretends to be a Protestant priest in a small country and, after falling in love with a girl, manages to recover some money that had been stolen. Once he learns of Charlot's true identity, the sheriff of the town decides to pardon him and, as a reward, instead of taking him back to prison, pushes him to kick on the other side of the Border. The instant Ch...