Post-colonial Anarchism - Chicano Anarchism

Chicano Anarchism

Chicano anarchism is an effort to understand how anarchism relates to the Chicano experience in the United States, or better said how the two relate to one another. A Chicano/a being a person of Mexican descent who was born and raised in the United States, more specifically a politicized person of Mexican descent born in the United States. Chicano anarchism, although the term itself is quite new, has it antecedents in the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon’s propagandizing in the Spanish-speaking communities of California and the southwest during his years of exile, and in the Mexican anarchist movement. Since the 1960s when the modern Chicano radical movement begin, and especially the late 60s and early 70s when it reached its zenith, to identify as a Chicano (rather than Hispanic or Latino) has been to identify with a self-consciously subversive political stance. Chicano anarchism thus seeks to take this form of radical self-identification and push it beyond the current emphasis on cultural-nationalism and towards class struggle and solidarity with the international working class, while keeping their analysis rooted in their unique history and culture.

One of the primary goals of Chicano anarchism is to inject a class struggle anarchist critique, made primarily by class conscious Chicano anarchists, into the modern nationalist Chicano movement and transform the movement away from the reactionary ideas of cultural-nationalism and into a movement that works in collaboration as comrades with the international working class, of which the mass of Chicanos are a part.