Throughout United States history, the ideas of progress and Manifest Destiny have masked the oppressive brutality of settler colonialism that modern America is built upon. Indigenous peoples were violently forced from their families, lands, and resources, and their histories were intentionally erased. The Chicano Movement was organized to fight against the systems of settler colonialism that targeted Chicanos in America. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez’s organization, Cruzada por la Justicia, organized the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, in March 1969, where El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was first adopted. El Plan confronts the legacy of settler colonialism and the present racial arrangement it upholds by reclaiming
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El Plan not only battles land dispossession, but the settler colonialism attempts to erase and assimilate the cultural identities of Chicano people. In turn, El Plan emphasizes the importance of cultural identity as a tool of resistance through its Organizational Goals. The plan refers to cultural identity as the “moral backbone” of the movement, because it unites people in the heart and mind through Chicano art, music, and education. This emphasis on cultural revival serves multiple purposes. First, it fosters pride and self-awareness among Chicano people, countering the marginalization and discrimination by Anglo-American culture. It calls for Chicanos to disrupt the notion of cultural inferiority imposed upon them and be confident and united in their own sense of identity and culture. This sense of inferiority is expressed in the opening lines of Rodolfo Gonzales’ poem “I am Jaoqun”, where he writes “I am Joaqun, lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society.suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society” (Gonzales
El Plan not only battles land dispossession, but the settler colonialism attempts to erase and assimilate the cultural identities of Chicano people. In turn, El Plan emphasizes the importance of cultural identity as a tool of resistance through its Organizational Goals. The plan refers to cultural identity as the “moral backbone” of the movement, because it unites people in the heart and mind through Chicano art, music, and education. This emphasis on cultural revival serves multiple purposes. First, it fosters pride and self-awareness among Chicano people, countering the marginalization and discrimination by Anglo-American culture. It calls for Chicanos to disrupt the notion of cultural inferiority imposed upon them and be confident and united in their own sense of identity and culture. This sense of inferiority is expressed in the opening lines of Rodolfo Gonzales’ poem “I am Jaoqun”, where he writes “I am Joaqun, lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society.suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society” (Gonzales