Movie on Sunday Feb 7 - Chicano! Quest for the Homeland

Sorry this took me a few days - I wasn't sure if we would be discussing the film in class and I wanted to hold off until then.

The focus of the documentary Chicano! Quest for a Homeland is the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. A lot of the film was focused on the actions of Reis Lopez Tijerina, the leader of the Alianca group, who claimed federal land as their own due to a treaty from twenty years earlier between the US and Mexico. Millions of acres were taken from the original landowning families. In 1965, the US Forest Service revoked half of the grazing permits. Then in the spring of 1967, people faced federal charges for occupying the land of the forest reserve. Much of Tijerina's earlier actions revolved around citizen's arrests. One of the first was of Alfonso Sanchez, the District Attorney who placed federal charges for occupying forest reserve lands.

Another important member of the Chicano Movement was Corky Gonzalez, a former boxer who became involved in Democratic politics. He registered many Mexican-American voters for John F. Kennedy and started the Crusade for Justice. Gonzalez strived for national attention and visibility for the Chicano Movement.

A major event in the Chicano Movement was the 1969 Denver Youth Conference. Here, issues were addressed such as women's roles in the movement. Women began to press for equality within all aspects of the movement. Additionally, a fifteen-point plan was drafted with a poem as its preamble, describing the search for the homeland of Aztlan, an Aztec myth than came to represent the southwest United States. Furthermore, issues such as the war in Vietnam were addressed - while Mexican Americans made up 12% of the US population, they accounted for 20% of the deaths in Vietnam.