To build unity requires recognizing the central role of young activists. They are vigorously fighting the attack on this century's Reconstruction. Th… - Elizabeth Martínez

In the past, Chicano often meant lower-class, with a negative connotation. During the Movement years, young Mexican Americans started to use "Chicano/Chicana" as an affirmation of pride and identity and to say, "We're not Mexicans or Americans. We're a combination -- a special population with our own history and culture."

The anti-diversity war rages not only in academia but in the whole society. Like the anti-affirmative action campaign, it is profoundly racist and sexist. Both represent much more than a backlash: they are tactics for solidifying a rightist ideology to sustain the Right's political hegemony, to guarantee that a racist, sexist and capitalist agenda holds the center of U.S. political culture. This in turn calls for demonizing progressive ideas and people that might impede right-wing domination over ideological space. It calls for blocking the study of U.S. history as a history of racism, sexism and imperialism at work. The U.S. political culture must be kept ahistorical, even anti-historical. The war on multiculturalism parallels the way in which reactionaries sought to use the Gulf War to regenerate patriotism and thereby annul the Vietnam War syndrome with its national self-doubt.

The Chicana may be working 16 hours a day to support for her children, but she will still be viewed as a sexual object rather than a human being. Unless she is over the age of 35 or 40, she will be seen more as a face and body than as a fellow worker and fellow victim of oppression.