“In the academy, [American Indian scholar] Jack Forbes created a path to bring Chicanas/os and others “home.” By this, I mean that Forbes provided historical knowledge about understanding that our legacies have always been deeply rooted in this hemisphere.” — Melissa Moreno, professor, Woodland Community College
Scholars in Chicano studies and related disciplines, since the 1960s, have long debated the idea of when Mexican Americans as a people(s) came to be. This is something that the discipline has grappled with since its creation in the late 1960s. Yet, it is a debate that has been rekindled both by the extreme anti-Mexican climate in this country, and also by the work of a pre-eminent American Indian scholar from a generation ago, who posited a seemingly controversial proposition: that these peoples, rather than foreigners, in fact are native or indigenous to these lands.
The first date chosen by early Chicano scholars within the discipline was 1848, when half of Mexico became part of the United States, after the end of the 1846-48 war and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A few years later, when the discipline became Chicana/Chicano studies, Chicana scholars generally selected 1519, the year that symbolically brought the Spanish and indigenous cultures together, producing the first mestizo or mixed child.
While Chicano/Chicana scholars grappled, one of the co-founders of American Indian Studies, Jack Forbes, in Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlan (completed in 1965, published in 1973), put forth the thesis that they were Anishinabeg, or Indians.
In addition, he also posited that the segregated barrio of Analco, founded in the 1600s and comprised of Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcaltecas from Mexico in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was “the birthplace of the Chicano.” He actually put forth this view in a 1961-62 treatise: “The Mexican Heritage of Aztlan,” when he was part of the Native American Movement or Movimiento Nativo Americano, a Southern California-based organization that asserted that Chicanos were indigenous.
As Dr. Jose Castro, one of the early students at the Indigenous-Chicano D-Q University, recently stated at a symposium in his honor at the University of California, Davis: “Jack Forbes always believed that Chicanos and American Indians were Indigenous.”
Choosing 1848 was not so much part of a debate, but an acknowledgment that, prior to 1848, there were no peoples referred to as Mexican Americans. They existed, but not by that name. Thus, books such as Occupied America by Rudy Acuña marked the end of that war as the beginning of their history, when Mexico lost its northern territories, what later became the U.S. Southwest.
