Chicanismo emerged as the cultural consciousness behind the Chicano Movement. The central aspect of Chicanismo is the identification of Chicanos with their Indigenous American roots to create an affinity with the notion that they are native to the land rather than immigrants. Chicanismo brought a new sense of nationalism for Chicanos that extended the notion of family to all Chicano people. Barrios, or working-class neighborhoods, became the cultural hubs for the people. It created a symbolic connection to the ancestral ties of Mesoamerica and the Nahuatl language through the situating of Aztlán, the ancestral home of the Aztecs, in the southwestern United States. Chicanismo also rejected Americanization and assimilation as a form of cultural destruction of the Chicano people, fostering notions of Brown Pride. Xicanisma has been referred to as an extension of Chicanismo. Overview During the early 1960s and 1970s, a great deal of Mexican Americans came together across the United States with the aim to fight for social and political change. This movement became known as the Chicano movement and can be defined as a social movement that emerged in the 1960s to protest the circumstances in which the Mexican American community found itself. This emotional, but predominantly nonviolent reform movement included several concerns of great importance to the community. Among these were the fear of cultural disintegration, the lack of economic and social mobility, rampant discrimination, and inadequate educational institutions. The movement would result in a shift in the way that Mexican Americans saw themselves in society. It was a question that had surfaced in the Mexican American community due to the barriers of oppression they felt once entering the United States. In order to combat these feelings of isolationism, the Chicano movement sought to unite all Chicanos, regardless of class. Communal empowerment was important to the movement because they were minorities in American society. This made it very important for community organizing in order to collectively advance their agenda. The movement was focused around the question of what it meant to be Mexican in American society. Chicano culture focused on a multiplicity of ideas that were held by the Mexican American community. Intellectuals and others involved in the movement, including artists and authors, created new forms of art that encompassed their culture. Examples included virtues of the Mexican indigenous heritage and bilingual, sometimes polyglot, works of literature. Part of the movement's aim was to construct a