ABSTRACT
Chicanos have formed a core element of the agrarian workforce in the US Southwest ever since. They have played a central role in the US agrarian labor movement since the 1930s, and their period of greatest activism was during the mid-1960s. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, created the first generation of Mexican Americans in the United States in its decree that the 100,000 Mexicans living in territory ceded to the United States were henceforth American citizens. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the supreme poetic expression of our Mexican desire to be one people, has inspired Mexicans more than once to social revolution. For millions of farmworkers, from the Mexicans and Filipinos of the West to the Afro-Americans of the South, the United States has come to a social, political, and cultural impasse.
