Redefining the Chicano cultural identity in the film "Tortilla soup" (2001). El Nuevo Latino (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, Bielefeld University, language: English, abstract: While reading about Chicano nationalist movement, I found out that this struggle of Mexican-Americans against an economic and social oppression by the dominant U.S. society, afterwards has not disappeared completely. Until today it inspires Mexican-American intellectuals, artists, cineastes and writers to continue the path of ethnic/cultural self-affirmation. Thus, I was intrigued about how Mexican-Americans would define their ethnical identity today in backdrop of the current demographic shift, which manifests itself in the transforming from Latino minority into the majority population. This phenomenon which the U.S. media called "browning" or "latinization" of America, was evoked due to the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s along with higher birth rates among U.S. Latino minorities. In the face of this fact, the state and its institutions became more aware of its multicultural and multiracial future, and that pushed them to redefine, reaffirm or, applying terminology of Anderson, to re-imagine itself once again as a nation. Yet it is still unclear what would it mean for future majority population. According to Stephen Bochner "the cultural identity of a society is defined by its majority group, and this group is usually quite distinguishable from the minority sub-groups with whom they share the physical environment and the territory that they inhabit". Well, would this claim also be legitimate in case of the U.S. demographic shift? How are Mexican-Americans perceiving this change? Whether there are changes in their mindsets and ways they represent themselves on social and cultural levels too? It should not be forgotten that Mexican-American community lived over the history under the labels of sub-group, temporal nation builders or just minority which in subtext implies less important.