[7] With this new sense of identity and history, the early proponents of the Chicano movement began viewing themselves as a colonized people entitled to self-determination of their own.
[8] Some of them also embraced a form of nationalism that was based on their perception of the failure of the United States government to live up to the promises that it had made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
As the Aztecs are central to the conquest and history of Mexico, the use of the word took on the added dimension of the reclamation of an indigenous heritage as part of the decolonization process.
Chicanos use the name Aztlán in reference to territories within the boundaries of the Mexican Cession, the land that was "granted" to Spain in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI in Bull Inter caetera, then claimed by the First Mexican Empire in 1821 when Spain signed the Treaty of Córdoba at the conclusion of the Mexican War of Independence, then claimed as "territories" (as opposed to "states", often referred to as "provinces") by 1824 Constitution, and finally ceded to the United States in 1848 as an outcome of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (although it also included Texas, which had earlier proclaimed its independence from the government in Mexico City and was independent territory.)
Mexican Americans had regional, linguistic, age, cultural, racial, and gender differences, all of which were all subsumed to a mutual dedication to the Chicano Movement.