Xicanx

Xicanx (/ˈtʃiːkæŋks, ˈʃiː-/ CHEE-kanks, SHEE-,[1] /ʃɪˈkænʃ/ shih-KANSH[2]) is an English-language gender-neutral neologism and identity referring to people of Mexican descent in the United States.

[2] Jennie Luna and Gabriel S. Estrada wrote that "this state reclamation of Indigenismo was a racialized logic that favored modern mestizo identity rather than supporting the living Nahua and Indigenous pueblos.

"[2] Luna and Estrada cite indigenous peoples of Mexico who see the Mexican state as an agent of violence and destructive assimilationist practices in their communities.

Luna and Estrada state that it has transformed to "reject Mexica-centrism, and instead can be viewed from a broader perspective, one that more widely embraces the Uto-Nahuatl, Mayan, and other Indigenous language families spoken throughout the Americas.

"[13] Luna and Estrada refer to the second x as an "Indigenized genderqueer" representation that interrupts "colonization and male/female hierarchies" while still acknowledging that it operates within a "partially European construction of language.

[17] Artist Roy Martinez describes Xicanx as "not being bound to the feminine or masculine aspects," stating that "it's not a set thing" that people should feel enclosed in, but that it is a fluid identity that extends beyond fitting within the gender binary and beyond borders.

[18] In an analysis of Alfred Arteaga's poetry, editor David Lloyd states that "the invocation of the shifting times and spaces through which Xicanx culture and poetics have emerged out of an indigenous context through successive colonial displacements and the imposition of layers of imperial languages is crucial to Arteaga's mapping of the material foundations of a specifically Xicanx worldview, lodged in displacement and hybridity than any fixed identity.

[2] Susy Zepeda argues that the Chicano Movement offered "surface-level representations of the Mexica" and that the roots of de-Indigenization were not adequately explored nor were Indigenous peoples "understood as living entities."

The Xicanx Institute for Teaching & Organizing (XITO) emerged as a strategy to continue the legacy of the Mexican American Studies Department Programs (MAS) in Tucson Unified School District.

After the unconstitutional ban of the MAS programs, XITO developed "a decolonizing and re-humanizing model of Ethnic studies professional development to counter the deficit model of current teacher education by infusing critical identity work—a critical analysis of race, power, and systems of oppression—together with an Indigenous epistemological framework formerly implemented in the highly successful MAS program.