The Chicanao Youth Leadership Camp
The Chicanao Youth Leadership Camp was found in the year 1994 by a segment of committed people who were working with Latino youth throughout San Diego County. The leadership camp began with a vision to have a program for high school-aged young students on a university setting where the students would be opened to an organization of higher learning. Since its founding, the Camp has provided its valuable service for more than three hundred students (Longman, 2004). The camp is now aged 13, and also the Camp steering committee plans to extend their services from the summer camp to local high school student organizations by the facilitation of workshops during the school year. It should also be noted that although the Camp’s main theme is providing leadership in the Latina/o community, any young person who is interested in learning about leadership in the Latina/o culture is more than invited to participate in the camp. Over the course of years, youth from several ethnic, cultural, economic and geographical backgrounds have participated in and developed the camp settings in their own special ways. The Camp is held every year at San Diego State University. Students stay in the residence halls and are free to gain experience in the day-to-day campus life. Residential advisors also called RA, who are actually the trained university students; give supervision, mentorship and guidance to all participants throughout the camp period.
The sharp isolation for several Chicanos from other cultural urban centers in the South-western region forced the communication among students at the University of Washington (UW) and the Chicano community of Seattle slightly more noticeable. The reality is that, the Chicano student movement at the University of Washington provided the impetus for new community institutions and a new era in the development of the arts and literature in Seattle and everywhere in that place. This energy would sprout out with the efforts of staff and faculty, as well as UW MEChA, the oldest student-initiative of the Chicano activist congregation in the Northwest (Alvizo and Barragan,2006).
At the community level, former student activists started the creation of SEAMAR and Consejo community health centers in 1978. The two centers in the beginning served the Western Washington Latino community, expanding over time to other low-income groups also. SEMAR reflected the farm laborer’s clinic in the Yakima Valley by providing holistic medical services, while Consejo concentrated mainly on mental health and chemical stuffs. These institutions remain important in giving access to health care for the Chicano and Latino immigrant communities.
Almost four decades after it started, the Chicano Movement still has a inevitable effect. As a result of activism at a very basic level on the part of several communities of color, there has been a noticeable transform in the way people talk about race, which is a lasting impact of the wider Civil Rights Movement. The most notable impacts of the Chicano Movement are still basically within academia, with the establishment of several student centers at college campuses everywhere in the country that provide to students of different ethnic backgrounds as well as the establishment of Chicano Studies Departments, research centers, academic journals, and so on.
The literary and art organizations of the 1970s have also left a long lasting impression on the Chicano/Latino community. The production of art centered on issues like racism, human privileges, and equal rights to education and jobs prevail even today. The discourse has also increased to include issues of class, race, nationality, and cultural integrity. Though the Chicano art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s has somewhat diminished, the contributions these people left behind continues to inspire today’s Chicano youth and affect the influence on Chicano culture.
At the local level, the movement gave rise to community institutions, helping to build a Chicano community where none had existed before. Alliances with other communities of color were essential to the movement’s success. This unity across racial lines was an independent development in the Northwest, and is an important part of the legacy of civil rights activism in the place. The spread of the Chicano community was also a result of work that was done on both sides of the state, with activism in the Yakima Valley providing a trigger for much of the activist tasks in the Puget Sound region as participants, mainly students, transferred to western Washington. The late 1970s saw the introduction of a chapter of the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA) in Seattle. CASA, which was in fact founded in Los Angeles during the year 1968, was a group that connected cultural nationalism and Marxist-Leninist concepts, becoming the first Chicano Marxist firm conceptualized by poor and working-class Chicanos. The firm began as a mutual help agency that then arranged around relieving the local regions from illegal drugs. As the firm expanded, it started arranging laborers in spite of legal status and formed alliance with Mexican socialists and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. This change toward a more internationalization concept was a reflection of the transforming demographics of the 1970s and was a response to an innovative anti-immigrant backlash.
The very rude anti-immigrant policies published by the Carter administration, as well as the patrolling of the southern border by the Ku Klux Klan, forced several Chicano activists to take rapid action by arranging the opposition to the activist sentiment projected by the right wing in the late 1970s in the national arena (Bocanegra, 2006).
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