In 2021, Santa Ana was the first major city to declare August Chicano Heritage Month. Then in 2022, the city started its annual Chicano Heritage Festival at El Salvador Park at the end of August to mark the Chicano Moratorium marches and untimely death of LA Times journalist Ruben Salazar.
This year, the rest of Orange County followed suit and officially declared August as Chicano Heritage Month. At Santa Ana’s second annual Chicano Heritage Festival, County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento even said that Orange County was “the first in the nation” to do so.
Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the LA Times, says that Sarmiento has been part of the push for the designation since the beginning. Plus, Sarmiento is good friends with Rep. Lou Correa, who introduced a resolution to federally declare August as Chicano Heritage Month last year.
“The very idea that Orange County, California – the supervisors – passed a resolution that marks anything as ‘Chicano’ anything is just so revolutionary,” Arellano says.
Out of all 12 months, why August? Arellano says, “It's tied to arguably the man who had the most profound meditation on the term ‘Chicano’ … my predecessor at the Los Angeles Times as a columnist, the late Ruben Salazar.”
Salazar paved the way for Latino journalists in mostly white newsrooms. He wrote a column about who is a Chicano when “Chicano” was still considered a pejorative term. Then it became the center of Mexican Americans’ social activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
“You had students reclaim it as a point of pride saying, ‘We're not going to be discriminated against anymore, and we're not going to be made to feel ashamed of who we are,’” Arellano says.
This Chicano pride continues to reverberate today. Arellano says, “Now you have a younger generation … of Mexican Americans once again reclaiming the term and saying, ‘I am Chicano. I am Chicana. I am Chicanx.’”
He adds, “At a time where ethnic studies is so contentious, to be able to have, again, the Orange County Board of Supervisors – which has always been conservative – say, ‘You know what? It's important to recognize this community and its contributions here in Orange County’... that's really profound. And hopefully, more people will want to learn that history and then hopefully want to learn about their own history. Everyone should know their own history.”