Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - András Tarnóc: Ethnic Consciousness in Chicano Literature: The Voice of "La Raza".

(1968) are the main North American texts testifying to the existence of Aztlán. Prescott compares the move of the Mexica to the Jewish exodus and Josephy admits that the Mexica leaving Aztlán "may even have been in the present-day United States Southwest" (Rendon 8—12). Rendon's Chicano Manifesto

, comparing Aztlán in importance to Mesopotamia, identifies the territory as present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, and the Sonora area of Northern Mexico. According to Anaya the Chicano movement's invocation of Aztlán supplied a symbol of national unity, established a collective ethnic identity, and provided a homeland. The Mexican-American community deprived of land by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo found a psychological and spiritual remedy for cultural deterritorialization enabling it to be "masters or senores of their own time" (Anaya 371— 73). "1848" pushed Chicanos into "King Arthur's Court," thus the imposition of an Anglo-Saxon archetype undermined the communal memory (Anaya 296). Contemporary Chicano experience reflected the Nietzschean prophecy of "man today stripped of myth, famished among all his pasts frantically digging for roots" (Leitch 116). The Aztlán myth emerged from the collective unconscious of the Mexican-American community. Through the naming process Chicanos placed themselves into an archetypal situation in which a loose group of people becomes a true community reflecting "the voice of all mankind" (Leitch 121). Since a myth is a communal response to a spiritual crisis (Anaya 377), the Chicano movement's solution for the ills of the Mexican-American community was the promotion of Chicano consciousness, the ideology of the New World Person. As Virágos asserts, myths function as barometers of a given culture. The Aztlán myth reflects the social circumstances of culturally dispossessed Chicanos, the collective selfimage of a nation destined for ethnic grandeur (49). 72