Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States. The label Chicano is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings. While Mexican American identity emerged to encourage assimilation into White American society and separate the community from African-American political struggle, Chicano identity emerged among anti-assimilationist youth, some of whom belonged to the Pachuco subculture, who reclaimed the term (which had previously been a classist and racist slur). Chicano was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent (with many using the Nahuatl language as a symbol), diverging from the more assimilationist Mex