Analysis

At the very beginning, we started with some ideas which we thought were possibly true about our central topic that is Chicano English. As it is reflected in our hypothesis, we first thought Chicanos are people who lived in the USA and they speak Spanglish. Later on we found out that actually Chicanos are people who live in the USA and they are native English speakers, not Spanglish as most people think.

 

Also we said people don't know the difference between Chicanos, Latinos and Hispanics, and at the end of the surveys we can say that we were right. Neither Americans nor Mexicans know exactly what a Chicano is. We used questions number 1, 2, 3, and 4 to find out the statement and the results were what we expected. In this case, Mexicans have more knowledge than Americans about the concepts we showed them, since there was a difference around 10-15% on people who answered right. Something worthy to say is that we can notice that although people know some of the concepts, at the same time they have more trouble to distinguish what an Hispanic is, and in the second place what a Latino is. These questions (2 and 3) were the ones with more error rate.

 

However we suspected that Chicanos were people who are discriminated in the USA, while in Mexico being a Chicano was something worth of pride. In the surveys we decided to include questions number 5, 7 and 10 and more important, we decided to apply surveys also to American people and not only to Mexicans in order to see the different perspectives that people (Mexican and American) have about Chicanos, and we can conclude that not everyone discriminate Chicanos as it is thought, but despite this many people do it. Something very interesting we found out is that even Mexicans don't like Chicanos! So we were kind of wrong with our theory. Mexican people think Chicanos want to be like a fake American, so they do not like to be recognized as Mexicans, and that is why some Chicanos have a certain feeling of hatred to Mexicans. On the surveys rate we see that the perspectives that Americans have are not very different from the Mexican ones. They both used the same words to describe to Chicano people, allowing us to classify this way:

 

1. Blingue 70% - Blingual 80%

2. Mexicano 55% - Mexican 66%

3. Trabajador 52% - Hard-working 52%

4. Inmigrante 47% - Immigrant 45%

5. Cholo 38% - Cholo 30%

6. Pobre 31% - Poor 26%

 

So as we can see, people have these ideas about what a Chicano is, which in this case “immigrant” and “Mexican” are wrong because Chicanos are not Mexican people, and they are not immigrants. But basically, this shows us that people do not discriminate Chicanos as much as we supposed. Less than ten people answer with discriminating words. However, we can also see that people think that the principal cause of the Chicanos was their need to find a job, which is correct, but it is not the main cause, it is because Texas used to be part of Mexico and 50 – 57% people answered that it was because of the opportunities for Mexicans to have a better life. So this shows the wrong ideas that people usually have about Chicanos, they think their ideas are correct and they trust but the real thing is that they are not. And the last question, question number ten, shows the main reason why we decided to make this questions, it was like the secret key used in order to see if people discriminate Chicanos and we found that most people do not do that, 67% of Americans and 80% of Mexicans say that Chicano is a way to be and that we have to respect that. Otherwise 33% of Americans and 14% of Mexicans answered that Chicanos English should be forbidden, so we can support what we said at the beginning of this paragraph: most people do not discriminate against Chicanos but some of them still do.

 

To sum up, we also said that people do not even know what neither Chicano English, Spanglish nor code-switching is. So, after many attempts of making good questions in which we can notice if people know that or not, we finally made questions number 6, 8, and 9. In order to see what people know about the topic we discovered that our idea was in one hand right, and on the other hand wrong. Some people can difference about some concepts but they do not know what exactly they are. In the surveys we noticed that people were able to know what the difference between Spanglish and code-switching is, but we noticed that although some of them also knew what the other concepts were, a high percentage of survey respondents couldn’t. So we were wrong when we thought that people weren’t able to differentiate the concepts, but at the same time, we were right when we said that they do not know exactly what they are. In this case Americans were the ones who have more correct answers but just with little difference from Mexicans.

So in this analysis we can conclude that there is no big difference between Mexicans and Americans answers, but they are at least few of them. It is up to each person to interpret these results.