Many Chicanos were descendents of Santa Fe which was first established by Juan Martinez de Montoya in 1607. The town was formally founded and made a capital in 1610, making it the oldest capital city and the second oldest surviving city founded by the European colonists in what land was later to become part of the United States, behind St. Augustine, Florida (1565). (Jamestown, Virginia was also settled in 1607).

Sante Fe was the first colonized city of America and these were the inhabitants.

Chicanos, regardless of their generational status, tend to trace their cultural roots to the indigenous peoples of North America and to the early Spanish and Mexican settlers of the Southwestern United States. Due to the long-term denigration of Mexican culture through assimilationist educational practices and stereotypical media portrayals, an emphasis on pride in Mexican cultural practices and in their preservation is common.

Immigration and diffusion of Mexican-American communities throughout the U.S.

Mexican-Americans made up a significant number of workers in a number of industries, particularly the railroad and mining industries in the southwestern U.S., that led to the growth of communities throughout the region. The employment needs of the railroad industry in the late nineteenth century brought Mexican immigrants from more remote regions of Mexico, while the new systems integrated the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The railroad also led to the economic development of those parts of the US, drawing Mexican immigrants in large numbers into agriculture in the early twentieth century, establishing a pattern that continued thereafter.

These largely male Mexican immigrants also established colonias in the early twentieth century in places such as Kansas City and Chicago as railroad employment took them further within the United States. Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants also moved in large numbers to Denver the San Francisco Bay area and to a lesser extent to Detroit and the Monongahela Valley, Pennsylvania, during World War I to work in the steel and automobile manufacturing industry. Others began migrating from South Texas to work in cotton fields elsewhere in Texas and Oklahoma.

More recently, beginning in significant numbers in the 1970s, Mexican immigrants have moved in large numbers to the Midwest, attracted by jobs in the packinghouse industry, and to the southeastern U.S., where they have displaced many African-Americans and contract workers from the Caribbean in agriculture and related industries. This large wave of Mexican immigration are attracted to low-paid labor jobs and an equally high number moved to low-income communities, such as industrial suburbs of Los Angeles in ethnic neighborhoods known as barrios and the agricultural sector of Imperial Valley, California.

Source: Wikipedia.org