Chicano identity was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s by Mexican Americans as a means of asserting their own ethnic, political, and cultural identity while rejecting and resisting assimilation into whiteness, systematic racism and stereotypes, colonialism, and the American nation-state. Chicano identity was also founded on the need to create alliances with other oppressed ethnic and Third World peoples while protesting U.S. imperialism. Chicano identity was organized around seven objectives: unity, economy, education, institutions, self-defense, culture, and political liberation, in an effort to bridge regional and class divisions among people of Mexican descent. The notion of Aztlán, a mythical homeland claimed to be located in the southwestern United States, mobilized Mexican Americans to take social and political action. Chicanos/as originally espoused the belief in "Chicano/a" as a unifying "mestizo" identity and also centered their platform in the masculine body.