Chicano/a identity functions as a way to reclaim one's Indigenous American, and often Indigenous Mexican, ancestry—to form an identity distinct from European identity, despite some Chicanos/as being of partial European descent—as a way to resist and subvert colonial domination. Rather than a "subculture" of European American culture, Alicia Gasper de Alba refers to "Chicanismo" as an ""alter-Native" culture, an Other American culture Indigenous to the land base now known as the West and Southwest of the United States." While influenced by settler-imposed systems and structures, Alba refers to Chicana/o culture as "not immigrant but native, not foreign but colonized, not alien but different from the overarching hegemony of white America."