Europe and North America’s emergence as global power brokers was one of the most significant historical processes to unfold during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the early 1800’s Britain, France, and later Germany and the United States, established and expanded worldwide networks of strategic and economic dominance through the acquisition of foreign territories. Less than a century later, decolonization began to reverse this process. In the period between the end of the Second World War and the Vietnam War’s start, colonial subjects and racialized minorities in the “West” increasingly asserted their self-determination and demanded equality. In a variety of local contexts, anticolonial nationalism produced a common culture of resistance that inspired liberation struggles worldwide. Stemming from the intersection of such local and global developments in the southwestern United States during the late 1960s was the Chicana/o movement. This proposed panel focuses on the Chicana/o movement’s concern with, and nod to, “Third World” anticolonial nationalism and thus speaks to the 2018 conference theme of “Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Global Perspective." The purpose of this discussion is to highlight that the Chicana/o movement was not simply a local articulation of cultural nationalism, but a social practice informed by larger global ideas of race, ethnicity, and other forms of difference. As such, the Chicana/o movement demonstrates that Third World anti-colonial nationalism was a transnational force that united diverse groups in a struggle against colonial exploitation and oppression. Studying resistance to imperialism in a more interconnected and comprehensive manner reveals that imperialism was a central historical experience of the modern world that facilitated the emergence of distinct social formations.