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What kinds of actions advanced the cause of the Chicano movement?

The Chicano movement came together in the decade following World War II, but its most famous actions took place in the 1960s when the country was also divided by controversial issues like the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement for black Americans.

Chicano Movement
Like the civil rights movement for black Americans, the Chicano movement used protests and court battles to attract new supporters and win more rights for its followers.
In 1968 Mexican-American students in Los Angeles walked out of their schools to stage large protests later called the Chicano Blowouts. Their teachers had ignored Mexican-American history, pushed them toward agricultural jobs regardless of their talents, and forbidden them from speaking Spanish in class. To improve their education, the students made a series of demands and then walked out, threatening to cost their schools a significant amount of attendance-based money. The leaders of the blowouts were arrested, but many became significant leaders within the movement, and the protests drew more attention to the struggles of Mexican-American teens.

Sometimes the communal nature of the movement resulted in new revelations and new actions. In the early 20th century, some California hospitals began sterilizing some Latina women after they had given birth. In other words, they were surgically preventing them from ever becoming pregnant again. The women were typically not informed about the consequences of the procedure, or they were simply threatened or coerced into accepting it. This program was approved by the government and designed to keep birth rates low among immigrants and minority populations. Its creators called it "a practical and necessary step to prevent racial deterioration," and it shockingly continued into the 1960s and 1970s.

After finding each other through participation in the Chicano movement, ten Mexican-American women who had been sterilized by their California doctors brought a collective lawsuit against them, claiming that their rights had been violated. The case was Madrigal v. Quilligan, and the judge ruled against the women because he said that the doctors were working in the women's best interests. Publicity and protests centered around this case resulted in more awareness of patients' rights and stricter regulations on doctors in the state.

Question

What did the creators of California's sterilization program mean when they said "racial deterioration"?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that certain races of people were superior to others was common in Europe, the United States, and other areas of the world, like Japan. The creators of the sterilization program didn't want one race (Latinos) to multiply more quickly than another (white Europeans) because that would have threatened what they felt was "white superiority." It took decades for civil rights movements (including the Chicano movement) to begin undoing the laws and policies created by that way of thinking.