Chicano activist literature of the 1960s depicted images of healthy bodies in its quest to promote empowerment for its people, but, paradoxically, Chicano novels written from the 1960s to the present have been filled with images of disability and illness rather than health. This project uses a disability studies perspective to present reasons for this paradox and to suggest that images of disability serve to both create and reflect contemporary attitudes toward nationalism in the Chicano nation. Unlike previous disability studies readings of Chicano literature, this study illustrates how specific historical transformations in conceptions of disability within the Chicano movement have contributed to shifting conceptions of national identity. To help illustrate these shifting conceptions, I offer the term dys-placement, which refers to post-colonial literature's convention of depicting disabled Others in effort to both register and critique a variety of social and political displacements. In effect, dys-placement contributes to a shifting of values within the post-colonized culture to aid in the culture's survival. In the process of dys -placement, disability tends to retain specific meanings in specific eras, and these meanings encapsulate the post-colonized culture's contemporary consciousness. This study will track the changing meanings of disability in Chicano novels published from the 1970s through the 1990s, but it will primarily focus on Miguel Mendez's Peregrinos de Aztlán (early to mid-1970s), Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga: A Novel (mid to late 1970s), Arturo Islas' The Rain God: A Desert Tale (1980s), and Benjamin Saenz's Carry Me Like Water (1990s), which offer conceptions of Chicano identity that are exemplary of other Chicano literary works from their respective eras. These historically-specific meanings of disability are typical of dys-placement because images of disability originate from trends in political activism and literature, and authors often suggest particular meanings of disability by framing it accordingly to particular models of disability in the ascendant at the time of their writing. In the four eras I explore, authors use the materialist, the rehabilitation, the social, and the cultural models, respectively. The process of dys-placement is also examined through Chicano culture's historically-specific manipulation of its cultural nationalist rallying symbol Aztlán.