Thread: Armando Navaro Ready for Confrontation

http://www.pe.com/localnews/sanbernardi ... 435c3.html

Professor is man of many battles
10:00 PM PDT on Sunday, September 17, 2006
By SHARON McNARY
The Press-Enterprise

Armando Navarro, the longtime Inland activist for immigrant and Latino rights, is in Mexico today, deep into at least his third political battle this year.

"We're going into a very precarious, explosive, volatile situation," said the UCR ethnic studies professor, who is in Mexico City protesting the narrow loss by a candidate in July's Mexican presidential election.

Earlier this summer, he fought against a San Bernardino city initiative that would have made it illegal to hire or rent homes to undocumented immigrants. The initiative failed to reach the ballot after a judge ruled it had too few signatures.

In February, he pulled together Latino activists from throughout Southern California to oppose a federal immigration reform bill that would criminalize undocumented immigrants. On May Day, he led thousands on a march through downtown Riverside.

By summer's end, concluding that the immigrant-rights movement in the United States is floundering, Navarro moved on to the next fight.

Navarro left for Mexico last week with a group of Inland-area activists to join thousands occupying Mexico City's Zocalo central plaza. He went to support leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has rejected his narrow electoral loss to Felipe Calderon.

On Saturday, Lopez Obrador's supporters declared him "the legitimate president" of Mexico. They also asked him to form a Cabinet and supported a constitutional convention.

Navarro supports Lopez Obrador's plan for large new social programs to help relieve the poverty that causes many to move to the United States.

Longtime Activist

Going to Mexico is vintage Navarro.

He has led groups to face down border militias in Arizona, to visit guerrillas in Central America, and to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Navarro has generated headlines in Riverside and San Bernardino counties going back to the early 1970s. Scores of news clips describe his protests of the Ku Klux Klan, police brutality, armed border vigilantes, the Catholic Church, even the university that employs him.

He is reviled from the political right for his support of legalizing the status of all undocumented immigrants, for his opposition to border militias and the Minuteman Project volunteer border watchers, and for referring to the Southwest United States as Aztlan, the mythic homeland of the indigenous Mexican people.

Navarro is recognized on the political left as a Latino civil-rights activist whose work dates to the Chicano-rights movement of the late 1960s.

A few of his peers, however, criticize what they say is his top-down leadership style.

Maximum Leader

Jesse Diaz, an Ontario immigrant-rights activist, recalled his ride with Navarro in 2004. As they returned from a human-rights event in Arizona, Diaz described his difficulty organizing a Latino economic boycott over the issue of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants.

"He gave me an 'F' for activism," Diaz said. He didn't know Navarro well, and had never taken his UCR class.

"I just started laughing," Diaz said. He continued his activism apart from Navarro.

Diaz went on to become a key member of the coalition that drew a police-estimated crowd of 500,000 marchers to the streets of Los Angeles on March 25. The group drummed up similarly large crowds on May 1.

"I would be curious to see what grade he would give me now," Diaz said.

Diaz likened Navarro's leadership style to the classic Latin American "caudillo" or single, maximum-leader model.

"I've never seen anybody other than Armando Navarro run or facilitate a National Alliance for Human Rights meeting," Diaz said, referring to the group Navarro leads.

Navarro considers himself more an organizer and strategist than a leader, but says that strong leaders also are essential.

"When there is not strong leadership, our community doesn't move," he said, citing some Mexican leaders. "Why do we glorify Pancho Villa, Emilio Zapata, Subcomandante Marcos and now Obrador?"

San Bernardino Issue

The San Bernardino city initiative to bar undocumented immigrants from rental housing and jobs angered many Latino activists when it was proposed earlier this year, but Navarro welcomed it.

The "Illegal Immigration Relief Initiative" held the potential to create in San Bernardino a microcosm of the national immigration debate. By drawing people into opposition, Navarro hoped to engage them on a larger and lasting civil-rights issue.

"Our blessing is the issue of San Bernardino," Navarro told his immigration seminar students in May, while the petition appeared to be headed to the city ballot. "We all realize that San Bernardino is our Montgomery," Navarro said, referring to the bus boycott by blacks in 1955-56 in Montgomery, Ala., that got the modern civil-rights movement rolling.

But the local issue became moot when a judge decided it had too few signatures to reach the ballot.

Meanwhile, Navarro sees other immigrant-rights groups, which drew huge public support in late March and on May 1, as disorganized now, squandering their strength and public appeal by calling for protests that end up with low turnouts, like two that fizzled in Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend.

Mexican Rights

Navarro wants every person of Mexican descent in the United States, whether native-born, a legal immigrant or undocumented -- to demand equal rights, and to be granted the legal right to live on land that was once Mexican territory.

Navarro concedes the United States has the right to control its own borders, but claims it fails to accommodate what he says are the historical rights of Mexican people to be here.

"This land used to be Mexico," he said. "No other immigrant group can claim that the Southwest was once their land. The Hungarians, the Irish, cannot make that claim."

Navarro sees people of Mexican descent as a colonized, oppressed, stateless people similar to the Palestinians, but without a single charismatic leader like the late Yasser Arafat.

If they cannot achieve economic and social equality under the current system, then they should seize political control by winning elections, he wrote in his latest book. If that fails, they should carve out a separate nation called Aztlan.
Greg Vojtko / The Press-Enterprise
UC Riverside professor Armando Navarro, right, participated in a July protest over the Mexican presidential election outside the Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino.

That is what riles Navarro's critics more than anything else.

Conservative activist David Horowitz's book, "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," lists Navarro alongside such 1960s politically oriented professors as Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky.

Navarro pulls out a folder with hate mail, the oldest dating to 1971.

"There's hate. A renaissance of hatred directed at us," he said.

Navarro's peers in academia see him as an activist who has lived the events he describes in his books.

"He's a scholar-activist, meaning he works both within the academic world and outside," said Louis DeSipio, a political science and Chicano/Latino studies professor at UC Irvine. "It used to be very common."

DeSipio said he uses material from Navarro's books about the Chicano movement, but declined to evaluate Navarro's scholarship or conclusions.

"I think he'd be very much a minority of scholars," in viewing Aztlan as a potential future nation, said DeSipio.

Priest or General

Since childhood, Navarro has envisioned himself in a changing array of leader roles -- priest, lead trumpet player, even general. But he would always step away from those roles to be a political organizer and agitator.

He said that if he were black, he'd be "the reincarnation of Malcolm X."

Born in 1941, he grew up in the El Depot barrio in what is now Rancho Cucamonga.

His parents immigrated from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1926 and had little education. They did not speak English. His farm worker father would slap him, "with a belt, not a hand," when he disobeyed. His mother was a traditional housewife who made him pray.

"I wanted to be a priest. I was altar boy, then head altar boy," Navarro said. "By age 13, I changed. I started playing the trumpet, the instrument of the devil, and that kicked me into a new phase. I wanted to be a musician."

Navarro joined the Army Reserve in 1960, rising to lieutenant by 1968 despite not having a college degree. His goal was to become a general.

Meanwhile, he worked in a truck-trailer assembly plant and played trumpet in a dance band at night to support his wife and young family.

High school friend Felix Martel said, "He was good. He played lead trumpet. I guess he's always been lead everything."

By the late 1960s, Navarro quit the military. He opposed the war in Vietnam and was becoming active in the nascent Chicano movement.

"I've always been a strategist. I used to dream that I would be in a position to do something about things," Navarro said.

Setting the Stage

Navarro cut his political teeth as an organizer for the Mexican American Political Association and La Raza Unida party in the heyday of the Chicano movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He orchestrated school walkouts and the election of the first-ever Latino majority to seats governing the Cucamonga School District.

Navarro led the 1981 campaign to pressure the state Legislature to redraw political district lines to help California Latinos win more elections.

He was executive director of Californios for Fair Representation, a group of Latino organizations that formed a united front in that campaign.

"He definitely gets noticed and makes an impression, with mixed success," said Douglas Johnson, a fellow with the Rose Institute of State and Local Government who analyzed the Californios campaign.

"Sometimes, he wins. More often, he sets the stage for more subtle activists to make some deal and get the goals achieved," said Johnson, a self-described conservative Republican who said he disagrees with Navarro's views but respects his efforts to pull Latinos into politics.

Navarro ran for mayor of Ontario in 1986, having moved to the city just two days before the close of the candidate filing period. He lost with 40 percent of the vote, and now swears off any interest in elective office.

Nearly every person interviewed for this article said Navarro has been consistent in his views and uncompromising in researching and defending them.

'Where's the Movement?'

On May 1, Navarro led 3,500 people on a march through downtown Riverside to City Hall. As the crowd rallied at a City Hall stage, Navarro let others exhort the crowd. When it was time for him to turn on his fiery rhetoric, he did something unusual.

He borrowed a musician's trumpet and played "La Marcha Zacatecas," a patriotic battle song familiar to anyone who attended school in Mexico. The crowd cheered.

"The symbolism of the song to them, the march of Zacatecas, it hit a nationalist note, and that was my intent," Navarro said in a later interview.

It was a signature Navarro twist, using a Mexican anthem to punctuate the immigrant demand to stay legally in the United States.

May Day was a high point in the immigrant-rights movement, when 1 million people marched in cities across the United States. But it was not a lasting victory, Navarro told a recent UCR public forum.

"What happened after May 1? Where's the movement?" he said, noting that a recent border march called by a San Diego group drew only 200 people to protest a federal plan to post National Guard troops on the U.S.-Mexican border. "We're losing the momentum."

Increasingly, he is turning his attention to Mexico.

Three years ago, he obtained dual Mexican citizenship, and went there in July to monitor the election.

The next few days in Mexico City could be the most volatile the city has seen in decades, as thousands of Obrador supporters are camping in public plazas to protest the election loss.

So Navarro is ready for another confrontation.

"I'll tell people you have two choices. I can extend the hand of friendship, or the fist of an adversary. Which one do you want?" Navarro said, displaying both hands.

Reach Sharon McNary at 951-368-9458 or smcnary@PE.com

Navarro sees people of Mexican descent as a colonized, oppressed, stateless people similar to the Palestinians, but without a single charismatic leader like the late Yasser Arafat.

This ought to be a wakeup call to anyone that thinks this isn't an invasion. next they'll be demanding their own state within the United States.