Thread: Raza isn't racist

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Raza isn't racist
The Latino student club MEChA is more about culture and education than reconquista.
By Gustavo Arellano
GUSTAVO ARELLANO is a staff writer with OC Weekly, where he writes the "¡Ask a Mexican!" column. A portion of this essay originally appeared in the Weekly.

June 15, 2006

THE REVOLUTION always finishes the same way: Someone claps. Then someone else. Someone else. Others join. More. Faster. More. Everyone in unison. Rhythmic. Louder. Faster. Finally, someone shrieks, "¡Qué viva la raza!" (Long live the Mexican race!). "¡Qué viva!" (May it live!), everyone screamed in response. And then we go off to continue the reconquista.

The above scene ends just about every meeting of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), the high school and college club for Mexican American students that scares the bejesus out of everyone else. Frankly, I don't blame everyone else.

Starting with the name (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán, "Aztlán" referring to the mythical Aztec homeland that prophecy held was north of Mexico and would be repopulated by descendants of the People of the Sun), continuing with slogans like Entre la raza todo; fuera de la raza, nada (Within the race, everything; outside of it, nothing) and concluding with that tribalistic clapping circle, the average MEChA meeting might look to outsiders like a gathering of brown-skinned brownshirts.

That's at least how anti-MEChA alarmists see it. For them, MEChA is what the Communist Party was for McCarthyites — a boogeyman of an organization you can use to spook citizens away from the aspirations and causes of its ex-members. The casualties include Antonio Villaraigosa in his first mayoral race, Cruz Bustamante in his unsuccessful 2003 gubernatorial run and Gil Cedillo every time he tries to get the Legislature to approve driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

Now KABC-AM (790) is playing the MEChA card against the Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a charter school in Lincoln Heights. Because the MEChA chapter of Pasadena City College supports the school, goes KABC's reasoning, Academia Semillas del Pueblo is obviously a racist school teaching kiddies to reconquer the Southwest, one Nahuatl lesson at a time.

It doesn't help MEChA's case that Semillas del Pueblo Principal Marcos Aguilar, a former UCLA Mechista, once dismissed the importance of Brown vs. the Board of Education during an interview, adding that "the white way, the American way, the neoliberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction." Or that members of Pasadena City College's MEChA chapter recently destroyed an entire run of the campus newspaper because they considered the paper's coverage of one MEChA event inadequate.

But, as in Islam, a few indige-nazis are stains sullying a noble organization. I should know. I am a Mechista.

As both a member of the invading army and a proud son of Mexican-hating Orange County, I can testify that, without a doubt, MEChA is harmless.

Sure, the organization's founding documents, the Plan de Santa Barbara and the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, call for a Chicano homeland. But few members take these hilariously dated relics of the 1960s seriously, if they even bother to read them. Little of the modern-day MEChA remains separatist, other than the occasional Che-spouting junior and a few cute mestizas with Aztec names like Citlali who sport Frida ponytails, black-frame glasses and Chuck Taylor high-tops.

MEChA's primary objectives are not secessionist but educational (get as many Latino high schoolers into the universities as possible and help them stay there) and cultural. For many Mexican American students, MEChA is their family by proxy, a support network for those of us who were the first in our families to graduate from high school, let alone college.

The open-borders philosophy expressed by many Mechistas isn't born from an irredentist ideology but from their experience of having relatives divided by borders. All that raza clatter isn't racism, it's the traditional way immigrants climb the success ladder — through solidarity and education. The loaded term itself is better understood as representing the immediate community, not as a proclamation of Mexican superiority to all other races.

Look, I get the widespread skepticism about MEChA's intentions. I myself was apprehensive about joining the club when I attended conservative Chapman University in Orange. I had heard whispers about the obsession with protests, the vitriolic speeches bashing everyone who wasn't brown, the infamous MEChA clap.

But then I actually attended a meeting. I encountered some extremist rhetoric — but it was aimed at increasing Latino enrollment on our minority-deficient campus and mentoring at-risk high school students. And it wasn't just Latinos involved in this radical clique. We had African Americans, Asians, gabachos … even a Kazakh student named Amir who proudly wore his MEChA shirt complete with the organizational logo: an eagle gripping a stick of dynamite and looming over a banner that reads "La Unión Hace la Fuerza" (Strength Through Unity). We cared about bettering the world, and MEChA allowed us to do something about it.

We protested Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he appeared on campus; we supported striking janitors and held events for all the major Mexican holidays. But mostly we spent our free time recruiting high school students to Chapman and holding educational carnivals for elementary niños y niñas.

Chapman administrators loved our dedication, holding us up as models of what others could aspire to. My fellow Mechistas went on to work for nonprofit organizations, consulted for the Democratic Party, became bankers and psychologists, made it in Hollywood, interned at the Cato Institute — and this Mechista went on to graduate summa cum laude from UCLA and work for a free newspaper. Not a single Mechista in our group dropped out.

Years later, I proudly call myself a Mechista. To be a Mechista is to care for those who face the same struggles you once did, to preach the gospel of education to immigrants so they can prosper and assimilate. To be a Mechista is to be American — an American with sore hands from so much clapping, that is.

I had to pull on my hip waders to read that one.

And I would say this to Gustavo:

"You are full of BS...if you wish to generate a movement such as yours go to Mexico and do it and then you will find the police beating the crap out of you. The Mecha movement is a farce and your talk about assimilation is garbage....and the only people you care about are the illegal alien scum that have come to this country which they have no legal, human, civil or in any other form of a right to do so."

To be a Mechista is to be American

I beg to differ. Junior needs a better education about America.

The leaders of the German Bund during the 1930s like Fritz Kuhn would no doubt say the very same thing.

O.K.! La Raza means "The race"! If you are "The Race" then you think you are better and that is racist!! And NO YOUR NOT BETTER!! You are naive! You are under estimating the will and resolve of the people of the US! And if you think the race means a race to citizenship then that will be a race you lose!!!!!!!!!!

Originally Posted by Gustavo Arellano

Raza isn't racist

Mr. Arellano,

That's like stating that the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty bill isn't amnesty!
Just out of curiosity, Mr. Arellano, are your parents siblings?

Another Pulitizer Prize winning genius reporter. Sheesh! For all you lurkers and website "guests" and congressional staffers out there, it isn't just La Raza, it's Communist La Raza. Their mission of this lunatic fringe subversive organization is to inject racism where there is none. That's what they do. Oops, my bad, their other mission is to lobby the Senate and Congress.

I agree with you Coto,

This is the official website of MeCha:

MeCha has set up shop in almost every college in the country. If you want to know more go to:
http://www.azteca.net/aztec/mecha/

http://ccir.net/LETTERS/MILLER-EVELYN/0 ... T_EM_.html

Letter to the Editor

Note: This was received by the L. A. Times. They declined to run it, however.

June 22, 2006

To L. A. Times op-ed editor Nicholas Goldberg:

Gustavo Arellano's opinion piece on MEChA (L.A. Times, June 15) illustrated his mastery of spin. Painting MEChA as a benign group of Chicano students helping others, he omits much, distorts some, misrepresents the rest, and cleverly obfuscates.

Read more about MEChA, some old, some recent, all radical. Their national constitution lauds the "bronze continent" and calls for the "liberation of our land". Anti-American literature is published on multiple campuses, including El Popo, AZTLAN News, Chispas, UCLA's Gente de AZTLAN (heroes are Che Guevara, Augusto Cesar Sandino, Simon Bolivar and Salvadoran Stalinist Farabundo Marti), VOZ FRONTERIZA (UC San Diego) that celebrated the death of a Border Patrol agent, La Voz Mestiza (UC Irvine) that identified conservative U.S. representatives as "Nazi Pigs" and referred to AZTLAN (U.S. Southwest) as "This land is ours and always will be", and LA VOZ BERKELEY that referred to the United States as AMERIKKA.

San Diego City College MEChA declared the five U.S. southwestern states were no longer part of the U.S., lowered the American flag and raised the AZTLAN flag in its place. In 1971, UC Santa Barbara MEChA was asked to work with the campus police to avoid violence. Their reply: "... we view the campus police as an integral part of this whole repressive system ... we cannot accept this 'kiss of death' ... que viva la revolucion (long live the revolution)".

In May 1993, MEChA at UCLA started a riot that caused heavy financial damage to that campus when they occupied the student union building and demanded full department status for Chicano Studies. A MEChA student spokesperson stated at a March 1997 rally at Los Angeles City Hall, "When the people in this building don't listen to the demands of our community, it's time to burn it down!"

At a statewide conference at Cal State University Northridge (CSUN) in 1996, a few hundred students with their parents and younger siblings, furious at the passage of propositions 187 and 209, chanted - screaming for several minutes - "Viva la revolucion", "Chicano Power", "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us", and "Esta es mi lucha, esta is mi tierra (This is my fight, this is my land)." CSUN MEChA advisor Professor Rudy Acuna (author of Occupied America) told them, "Right now you are living in Nazi USA ... we can't let them take us to those intellectual ovens." I was one of two Anglo reporters forcibly removed, though we both were admitted that morning with press passes from a local cable TV producer.

CSUN Mechistas instructed high school students how to participate in walkouts throughout Los Angeles during the recent demonstrations, showing them the film "Walkout" produced by Chicano war-horse activists of the 60's. The same old war-horses are still active MEChA mentors, including Acuna, others at UCLA and other local and out of state universities. One of the most radical is Chicano Studies Professor Armando Navarro of UC Riverside. Navarro tells Mechistas, "You are like the generals who command armies ... we're in a state of war!" and demands "a nation within a nation - even the idea of an AZTLAN" for Chicanos and Latinos.

MEChA advisor Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez (University of Texas at Arlington) was the founder of La Raza Unida Party and UMAS (United Mexican American Students) which morphed into MEChA. Gutierrez still instructs Mechistas that Latinos have the right to migrate freely throughout the Americas, to be radical and prepared to govern when White America disappears. These antiques still groom new radicals aligned with the Brown Berets - uniformed street soldiers of the AZTLAN brigade.

At the MEChA national conference at Michigan State University in April 1997, a drawing of Emiliano Zapata holding a rifle was on the face page of their program. "Ch" was replaced by "X", i.e., Chicano was now "Xicano", MEChA was now "MEXA", etc. Their program included the following statement: "National revolution is the theme for this year's MEXA conference ... an emerging XICANO nation."

Arellano writes he is proud to have helped striking janitors. The "Justice for Janitors" campaign, with Jesse Jackson at the helm, was composed of illegal aliens who had displaced American janitors by undercutting their wages and then marched through Los Angeles demanding the higher wages of those they had replaced. They couldn't read the signs they carried.

Arellano is crafty. A few months ago he appeared with Minuteman Founder Jim Gilchrist on the Orange County TV cable channel - a cordial discussion about immigration. They shook hands and agreed to disagree on issues. A few days later Arellano was a guest on a Pacifica Radio program titled, "The Pocho Hour of Power". Questioned on his appearance with Gilchrist, Arellano called him "a truly evil person". He couldn't know someone heard both programs!

Yes, Gustavo, RECONQUISTA is alive and thriving. Yes, Gustavo RAZA is racist.

Evelyn Miller