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The MECHA Smear

Posted on September 2, 2003 in California Watch Gray Davis Recall Immigration

I don’t normally read Instapundit because, quite frankly, Glenn Reynolds is a flake. But his and Howard Owen’s recent comments about Cruz Bustamante’s past association with MECHA deserve exposure as the ravings of paranoics.

The Right — led by censorship king Bill O’Reilly — has been flooding the airwaves with the accusation that Cruz Bustamante and MECHA implicitly endorse the violent takeover and reannexation of the Southwest by Mexico. Note that second word: reannexation. The land we’re on was Mexico’s to begin with. By slowly infiltrating into the territory and then using the military force of the United States to seize the choicest parts of Mexico’s northern frontier, WASPs seized Texas, Arizona, California, and New Mexico. It’s a classic case of projection: they fear that Latinos will do unto them as James K. Polk did unto the Mexican citizens living in this region in the late 1840s.

That war was settled by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which stated that the rights of the Spanish-speaking citizens of the territories ceded to the United States would be respected. MECHA was founded in 1969 at the University of Santa Barbara with a mind to addressing issues facing the Chicano and Chicana community including sexism, the war in Vietnam, racism, economic justice — especially for farmworkers, and the enjoyment of their own culture as citizens of the United States.

Howard Owens, in particular, has read much evil into the imaginary “Aztlan Myth”. By this, Owens purports that MECHA is fifth column out to seize a vast chunk of U.S. territory. Here’s the prologue of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán which so infuriates the Right:

In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.

We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts. Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent

Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner “gabacho” who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.

The author of the prologue denies that he intended anything more than to instill ethnic pride. The real intentions of the organizers of the Denver Conference (which predates MECHA) is made apparent in Article 7:

POLITICAL LIBERATION can only come through independent action on our part, since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we are a majority, we will control; where we are a minority, we will represent a pressure group; nationally, we will represent one party: La Familia de La Raza!

This paragraph declares a strategy based on democratic mobilization of the Latino people. There is no talk of secession here, but of involvement in the American political system. They speak of a nation within a nation, working to protect their rights as guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Defenders of the prologue note that it is a historical fact that the United States now includes territories which were seized by war from Mexico. They insist that within those territories, they remain a nation with rights that are to be respected by the United States, including bilingual education and access to voting materials in Spanish.

To give this a more personal perspective: These conflicts go back to the seventies when right wing groups first began to infiltrate college campuses with the intention of undermining Title IX. What I remember of MECHA was that it mainly acted as a cultural organization. Control of the record player at dances highlighted the differences between Chicano and other students. We also had a Black Students Union and a Gay Student’s Union. (The fights over funding the latter are branded into my memory as one of the most frightening passages of my life to this day.)

Conservative white students began to whine about these organizations. Why can’t we have something like this? they complained, never minding that by their control of the student government they already did. There were no blacks or Chicanos in the Student Council. White students at Claremont Men’s College (the only school ever endorsed by the John Birch Society — it’s now named Claremont McKenna College) voted for their own. They complained when blacks and Latinos voted as a bloc, but I know of very few who crossed the line to vote for someone who wasn’t white. Where blacks and Latinos asked for recognition, white students insisted on dominance. And they got it. At “college-wide” dances we heard the records that suited the musical tastes of the white elite. We saw films popular with white intellectuals — nearly all American except for the occasional French film to show that we had a cosmopolitan flair. I never once remember going to see a film in Spanish at the college film festivals.

MECHA allowed Latino students a place where they could share their culture. They often invited white students to their affairs but, again, few attended. To attend, they believed, was to acknowledge that the organization had the right to exist, which, in fact, was true.

As for the political end of things, all I ever heard MECHA students promote was bilingual education and observance of the UFW boycotts. White students sluiced down Gallo Wine by the jug until the agribusiness signed a contract with the UFW and then they switched to other brands. Coors Beer was very popular because it could only be had in the West and because it didn’t hire many Latinos, which made it the subject of a boycott. White students of the Howard Owens stripe took every opportunity to deliver slaps in the face of Mexican Americans. They enjoyed the fact that they outnumbered them, that they could do these things with impunity.

These days the talk is of what will happen in fifty years when Spanish-speaking Californians outnumber the English speakers. Whites now predict “domination” — a vague threat that they dare not define. What does this mean? That they will have to capitulate to bilingual education after all? And what will that lead to? Here the talk becomes very vague. Rightists speak of the disintegration of democracy, of their rights as white people being disrespected.

To address the first concern: I doubt that democracy will die until conservative white people make an earnest effort to make it happen as they did in the year 2000 and ever since. Switzerland has held together for more than a thousand years speaking three languages in an environment of mutual respect and they have profited, too. A bilingual state will be in a stronger position as far as international trade goes.

The second may come true as a backlash to the shabby treatment of Latinos which Glenn Reynolds and Howard Owens turn a blind eye to. I think our best protection against a backlash is to start acting decently now. I believe that every student in California should learn the history of both the United States and Mexico, that every high school graduate should be fluent in Spanish and English. I think we should recognize that these lands used to belong to Mexico, that we gave Mexico our word to respect the rights of our Spanish-speaking citizens, and that we should stick to our word. (I call that Moral Integrity.) If you want to avoid a Reign of Terror when Latinos take over, you should stop this race-baiting and paranoia now. It’s time for a deep breath, to think how about we’re going to handle this — together — without bloodshed or loss of rights. If we love our democracy (given Owens and Reynolds’s unflinching support of Resident Bush this is questionable for their part), we need to act democratically and inclusively now.

— Instead of resorting to Reynolds and Owens style dirty-politics-as-usual.


For a Latino view on the motives and falsehoods behind the so-called liberal media’s attacks on Bustmonte, click here.

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