MEChA

I was driving home from the neighborhood WalMart, and turned on NPR to listen to Maria Hinojosa on Latino USA. The program, or at any rate the part I listened to, featured a number of Hispanics defending MEChA, and citing its good effects on their lives. It seems the organization feels under attack from the latest maneuverings of the Arizona legislature.

I'm no friend to the kind of anti-immigrant bullshit that Republicans are now embracing, so I thought I ought to check out MEChA. The Acronymn stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Student Movement of Aztlan. Aztlan is usually conceived of as Mexico plus those parts of the US that we stole from Mexico.

The national web site, linked above, certainly seems inoffensive enough, and the Constitution is bureaucratic enough to put the doughtiest proofreader to sleep. If you make it down far enough, though, you come to section twenty-four:

Section 24.

In order to be a MEChA chapter recognized by the Regional, it shall adopt and abide by the following responsibilities:


A) Orient all members by discussing and reading historical documents of our Movimiento including: El Plan de Santa Barbara, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, and the MEChA Position Papers of Philosophy, Constitutions, Relationship to Outside Organizations, and Goals & Objectives.

A bunch of the good stuff can be found in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. A sample:

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.

Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.

The Spanish phrase translates: "In the race all. Outside the race, nothing."

So as a perhaps insufficiently "brutal gringo" inhabiting northern Aztlan, should I be nervous? There is a fair amount of revolutionary and Leninist rhetoric:

Land and realty ownership will be acquired by the community for the people's welfare. Economic ties of responsibility must be secured by nationalism and the Chicano defense units.
...
For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts.
...
Self-Defense against the occupying forces of the oppressors at every school, every available man, woman, and child.

I guess means that those rotten kids who smashed my mailbox were not delinquents but revolutionary terrorists.

A lot of this is doubtless the fulminations of beer fueled college kids, but if these kids were Arabs or Palestinians, I suspect that they would be rotting in Gitmo as we speak