40 yrs of Chicano Studies

[ilbegone]

Chicano Militant Workshop

El P.P.'s 12-Step Plan on How to Run a Chingon Chicano Militant Workshop

Step 1: Agenda Like any undertaking, you must prepare for your workshop by making an agenda. We recommend creating an outline to use your 50 minutes of workshop time wisely, from our experience prepare an agenda that will cover the following topics:

1. Pre-Contact Mesoamerica

2. Colonization

3. La Indendencia de 1821

4. The US-Mexico War

5. Zoot Suit Riots

6. The Chicano Movement of the 1970's

7. The Zapatistas

8. [INSERT HERE WHAT YOU PLAN ON TALKING ABOUT IN THE
WORKSHOP]

9. How much cooler Chicana authors are than Chicano authors
and last but not least...

10. What is a Chicana/o? or What is a Xican@?

Step 2: Appearance is Everything.

Make sure that you are dressed in the most militant of Chican@ gear! We recommend your wear a t-shirt with the latest designs by Votan, which can be found at the Nahui Ohlin store in Echo Park, or any black long sleeve shirt by Anahuak Designs.com. Ojo! Mujeres, if you wear a hupil, you must wear your hair in trenzas!

Step 3: Prep Time

Upon arrival at the classroom, pre-arrange all the chairs in a circle so that everyone's voice is equal during the chingon workshop (Only the colonizer puts chairs is rows).

Step 4: Roll Deep

Once your workshop agenda is set, try to enlist the help of an Ol'Skool Mechista to present with you at the conferencia. This way if your workshop goes down in flames, you and the veterano can resort to shouting at the top of your lungs at people: "What are you doing for la causa!?!"

Step 5: Beginning & Ending the Workshop

Begin the workshop by blowing a conch shell to the four directions. At the end of the workshop, make sure you walk around and give each and every person in your workshop a Chicano Power handshake.

Step 6: Lay Down the Law

Punking a wise-ass Mechista from MEChA de Berkeley or Berkeley MEChA at the beginning of the workshop will get you automatic street cred! Let the crowd know that your $26 a unit at Community College was a much smarter option than Berkeley's $9,999.99 a semester from the get go!

Step 7: Classroom Management

In order to reduce the chaos that will surely follow due to the revolutionary and decolonizing nature of El P.P.'s 12-Step Program on How to Run a Chingon Chicano Militant Workshop (hey, decolonization is a hell of a drug!) we recommend that you use a speaking stick instead of calling on people who raise their hands (only teacher pet's from the suburb raise their hands in class).

Step 8: Seize the Moment

Use this opportunity to bad mouth all the MEChA chapters and Mechistas you don't agree with politically or for whatever reason... hey you took the time to put together a workshop, use those 50 minutes wisely!

Step 9: Keep Your Friends Close...

Befriend all the Community College Mechistas at the workshop before they transfer and become tainted by the UC, you may need them next time an amendment is made to the Progressive Political Agenda.

Step 10: Never Lose an Argument

It is important to save face, this is the Golden Rule in running a Chingon Chicano Militant Workshop. If anyone starts talking shit in your workshop repeat this line, "My ideas came from the ancestors", this should win the argument. If this doesn't work, accuse them of being part of Liga, you'll have them on the run then

Step 11: Incorporate Multimedia

Be a High-Tek Aztek! Always use an excerpt from the PBS Chicano! Documentary, there are four videos to choose from. If you can't get of hold of them, 'Viva La Causa! by Betita Martinez will work nicely.

Step 12: Contact Information

Before the end of the workshop, leave your contact information on the board. Make sure to set up a new email account with a Nahuatl name ahead of time... cuz [email protected] is not as cool as [email protected]

[ilbegone]

Like I wrote before, they really don't have much to say when it comes to anything that's outside the Chicano victim realm. Will they ever realize it? Probably not.

In these quotes, they're actually poking fun at the knuckleheads who are doing it in real life.

Once again, think of Foxworthy and Red Neck humor.

Note that in the post you referred to Moreno (giving the speech) is in a Chicano style of outer space, and the white Vice Chancellor is clueless about what is going on but supportive of it. The Vice Chancellor will be clueless forever, he's living in the "teacher land" parallel universe. Moreno's mother gets the absurd idea that her husband is having an affair. In the mean time, the audience is watching a freak show at the podium during graduation. Carlos Mencia (from Central America) gets slammed as a plagerist. Flores, quoted at the end, is as whacked out as Moreno.

They're making fun of the process.

Same thing with the "Chicano Militant Work Shop".

[ilbegone]

While the beginning of the Chicano movement in the early 60’s had many streams which became a river, the rhetoric and wording of Chicanismo can be traced to several individuals who could be described as founding fathers.

One of them, Reies Tijerina, was designated “First national hero of Aztlan” in 1969 at the conference hosted by Corky Gonzales’ bunch in Denver, and is required reading in Chicano Studies.

From a diary entry in 1974 in Tijerina‘s autobiography:

The Anglo created the Black Legend against Spain. For more than three hundred years that false propaganda was used until the western world turned against Spain.

Using false propaganda, the Anglo has gotten into two world wars to defend the root of it’s race: England.

Later, for the past twenty-nine years they have used false propaganda in opposition to Communism.

They have used the same type of false propaganda against the land recovery movement and me.

The origin of the Black Legend was the Spanish Priest Las Casas, who witnessed and decried the swift near extermination of Caribbean Indians by Spaniards in a very few years after discovery.

The English merely ran with the tale. The French may have latched on to it too, because If I remember right, de Toqueville wrote in DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that if it hadn’t been for the fact that Indians grew all the food in New Spain, the Spaniards would have exterminated them.

England, France, and Spain have almost always been enemies of one sort or another, broken only by matters of temporary convenience.

The rest of Tijerina’s statement speaks for itself.

Tijerina’s autobiography is a tough read for me, nearly every page says nearly the same thing, like an endless loop of about 200 hundred words merely re-arranged to repeat the first page’s message over and over and over again.

I have to read it in small doses.

[ilbegone]

To early activist Tijerina, the white man was up his ass and dancing on his hemorhoids, the “Anglo race” was psychopathic. Almost every one of them with a sinister, conspiratorial anti -“Indohispano” agenda. Tijerina wrote Johnson and Nixon on a regular basis concerning the land grant cause and his several incarcerations, but believed that both were out to get him using the vast resources of the US Government.

It seems that quite a few people, including Jose Angel Gutierrez' father and other people Tijerina would describe as "Indohispano" , regarded Tijerina as a dangerous lunatic. When asked why he was against the land recovery movement, Senator Montoya of New Mexico said that he wasn't against land recovery (for land grant heirs), but that he was against Tijerina, then described Tijerina as a racist who would pit Anglos against his people and added that Tijerina "is not from here... he is not one of us" (Tijerina was from Texas). No doubt that Montoya is regarded by Chicanista thought as a "vendido coconut"


On the other hand, writer Richard Rodriguez also disliked Richard Nixon (but was fascinated by Nixon's character as he was Benjamin Franklin's), but had a much different view of Nixon and Johnson:

…The Negro Civil rights movement became, during Johnson’s administration, the great American novel. America had to admit that the game had been rigged for millions of its own citizens… If America were to persist as a novel, then the opening chapter had to be repaired, at least to the extent that a black child could imagine Harvard in the distance. The revised chapter would henceforth be titled “Affirmative Action”…

Throughout the Johnson administration, domestic considerations of race remained black and white. Baptist hymns were converted to statistics. And since race, not social class, was the nation’s most important metaphor for social division, Americans of every description were advancing their claims to government redress by analogy to Negro disadvantage.

Statistics were transported into hues and distributed along a black and white spectrum. In college, because of Lyndon Johnson, I became a “minority student”. But it was not until Richard Nixon’s administration that I became brown. A government document of dulling prose, Statisical Directive 15, would redefine America as an idea in five colors: White. Black. Yellow. Red. Brown.

To a generation of Americans - the first generation of affirmative action, these catagories became alternatives for any more subjective self-description…

In Six Crises, Nixon recalls that his mother, Hannah, prayed he might become a Quaker missionary to Central America. In a secular transposition of that vocation, Nixon ended up my Godfather. Because of Nixon, several million Americans were baptized Hispanic.

After all Richard Nixon had written about how hard work wins the day in America, finally it was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass all the old rules. Through he agency of affirmative action… I had, suddenly, a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat.

The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working class kid - the sort he had been - who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a “minority” in numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically “represented” in the board room, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were “under represented”, those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress…

Myself as a child of fortune? Lyndon Johnson might do for the Victorian benefactor; was mine, in any case. During Johnson’s administration I became eligible for affirming moneys. I did not initially question this diversion of my novel, and Richard Rodriguez, the child of fortune … who thought his American entitlement came as a descendant of Benjamin Franklin - our “forefathers,” he had been taught to say, and he believed it! -Richard progressed in a direction more British than American.

Benjamin Franklin would have never qualified for affirmative action… None of them would have qualified - Franklin, Johnson, Nixon.

My election saw me through the last years of graduate school - and beyond, to this very page.

[ilbegone]

Here are some more Rodriguez quotes (five posts).

I don't like to quote so extensively, but it's the whole meat of the issue.

Rodriguez 1)

...Consider my father: when he decided to apply for American citizenship, my father told no one, none of his friends, those men whom he had come to this country with looking for work. American citizenship would have seemed a betrayal of Mexico, a sin against memory. One afternoon, like a man with something to hide, my father slipped away. He went downtown to the Federal building in Sacramento, and disappeared into America.

Now memory takes her revenge on the son...

I once had the occasion to ask a middle class Mexican what he admires about the United States, (a provocative question because, according to Mexican history and proverb, there is nothing about the United States to admire). He found only one disembodied word: “organization”. When I pressed the man to anthropomorphize further, he said, “Deliveries get made, phones are answered, brakes are repaired” (indirect constructions all, as if by the construction of unseen hands)...

Mexico, mad mother. She still does not know what to make of our leaving. For most of this century Mexico has seen her children flee the house of memory. During the Revolution 10 percent of the population picked up and moved to the United States; in the decades following the Revolution, Mexico has watched many more of her children cast their lots with the future; head north for work, for wages, for life. Bad enough that so many left, worse that so many left for the gringo...

I would see them downtown on Sundays – men my age drunk in Plaza Park. I was still a boy at 16, but I was an American.

Or they would come into town Monday night for the wrestling matches or on tuesday nights for boxing. They worked on the ranches over in Yolo County. They were men with time on their hands, They were men without women. They were Mexicans without Mexico...

My parents left Mexico in the twenties: she as a girl with her family; he as a young man, alone. To tell different stories. Two Mexicos. At some celebration - we went to so many when I was a boy – a man in the crowd filled his lungs with American air to crow over all, !VIVA MEXICO! Everyone cheered. My parents cheered. The band played louder. Why VIVA MEXICO? The country that had betrayed them? The country that forced them to live elsewhere?

I remember standing in the doorway of my parents' empty bedroom.

Mexico was a memory – not mine. Mexico was mysteriously both he and she, like this, like my parents' bed. And over my parents' bed floated the Virgin of Guadalupe in a dime store frame. In its most potent guise, Mexico was a mother like this queen...

A true mother, Mexico would not distinguish among her children. Her protective arm extended not only to the Mexican nationals working in the United States, but to the larger number of Mexican – Americans as well. Mexico was not interested in passports; Mexico was interested in blood. No matter how far away you moved, you were still related to her...

In 1959, Octavio Paz, Mexico's sultan son, her clever one -philosopher, poet, statesman - published the Labyrinth of Solitude, his reflections on Mexico. Within his labyrinth, Paz places as well the Mexican American. He writes of the Pachuco, the teenage gang member, and, by implication, the Mexican American. “The Pachuco does not want to become Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma”.

This was Mother Mexico talking, her good son; this was Mexico's metropolitan version of Mexican Americans. Mexico had lost language, lost gods, lost ground. Mexico recognized historical confusion in us.

When we return to Mexico as turistas, with our little wads of greenbacks, our credit cards, our Japanese cameras, our Bermuda shorts, our pauses for directions and our pointing fingers, Mexico condescends to take our order (our order in halting Spanish), claro senor. But the table is not clear; the table will never be cleared. Mexico prefers to reply in English, as a way of saying:

!Pocho!

The Mexican American who forgets his true mother is a pocho, a person of no address, a child of no proper idiom.

But blood is blood, or perhaps, in this case, language is blood...

And most Mexican Americans lived in barrios, apart from gringos; many still retained Spanish as if in homage to her (Mexico). We were still her children.

As long as we didn't marry...

[ilbegone]

Rodriguez 2)

Mexicans will remember this century as the century of loss. The land will not sustain Mexicans. For generations, from Mexico City, came promises of land reform. This land will be yours.

What more seductive promise could there be to a nation haunted by the memory of dispossession?

The city broke most of its promises...

The Goddess of Liberty... may well ask Mexicans why they are so resistant to change, to the interesting freedoms she offers. Mexicans are notorious in the United States for their skepticism regarding public life. Mexicans don't vote. Mexicans drop out of school.

Mexicans live in superstitious fear of the American diaspora. Mexican Americans are in awe of education, of getting too much schooling, of changing too much, of moving too far from home.

Well, never to be outdone, Mother Mexico has got herself up in goddess cloth. She carries a torch, too, and it is the torch of memory. She is searching for her children.

A false mother, Mexico cares less for her children than she does for her pride. The exodus of so many Mexicans for the U.S. Is not evidence of Mexico's failure; it is evidence, rather, of the emigrant's failure. After all, those who left were of the peasant, the lower classes – those who could not make it in Mexico.

The government of hurt pride is not above political drag. The government of Mexico impersonates the intimate genius of matriarchy in order to justify a political strangle hold.

You betray Uncle Sam by favoring private over public life, by seeking to exempt yourself: by cheating on your income taxes, by avoiding jury duty, by trying to keep your boy on the farm.

These are legal offenses.

Betrayal of Mother Mexico, on the other hand, is a sin against the natural law, a failure of memory...

Mexico always can find a myth to account for us: Mexicans who go north are like the Chichimeca, - a barbarous tribe antithetical to Mexico. But in the United States, Mexican Americans did not exist in the national imagination until the 1960's – years when the black civil rights movement prompted Americans to acknowledge “invisible minorities” in their midst. Then it was deemed statistically that Mexican Americans constituted a disadvantaged society, living in worse conditions than most other Americans, having less education, facing bleaker sidewalks or Safeways.

**

[ilbegone]

Rodriguez 3)

3
The sixties were years of romance for the American middle class. Americans competed with one another to play the role of society's victim...

In those years, the national habit of Americans was to seek from the comparison with blacks a kind of analogy. Mexican American political activists, especially student activists, insisted on a rough similarity between the two societies – black, Chicano – ignoring any complex factor of history or race that might disqualify the equation.

Black Americans had suffered relentless segregation and mistreatment, but blacks had been implicated in the public life of this country from the beginning. Oceans separated the black slave from any possibility of rescue or restoration. From the symbiosis of oppressor and the oppressed, blacks took a hard realism. They acquired the language of the white man, though they inflected it with refusal. And because racism fell on all blacks,regardless of class, a bond formed between the poor and bourgeoisie, thence the possibility of a leadership class able to speak for the entire group.

Mexican Americans of the generation of the sixties had no myth of themselves as Americans. So that when Mexican Americans won national notoriety, we could only refer the public gaze to the past. We are people of the land, we told ourselves. Middle class college students took to wearing farmer-in-the-dell overalls and they took, as well, a rural slang to name themselves: Chicanos.

Chicanismo blended nostalgia with grievance to reinvent the mythic northern kingdom of Aztlan as corresponding to the southwestern American desert. Just as Mexico would only celebrate her Indian half, Chicanos determined to portray themselves as Indians in America, as indigenous people, thus casting the United States in the role of Spain.

Chicanos used the language of colonial Spain to declare to America that they would never give up their culture. And they said, in Spanish, that Spaniards had been the oppressors of their people.

Left to ourselves in a protestant land, Mexican Americans shored up our grievances, making them alters to the past...

Ah, Mother, can you not realize how Mexican we have become?

But she hates us, she hates us.

[ilbegone]

Rodriguez 4)

Chicanismo offended Mexico. It was one thing for Mexico to play the victim among her children, but Mexico didn't like it that Chicanos were playing the same role for the gringos.

By claiming too many exemptions, Chicanos also offended Americans. Chicanos seemed to violate a civic agreement that generations of other immigrants had honored: “My grandparents had to learn English.”...

In the late 1960's, when Cesar Chavez made the cover of time as the most famous Mexican American anyone could name, he was already irrelevant to to Mexican-American lives insofar as 90 percent of us lived in cities and were more apt to work in construction than as farm workers...

Politics can easily override irony. But, by the late 1980's, the confusing “we” of Mexican Americanism was transposed an octave higher to the “we” of pan-American Hispanicism.

Mexican Americans constituted the majority of the nation's Hispanic population. But Mexican Americans were in no position to define the latitude of of the term “Hispanic” - the tumult of pigments and alters and memories there. “Hispanic" is not a racial or a cultural or a geographic or a linguistic or an economic description. "Hispanic" is a bureaucratic integer – a complete political fiction. How much does a central American refugee have in common with the Mexican from Tijuana? What does the black Puerto Rican in New York have in common with the white Cuban in Mimi? Those Mexican Americans in a position to speak for the group – whatever the group was – that is, those of us with access to microphones because of affirmative action, were not even able to account for our own success. Or were we advancing on the backs of those who were drowning?

[ilbegone]

Rodriguez 5)

Think of earlier immigrants to this country. Think of the Jewish immigrants or the Italian. Many came, carefully observing Old World distinctions and rivalries. German Jews distinguished themselves from Russian Jews. The Venetian was adamant about not being taken for a Neopolitan. But to America, what did such claims matter? All Italians pretty much looked and sounded the same. A Jew was a Jew. And now, America shrugs again. Palm trees or cactus, it's all the same. Hispanics are all the same.

I saw Cesar Chavez again, a year ago, at a black – tie benefit in a hotel in San Jose. The organizers of the event ushered him into the crowded ballroom under a canopy of hush and tenderness and parked him at the center table, where he sat blinking. How fragile the great can seem. How much more substantial we of the ballroom seemed, the Mexican-American haute bourgeoisie, as we stood to pay our homage – orange women in fur coats, affirmative-action officers from cigarette companies, film makers, investment bankers, fat cats and stuffed shirts and bleeding hearts – stood applauding our little saint. Cesar Chavez reminded us that night of who our grandparents used to be.

Then Mexican waiters served champagne

Success is a terrible dilemma for Mexican Americans, like being denied some soul – sustaining sacrament. Without the myth of victimization – who are we? We are no longer Mexican, we are professional Mexicans. We hire Mexicans. After so many years thinking ourselves exempt from some common myth of America, we might as well be Italians.

[ilbegone]

Next day or three I want to get into the Denver youth conference and get into the origin of the farfetched concept of Aztlan and contrived north of the border "indigenism" of people with south of the border Mexican mestizo origins, as well as a smattering of associated issues.

I might take a couple days off or post on something off topic but relevant in the meantime.

[ilbegone]

This is in the words of Ernest Vigil, a member of the Crusade for Justice from 1968 to 1981, organizer, activist, and an ethnic and race research associate at the University of Colorado. From his book Crusade for Justice.

El Plan Espiritual De Aztlan

The first Denver Youth Conference is best known for a proclamation called El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, published in English and Spanish and consisting of a preamble and a less well known “program of Action”. The three paragraph preamble read:

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 Aztlan, from whence came pour forefathers, reclaiming the land of our birth, and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, Declare that the call of our blood is 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. Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds and 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 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 Aztlan – Por La Raza Todo, fuera La Raza Nada. March 1969.

“Aztlan” referred to the origin of the Nahuatl speaking Mexica of Mexico, who are commonly, but incorrectly, referred to a Aztecs. They came from somewhere in Northern Mexico or the present day American southwest. The Mexica, who are not specifically mention in the Plan, arrived nearly one thousand years ago in the Valley of Anahuac, after a long odyssey,and rose to power and splendor until their subjugation by the Spaniards. The location of Aztlan, their homeland, is difficult to ascertain: somewhere between Nayrit, Mexico – 400 miles northwest of Mexico City – and the present day U.S. Southwest. Who could locate, with precision, Aztlan, the ancestral Mexica homeland? Incidentally, no account of Aztlan locates it near Denver, which is 120 miles north of the Arkansas River, Mexico's northern border at the time of the American takeover.

Continued below

[ilbegone]

Vigil continued

“AZLAN” RECONSIDERED

The wording of the Plan demonstrates ethnic pride in its consciousness of a “proud historical heritage”, but its poetic wording creates great interpretive difficulties. It declared unity in gender based terminology (“brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come”). It spoke of “tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brow, and by our hearts”. But what exactly were these tasks for which our hearts called, and what, exactly, was it time to do?

And what did indigenous nations have to say about this grand plan declared in their absence? They clearly have their own myths, legends, and histories of origin that surpass, equal, predate, or displace Aztlan. What did the Plan mean to the tribal nations of the present day American southwest, if this was where Aztlan was once located, tribal nations who had engaged Spaniards and Mexicans (mestizos) in bloody warfare for encroachment on lands they occupied. Or was their input needed, since Chicanos were really “Indian”, or at least mestizo, anyway?

While declaring the “Independence of our Mestizo Nation”, the Plan says nothing about these peoples and nations, nor about African Americans or the role – if any- that the foreign: "Gabacho” would play in the nation it proclaimed. Its wording implies the solidarity of the Americas, since it does “not recognize capricious frontiers on the Bronze Continent”. But how were Chicanos to commune with their “brothers” across these borders? And what was meant by a “Bronze People with a Bronze Culture”?

The Plan declares, “We are free and sovereign, We are a nation”. Was this to be a new nation called Aztlan? And how would Aztlan relate to Mexico? Or would it? Was the Plan a literal declaration of independence from the United States? If so, where were the limits of these lands, since Mexico's borders were drawn by Spanish imperialists anyway and, at the time of the American takeover, vast regions populated not by Mexican mestizos, but by sedentary or nomadic tribal nations? In what sense did “Chicanos” have “their hearts in their hands and their hands in the soil”? What did this interesting imagery mean?

The verbal and theoretical imprecision of this declaration leaves room for many interpretations. Whatever “Aztlan” meant, the word spread rapidly after the conference. Students, for example, soon adopted the name Moviemento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) – The Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.

The Plan was, as noted above, a two part document; Gonzales wrote the program, while poet Alberto Urista wrote most of the preamble. The program sees nationalism as an ideology around which Chicanos would rally:

"The Chicano, (La Raza de Bronze) must use nationalism as the key for or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization. Once committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlan, we can only conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism. Our struggle must be the control of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, and our political life. El Plan commits all levels of Chicano society: the barrio, the campo, the ranchero, the writer, the teacher, the worker, the professional, to la causa."

Nationalism was so important that a restatement of it served as punto primero (point one): “Nationalism as the key to organization transcends all religions, political, class and economic factions or boundaries”. Nationalism is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree on”. Gonzales believed nationalism should, and would transcend those factors that divided Chicanos. Leftists and many intellectuals at the youth conference, however, argued that “La Raza” itself was divided into classes with divergent interests, and that, at its worst, primitive nationalism could be racist. For them, nationalism alone would not transcend class privilege and bias. The Plan did not address these issues.

The resolutions of the crusade's youth conferences of 1969, 1970, and 1971 reflect the prevailing nationalist sentiments of conference participants. Nationalism may not have been a comprehensive political theory, but it prevailed in the conferences' rhetoric, emotion, spirit of unity, and youthful enthusiasm. Philosophical conflict arose between nationalists and those advocating theories based on class, and though the Plan did not cause these conflicts, being merely an expression of pre-existing nationalist sentiment, neither was it an adequate framework to comprehend or resolve them.

For all its conceptual murkiness, and rhetorical quirkiness, the Plan's preamble and program denounce exploitation and advocated liberation and self determination, calling for driving out exploiters and “occupying forces”. It was provocative In its advocacy or “revolutionary acts” by youth and was traditionalist, or conservative, in its defense of culture, morals, and values like “respect” and “family and home”. It was idealistic in advocating “love”, “humanism”, and “dignity”. It criticized and rejected American society and government and served as a radical voice that spoke to many ideas, emotions, visions, and issues within the community.

[ilbegone]

Here is a description of “youth” behavior in Denver which would be described by the Plan of Aztlan as “revolutionary” rather than criminal juvenile delinquency. There is also some “ethnic cleansing” of public employees at these parks, without detail provided how the previous employees were persuaded to quit their park jobs. It states that black employees were still employed at Mestizo park after the take over, but doesn't say how many or what percentage. There are descriptions of a night fight in the park between black and brown, exchanged gunfire, and gunfire directed towards a police car as well as housing units the next night.

This is just one account of the many sided story. Reading between the lines, I believe there is much left unsaid or favorably stated towards the narrator's side, and it doesn't seem there was a single incident of spontaneous eruption of resentment and violence between black and brown as the narration seems to suggest.

I wonder how many of the participants were actually drop outs instead of school attendees as described, and I wonder what the drop out and gang banging rate is now compared to the early 1970's.

From Vigil's book.

LIBERATED TERRITORY: ALMA, MESTIZO, AND LA RAZA PARKS

Though law and order politics had the edge in the polls, activists continued to gain ground in the barrios. During the summer of 1970, young political activists and community residents took over the public swimming pool in the Northside's Columbus Park, a tactic patterned after the 1969 take over at Lincoln Park. The pool at Curtis Park was taken over in 1971, and the three parks were renamed La Raza Park, Alma Park, and Mestizo Park.... Though it lost influence over Alma Park in the early 1970's, the Crusade for Justice continued as the key influence at the East side and North Denver parks, which became centers of community organizing, leading to conflicts with local authorities.

Conflicts at Mestizo Park

Youth activists in the East side pressured employees at Curtis Park to quit their jobs in 1971, and replaced them with staff from the community. Among the new employees were Artie, Victor, and Tomas Ornelas, Danny Castro, Ray Zaragosa, Philip Miera, and others. The Mestizo Park takeover had led to unforeseen complications.

Chicano youths were well organized and highly politicized through their participation in school walk outs and involvement in the Berets and the Crusade for Justice. Though the African American community in the East side is larger than the Chicano community, Chicanos predominated in the immediate area of the park. African American youths were also employed at the park, but conflict arose when some resentful black youths felt that “the Mexicans had taken over”.

Community activists recall that some of the African American youths had recently moved to Denver from the Deep South or were staying with relatives during the summer months. Unfamiliar with Mexicans, some of these youths viewed Chicanos as dark white people.

In the summer of 1972, conflict escalated when Chicano youths reported that they had been assaulted or bullied by this particular group of youngsters. The park staff sought them out and told them both groups suffered discrimination and should get along peacefully. The staff reported that this attempt to forge unity was misinterpreted as weakness and fear. After another run in with these youths, the Chicanos challenged them to meet in the park to settle matters.

The twenty or so black youths who arrived that night found themselves outnumbered. Shots were exchanged, and one Chicano suffered a minor wound, reportedly from a rifle shot. The Chicano youths had small caliber pistols and missed their targets in the exchange of gunfire. Representatives of the black youths went to the park the next day saying they wanted to establish a “peace treaty”, The Chicanos responded that this is what they wanted before the violence escalated, but the previous night's incident had changed the situation. A Chicano was shot, while their rivals suffered no injury. The Chicano youths made a counter offer. Both groups were to show up that night. At the appointed hour of 9p.m., the black youngsters were told, they must, as a sign of good faith, shoot the first police car to pass through the Area. Chicanos would then join the battle.

Sporadic gunfire was heard during the day as Chicano youths shot out street lights. By nightfall two city blocks around the park were in complete darkness. Over a hundred Chicano youths from different barrios gathered in the darkened park.

Police cruised the area, but the 9p.m. Deadline passed without incident.A messenger was sent to inform the African Americans that the Chicanos would wait until 10 p.m. for action to be taken. People with police scanners monitored police communications, so youths in the park were aware that riot equipped police were congregating four blocks away and that the nearby fire station was in radio communication with the police to report developments.

The 10 p.m. Deadline also passed. A patrol wagon ventured into the area and was met with gunfire from Chicanos in the park. It quickly retreated. Many volleys of gunfire were then directed at the housing units in the nearby projects where the black youths lived. After 11 p.m. The police marched into the area, but found the park abandoned, thanks to police scanners.

No arrests were made. The next day organizers from the Crusade for Justice and the Black Panthers were called in to negotiate an end to the violence, and conflict between the two youth groups ended.

This isn't the end of general disorder and violence. There are dozens of fire bombings, gun battles with police, beatings, at least one stabbing, mob action, rocks and bottles thrown at police, property damage, at least one lawsuit by MALDEF, lots of violence of one sort or another.

40 YEARS OF CHICANO STUDIES

[ilbegone]

Things don't seem to have changed much in Denver over forty years.

Activist puts gangs at crux of shootings

Denver cops cite homicide drop to dispute connection

By Kirk Mitchell and Manny Gonzales Denver Post Staff Writers

Updated: 07/12/2007 01:48:32 AM MDT

A poster offering $2,000 in reward money is posted on a lamppost on the corner of 44th Ave. and Fillmore St. where a man was killed and son wounded by a gunman early Monday morning. (Post / Glenn Asakawa)

A trail of dried blood leads up to the doorstep of a church where one of three fatal shootings happened within eight hours this week.

Members of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on South Federal Boulevard held a candlelight prayer and vigil Wednesday night on the church's lawn.

"This city is a place that can be torn apart - a place where blood can be shed on the doorsteps of churches," pastor Jay McDivitt told the congregation.

Community activists say a battle is escalating between rival gangs in the city. But Denver police are downplaying any connection and say homicides in the city are down from previous years.

"There are a lot of things that have triggered our concern," said the Rev. Paul Burleson, vice president of political affairs for the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance.

"We want to make sure it isn't another summer of violence."

Lakewood officials say they suspect that a slaying there early Tuesday involved gangs. Denver police, however, say they don't believe two other killings in Denver involved street gangs.

Denver police also say that the 27 homicides in Denver this year are six fewer than at the same time last year and almost half the 53 homicides by the same time in 2004.

Furthermore, Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said it doesn't appear the three recent homicides are related.

But the Rev. Leon Kelly of Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives said the shootings - particularly a drive-by shooting - appear to him to be the work of gangs.

Kelly said the past three weeks have been particularly violent, with many shootings going unreported. Some appear to have been racially motivated, with black and Latino gang members attacking each other. Police reported that a Monday night shooting started as a dispute between groups of black and Latino youths.

"There has been this kind of hostility in Park Hill and the east side the past several weeks," Kelly said. "It takes two or three deaths at about the same time for people to take notice."

He said some of the dead and injured may be innocent victims of gang shootings.

At 9:30 p.m. Monday, two men were shot - one fatally - following a fight outside the South Federal Boulevard church. Roberto Perez-Juarez, 26, was killed, Jackson said.

Four hours later shots were fired from a dark sport utility vehicle at Christopher Pacheco on the 5600 block of West Mexico Avenue in Lakewood.

Members of Pacheco's family say he was not connected to gangs and they don't know why he was shot while playing pool in his garage.

"It certainly is a suspicion that at least the shooters are gang-related," said Steve Davis, Lakewood police spokesman.

Four hours after the Lakewood homicide, two other men were shot - one fatally - in the 4300 block of Fillmore Street in Denver. Eusebio Barboza-Aguilar, born in 1969, was killed, Jackson said.

Police have not arrested anyone in the three homicides, according to authorities.

40 YEARS OF CHICANO STUDIES

[ilbegone]

The Gang's All Here (in Denver)

Her grandmother will never forget the day Venus Montoya died. And she will never forgive her killers.

By Steve Jackson
Published on July 17, 1997

We can sit out here," Becky Estrada says from her front porch. She shrugs and shakes a cigarette out of its pack, pausing a moment to stare down the street as though looking for someone. Then she lights up. "The house is a mess."

Small wonder. An endless parade of nieces, nephews, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, in-laws and other family members bang in and out of the screen door. Inside the house, where Becky raised her own children, the curtains are drawn as if to protect the inhabitants from the bright summer sun and the world outside.

A small boy with enormous brown eyes emerges from the dark cocoon and crawls up on Becky's lap. He wants an ice cream from the two teenage boys in baggy shorts and oversized shirts who are pushing a cart up the street. He pleads. "Please, Mom, can I have a dollar?"

"No, son," she replies. Both she and her husband work, but there is never enough--not with so many mouths to feed. A dollar is a lot of money for an ice-cream bar.

Most of the modest homes in the neighborhood are well-kept, with green lawns and relatively fresh paint. Becky's place looks like something has sucked the life out of it--out of the yard, the house, the people who live there. Everyone except the children...nothing seems to knock them down for long.

The boy continues to beg until he gets his dollar. Then he bounds down the cement steps in pursuit of the vendors.

"That's Angel," Becky says, using the Anglo pronunciation of the name. "He was four when they killed his mother."

Becky draws sharply on her cigarette, as though inhaling smoke could smother the sadness waiting inside. But her eyes gleam with tears as they track Angel's return, the already melting ice-cream bar clutched triumphantly in his small brown hand.

Becky is a small, round woman with blue-green homemade tattoos fading on her arms. She looks like a person who once laughed a lot--the tell-tale lines are there around her eyes--but now does not find much reason for laughter. The years have been hard on her; there's been so much death and pain.

When she talks, her eyes mirror the emotions of the moment. Her anger at gangs and guns and the senseless, never-ending violence. Her fear that Angel and the other children face a future in which they will likely be victims of or participants in that violence. But mostly Becky's eyes reflect her apprehension, her anticipation that any news will certainly be bad.

A year ago this week, Becky learned that her nineteen-year-old granddaughter Venus Montoya, Angel's mother, had been murdered--by cowards who attacked in the dark and killed an innocent girl.

But there has been some good news of late. In June the Lakewood police arrested several members of the Westside CMG Bloods, and charged them with Venus's murder. It didn't surprise Becky that the same gang members were also accused of killing another young girl, whose body had been dumped like trash in the mountains back in May.

Becky had known in her heart that Venus's killers murdered that girl, too, even before the police figured it out. And now Denver and Jefferson county prosecutors and police officials were talking about having broken the backbone of the CMG Bloods, both Eastside and Westside, through a series of arrests for drug dealing, robbery, racketeering...and murder.

Including the murder of Venus, who wasn't even the gangsters' target that night last July.




In late spring 1996, word was out among the CMG Bloods that Salvino "Sal" Martinez was a snitch. That he was talking to the "po po's": the Denver Metro Gang Task Force and the Denver Police Gang Bureau. Giving up some of his homies to save his ass...or maybe to further his own business interests by eliminating the competition.

Martinez was asking for trouble. The Crenshaw Mafia Gangster Bloods, who'd started out as a black gang near 104th and Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, had shown up in Denver over a decade ago--and their power had been growing ever since. Although at first their numbers and influence had been negligible compared with some of the homegrown gangs, by last summer they covered much of the metro area.

The CMG Bloods split Denver by race and territory. Eastside CMG was predominantly black and claimed the Park Hill area down to Aurora and into Montbello.

Westside CMG came along a little later, when more Latinos joined up. Most of that branch remained Latino, although there were also white, Asian and black Westside CMGs. Generally, the Westside CMG claimed anything west of downtown Denver, into the east side of Lakewood and south into Bear Valley. But not north of Colfax--that was Northside CMG.

What made Eastside and Westside CMG unusual was that the gangs cooperated in their various criminal activities, as well as for mutual protection. (By comparison, black and Latino Crips gangs in Denver rarely had anything in common other than a name and, in fact, were often violent rivals.)

Some Westside CMG members even claimed to be Eastside as well, especially if that was their original affiliation. Like reputed Westside CMG leader Daniel "Bango" Martinez, a 24-year-old with a seven-year history of arrests for drugs, assaults and acting as a general menace to society.

http://www.westword.com/1997-07-17/news/the-gang-s-all-here/