Guest Column
Raza isn't racist
- The Latino student club MEChA is more about culture and education than reconquista.
- By Gustavo Arellano
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.
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.
Los Angeles Times commentary at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-arellano15jun15,0,3083983.story
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