To answer your question I’m no more outraged over “la raza” than I am “NAA...colored people”. I think people are getting their panties in a wad over nothing and some that are are inciting outrage for the sake of stirring the pot (I’m a little disappointed in Michelle, but she has been moving this way for some time).
I’ve asked about this to hispanic friends in the past and they say it has a historical connotation when the poor people and peasants in Mexico were fighting their Spanish origin “overlords”. To them it means the common people, the salt of the earth, that kind of thing and was meant to separate them from the rich wealthy landowners who abused and exploited them.
It’ use is going to raise some hackles in the US but I doubt they are going to change it now. Best just to move on to more fertile areas of disagreement.
BTW - Hispanic, Mexican, Spanish, mixed Indian, mestizo, etc. is not a race anyway.
Thats not the origin (”when the poor people and peasants in Mexico were fighting their Spanish origin “overlords”).
That is in a way some of the root of the Mexican problem. The Mexicans who led the fighting against the white (Spanish) overlord were for the most part white, and the Mexicans who were fighting against the nationalists were often indians. A similar pattern held across most of the Latin American liberation struggles, with echoes down to the Mexican revolution of 1911 (where Zapatas Indian villagers, among others, revolted because they wanted to enforce Spanish-era indian priveleges).
So Mexico was born without a national identity and, critically, without a national philosophy, like the US. So the place was broken up with ethnic and regional warfare periodically.
The “la raza” term was invented by a very prominent Mexican professor in the 1940’s as part of his theory of racial superiority and the development of a new, improved race. The Mexican regime of the day picked up on it and used it in their propaganda to create a Mexican ethnic identity. Thats precisely what the Nazi regime did in the 1930’s.
Mexican-American activists picked it up twenty years later, and unfortunately very much in the original sense, i.e., Mexican racial superiority, ethnnic exclusivity, and irredentism, which to be fair was just part of the macho posturing revolutionary chic of the times. See Tom Wolfe on the subject.
Mecha (fuse) with its war-club and bomb was full of this over-the-top sophomoric macho idiocy. As far as violent symbology went, the Chicanos had the stuff that was furthest out there, which was not matched by the rather tame reality. The Panthers et. al. were far more serious.
Who knows what “la raza” means now. You will get all sorts of opinions I’m sure, but its unlikely they are very well informed. The real problem with it is that it is very awkward and counterproductive in US society, its a childish leftover from a childish time, designed (by sophomores, literally) to get a rise out of people.