Armando Navarro, speaking to a MEChA group in 1995:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, what this means is a transfer of power, it means control, and it is the young people, the people who are now moving to develop an agenda for the twenty first century they are going to be in a position to really make the promise of what the Chicano movement was all about in terms of self-determination, in terms of empowerment, even in the terms of an Aztlan...."
Note: mecha means fuse in Spanish. The official symbol of MEChA is an eagle holding a lit dynamite bomb in one hand, and an Aztec head-chopper in the other. MEChA is an acronym for the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan.
This is what the MEChA Constitution says (Article II, section 1): "General membership shall consist of any student who accepts, believes and works for the goals and objectives of MEChA, including the liberation of AZTLAN, meaning self-determination of our people in this occupied state and the physical liberation of our land."
As usual, another Marxist romantic fantasy, this idea of the mythical "Aztlan." In reality, aztlan means place of white earth. That's how the Aztecs, Colonial Spaniards, and Mexicans regarded it - as compared with their core area, Central Mexico, it was regarded as a peripheral, mostly useless, arid wasteland. At the peak of Spanish and Mexican power, there were only a few thousand civilized people living here - they were outnumbered by the various Indian tribes. Until Anglo-Americans arrived and introduced widespread irrigation and water management structures, this land's potential was not even realized. There are reasons why neigher the Spanish nor the Mexicans saw any need for large garrisons and forts - they simply DID NOT CARE ENOUGH about their Northwestern border area to invest into it. The Mexicans fought much harder to keep Texas in '36 because they were worried about a general invasion by the US. By '46, they understood that we had no real designs on the core areas of Mexico and therefore, barely put up a fight to keep the rest of the SW US. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was not a contentious affair and Mexico was of a good spirit about it.