Assimilation plays no part in this history lesson (Mexica Movement)

LA Times ^ | March 26, 2007 | Bob Sipchen

[LNewman]

The 400-foot-long mural decorating two outside walls at Theodore Roosevelt High presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.

...

I stumbled on the beautifully painted call for the descendants of Aztecs and other native cultures to reclaim their continent while hiking around the well-secured Boyle Heights campus in search of an entrance. Now I stand drinking in its full effect with artist Nelyollotl Toltecatl and the man he credits with enlightening him to North America's true history, Olin Tezcatlipoca.

I tracked these two down through an odd little website, http://www.stolencontinent.org . The massive mural ... is a project of "the Mexica Movement," a small but disproportionately outraged cadre whose rhetoric pushes hard against the boundary between political expression and bigotry. A note to a "European," for example, proclaims: "Your people are … inferior to us in your morals, ethics, and humanity — by your collective actions of the last 500 years."

...

Roosevelt High these days is 99.1% Latino. Not that the Mexica Movement has any patience with that term. "We reject the right of Europeans to define who we are," the website says. "We reject their occupation of our continent and their occupation of our DNA."

...

On the one hand there's the father who called to say his son was humiliated when a teacher yanked down a map of North America and said any white students in the class should be ashamed of the atrocities their ancestors had inflicted on the continent.

Then there are the students, including many I met outside Roosevelt, who say that they've learned nothing in their years of public education about the accomplishments of people from Mexico or Central America ...

[amihow]

I suggest that all those who romanticize the Mayan, Aztec and other indigenous cultures, quit using the Judeo/Christian/Greek/Roman/Anglo inventions,medicine developments of law and concepts of human rights, their methods of husbandry and go back to their roots, killing their children in sacrificial ceremonies, raiding each other for victims.

At the same time they were living like that, the Greeks and the Romans developing the seeds of the civilization in which we now live. Certainly there is much wrong in today's America, but there are ways to fix things without destroying the whole society and it is not to bring back ancient,indigenous cultures.

I, myself, have Indian blood. I am respectful and thankful for the good that existed in those ancestors and I want knowledge of that preserved. It certainly was not the Indian's fault that they did not have the same giants upon which to build their civilization and it is also certain that they were intelligent, but when I contemplate the good that comes from my roots, I know that the Europeans conferred much more good on us than did the Indians.

This hatred for Europeans is really illogical and destructive. We all need to give credit to the good where ever we find it.

[Altura Ct.]

There are many here in this country and some on this board who think all of this is just fine and we are bigots and haters if we think otherwise. We should hang our heads in shame and admit guilt. We should be willing to give up our country and way of life in the process...

Multiculturalism at it's finest and it will/is destroying this country! You can take this crap and cram it!