MECHA's "Spiritual Plan" For California (California FReepers, PLEASE read this!)

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 Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, 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. Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, 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 the world, 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 Aztlán.

Program El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán sets the theme that the Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze) must use their nationalism as the key or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization. Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, 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 then must be for the control of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, our culture, 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 Nationalism as the key to organization transcends all religious, political, class, and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon.

Organizational Goals
1. UNITY in the thinking of our people concerning the barrios, the pueblo, the campo, the land, the poor, the middle class, the professional-all committed to the liberation of La Raza.

2. ECONOMY: economic control of our lives and our communities can only come about by driving the exploiter out of our communities, our pueblos, and our lands and by controlling and developing our own talents, sweat, and resources. Cultural background and values which ignore materialism and embrace humanism will contribute to the act of cooperative buying and the distribution of resources and production to sustain an economic base for healthy growth and development Lands rightfully ours will be fought for and defended. Land and realty ownership will be acquired by the community for the people's welfare. Economic ties of responsibility must be secured by nationalism and the Chicano defense units.

3. EDUCATION must be relative to our people, i.e., history, culture, bilingual education, contributions, etc. Community control of our schools, our teachers, our administrators, our counselors, and our programs.

4. INSTITUTIONS shall serve our people by providing the service necessary for a full life and their welfare on the basis of restitution, not handouts or beggar's crumbs. Restitution for past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights. Institutions in our community which do not serve the people have no place in the community. The institutions belong to the people.

5. SELF-DEFENSE of the community must rely on the combined strength of the people. The front line defense will come from the barrios, the campos, the pueblos, and the ranchitos. Their involvement as protectors of their people will be given respect and dignity. They in turn offer their responsibility and their lives for their people. Those who place themselves in the front ranks for their people do so out of love and carnalismo. Those institutions which are fattened by our brothers to provide employment and political pork barrels for the gringo will do so only as acts of liberation and for La Causa. For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts.

6. CULTURAL values of our people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the movement. Our culture unites and educates the family of La Raza towards liberation with one heart and one mind. We must insure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood.

7. POLITICAL LIBERATION can only come through indepen-dent action on our part, since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we are a majority, we will control; where we are a minority, we will represent a pressure group; nationally, we will represent one party: La Familia de La Raza!

1. Awareness and distribution of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Presented at every meeting, demonstration, confrontation, courthouse, institution, administration, church, school, tree, building, car, and every place of human existence.

2. September 16, on the birthdate of Mexican Independence, a national walk-out by all Chicanos of all colleges and schools to be sustained until the complete revision of the educational system: its policy makers, administration, its curriculum, and its personnel to meet the needs of our community.

3. Self-Defense against the occupying forces of the oppressors at every school, every available man, woman, and child.

4. Community nationalization and organization of all Chicanos: El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.

5. Economic program to drive the exploiter out of our community and a welding together of our people's combined resources to control their own production through cooperative effort.

A nation autonomous and free - culturally, socially, economically, and politically- will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of our goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice (reward and punishment), and the profit of our sweat.

The primary goal of MEChA is to liberate and return to Mexico the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado . The true objective of this group is hard to believe, but don't take it lightly...

El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán

http://www.americanpatrol.org/REFERENCE/Bustamante-Cruz.html

Cruz Bustamante
Mechista - Reconquista

THE CASE AGAINST MEChA

http://www.americanpatrol.org/REFERENCE/Bustamante-Cruz.html#latest

What distinguishes MEChA from its more mainstream counterparts is its explicit and virulent calls for reconquest.

As one of MEChA’s many charming slogans has it, "for those of our race, everything; for those outside of it, nothing."

Substitute "Aryan" for "mestizo" and "white" for "bronze." Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante's MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger's evil Nazi Party.

MEChA's liberation agenda, outlined in El Plan de Aztlan, states defiantly:

"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."

http://boundless.org/2002_2003/features/a0000660.html

Radical politics have been part of the game on American campuses since at least the mid-1960s but have recently taken a new and disturbing turn. At colleges and universities across the country, the Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlan (The Student Movement of Aztlan Chicanos) — better known by its acronym, MEChA — is calling for the surrender of wide swaths of American territory to Mexico. Worse yet, in doing so, it has the support of university administrators, elected officials, and — thanks to the mandatory student activity fees on which the organization depends — tuition-paying students. ¹

Founded in the late 1960s, MEChA has spent the last three decades indoctrinating Latino students on American campuses in the ideology of reconquista (reconquest). According to MEChA propaganda, the Southwestern United States — including California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado — sits on the territory of the ancient (and mythical) “Nation of Aztlan.” Supposedly the cradle of Aztec civilization, MEChA charges that Aztlan was unjustly seized by the United States following the Mexican-American War. Now MEChA wants this territory given back to its alleged rightful owners: the people and government of Mexico.

As a matter of fact, the American Southwest was not, as MEChA claims, “stolen” from Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War, the government of Mexico legally ceded this territory to the United States (by the Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo, 1848). Nor has there ever been any place called “Aztlan” on American soil, much less a “Nation of Aztlan.” Invented 30 years ago by radical Latino activists, the Nation of Atzlan has more in common with Atlantis than with Israel.

But MEChA is not a group to let facts get in the way. There are today more than 300 MEChA unions in existence, with more than 100 in California alone. While the group is concentrated in the Southwest and along the West Coast, it can also be found farther East: It’s got chapters at MIT, Yale, Cornell, George Washington University, and Brown, among other East Coast universities. On the West Coast, where MEChA is to be found in nearly every institution of higher education, the movement is spreading so quickly that it has set its sights on the public school system, establishing high school chapters and encouraging its young supporters to participate in its numerous (and sometimes violent) protests and marches.

The revolution that MEChA plans for the American Southwest is to be a peaceful one — at least for the time being. By supporting continued high levels of Mexican immigration to the United States, MEChA hopes to achieve by sheer weight of numbers what the U.S. government long ago achieved by force of arms: the re-partition of the American Southwest. To this end, MEChA endorses a cocktail of pro-immigration policies. These include open borders, government benefits (including the right to vote and obtain drivers licenses) for non-citizens, amnesty for illegal aliens, dual citizenship, state recognition of Spanish as an official language, and racial set-asides in education and corporate hiring.

MEChA is hardly alone in promoting these policies. The National Council of La Raza and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), two of the better known Latino advocacy groups, also support them (as does Mexican President Vicente Fox). What distinguishes MEChA from its more mainstream counterparts, however, is its explicit and virulent calls for reconquest. While organizations like La Raza and MALDEF may harbor irredentist dreams, MEChA has made the reconquest of the American Southwest the central platform of its program.

As one of MEChA’s founding documents, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (The Spiritual Plan of Atzlan) puts it: “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 our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.”

El Plan Espiritual is typical, not just for its atrocious prose, but also for its violent racial overtones. Indeed, to judge by the numerous Web sites and student publications sponsored by MEChA, life after the reconquest is going to be a pretty dreary affair. Just beneath the surface of the Marxist-inspired “union of free pueblos” imagined by MEChA visionaries runs a rich vein of race hatred and conspiratorial anti-Semitism. As an editorial addressed to “capitalist whites” in the University of California Irvine’s La Voz Mestiza (The Mestiza Voice) concludes, “You’ve spilled enough of our blood, now it’s your turn to bleed you [expletive] sub-human beasts.” Or, as one of MEChA’s many charming slogans has it, “por la Raza todo; fuera la Raza nada”: for those of our race, everything; for those outside of it, nothing.

Such statements don’t leave much to the imagination. In calling for the re-partition of the American Southwest, MEChA is not just seeking the overthrow of the American government but the overthrow of its people as well. Only in this way will it achieve “the bronze continent for the bronze people” of which it dreams. This is strong beer, indeed. As a number of recent cases indicated, however, MEChA is not just tolerated on our supposedly multicultural campuses. It is encouraged:

1) In 1995, the Voz Fronteriza, the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) official MEChA publication, ran an editorial on the death of a Latino INS agent. Describing him as a traitor to his race who deserved to die, the editors of the Voz concluded that “all the migra [a pejorative term for the Immigration and Naturalization Service] pigs should be killed, every single one.” In the controversy that followed, UCSD Vice Chancellor Joseph W. Watson defended the publication’s right to free expression. Watson also refused to officially condemn the sentiments expressed in the Voz Fronteriza article, arguing that “the university is legally prohibited from censuring the contents of student publications.”

2) Late last year, two student reporters from the UCSD satiric publication, The Koala, attended and attempted to photograph an open meeting of MEChA. In response to complaints from MEChA, the UCSD administration charged them with violating the student code’s catch-all prohibition on “obstruction or disruption of teaching, research, administration, disciplinary procedures, or other UCSD or University activities.” Watson — the same man who, six years earlier, had defended the Voz Fronteriza’s “right to free expression” and refused to condemn the contents of the publication — issued a statement to “condemn Koala’s abuse of the constitutional guarantees of free expression and disfavor their unconscionable behavior”.

Watson then brought the staff of The Koala before an administrative court. When it appeared the court was likely to find in The Koala’s favor, the administration annulled the proceedings and ordered that the trial be re-held, this time in secret. The Koala was saved from Watson’s kangaroo court only after the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) stepped in, reminding the UCSD administration of the constitutional protections of due process and freedom of expression and calling media attention to the case.

3) In February of this year, The California Patriot, a publication of the University of California Berkeley College Republicans, ran an article critical of MEChA. Before the journal could be distributed, a number of people — apparently MEChA activists — broke into the Patriot’s campus offices and stole the entire print run, valued at $2000. When Patriot staff members lodged a complaint with the university police department, they received death threats. The university, meanwhile, quietly dropped the case. It continues to supply Berkeley MEChA with $20,000 in yearly student activity fees.

Something is clearly wrong with this picture. While MEChA has as much right to free expression as the next hate group, one would like to think that, left to its own devices, “el Movimiento” would wither and die. The problem is, it hasn’t been left to its own devices. In each of the cases mentioned above, MEChA has not only not been discouraged — it has in fact been accorded special protection denied other student groups. What’s more, MEChA chapters often benefit, as at Berkeley, from lavish grants of student activity fees. If MEChA has successfully spread through the American university system, it is only because university administrators and faculty — the guardians of the system — have opened all the doors.

In doing so, they no doubt comfort themselves with the idea that it is all for the greater good of “diversity.” After all, in contrast to the “gringos” against whom the organization spends most of its time railing, MEChA can claim to represent a recognized ethnic minority. In the hyper-simplified, two-tone world of contemporary academia, that’s all it takes to count as a victim. MEChA advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government, the seizure of large swaths of U.S. territory, and the expulsion (or worse) of those presently living there. For this generation of college administrators and left-wing faculty, however, MEChA is a victim group deserving protection. Such is the logic of diversity. The road to Aztlan, at any rate, will be paved with good intentions.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20030820.shtml

Bustamante, MEChA and the media
Michelle Malkin (archive)

August 20, 2003 |

Now that Democrat Cruz Bustamante is California's gubernatorial recall front-runner, we can look forward to in-depth media investigations of the Latino candidate's long-held ties to the racial separatist group MEChA, right?

Ha.

While Katie Couric complains about GOP candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger being "the son of a Nazi party member" and international media outlets assail Schwarzenegger adviser Pete Wilson as "anti-immigrant" and "racially divisive," the liberal press has been stone-cold silent on Bustamante's connection to one of the nation's most virulently racist organizations.

As a student at Fresno State University in the 1970s, Bustamante was an active member of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, which stands for the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan. Bustamante repeatedly denies having a "radical ethnic agenda," but has refused to disassociate himself from his Mechista roots. In fact, Bustamante recently returned to Fresno State for a separate Latino commencement ceremony founded by two of his Chicano activist classmates.

MEChA has been dismissed by some as a harmless social club, but it operates an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide that would make David Duke and the KKK turn green with envy. MEChA members in the University of California system have rioted in Los Angeles, editorialized that federal immigration "pigs should be killed, every single one" in San Diego, and are suspected of breaking into a conservative student publication's offices and stealing its entire print run in Berkeley.

MEChA's symbol is an eagle clutching a dynamite stick and machete-like weapon in its claws; its motto is " Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing)." The MEChA Constitution calls on members to "promote Chicanismo within the community, politicizing our Raza (race) with an emphasis on indigenous consciousness to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the Chicano people for the purpose of liberating Aztlan." "Aztlan" is the group's term for the vast southwestern U.S. expanse, from parts of Washington and Oregon down to California and Arizona and over to Texas, which MEChA claims to be a mythical homeland and seeks to reconquer for Mexico ( reconquista ).

MEChA's liberation agenda, outlined in El Plan de Aztlan, states defiantly:

"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."

Substitute "Aryan" for "mestizo" and "white" for "bronze." Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante's MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger's evil Nazi Party. To date, however, the only exposure Bustamante's MEChA history has received has been on the Internet.

In a critical article on Bustamante published by David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine.com last week, Lowell Ponte notes that "Like Nazism, MEChA has acquired more than a tinge of racism. In their tactics to advance Latinos and 'La Raza,' many of its activists have directed racist attacks against not only white-skinned Anglos but also against blacks, Asian-Americans and Jews -- in fact, against every non-Latino group."

Popular Internet blogger Tacitus points out: "It's tempting to dismiss this as a youthful affiliation that means nothing today -- but that temptation would be wrong. There are certain associations that are socially tainting (and justly so) in the modern day, and they don't have statutes of limitations. Former Klansmen and former Nazis don't get a pass unless they spend a great deal of time and energy apologizing for and explaining themselves in a convincing manner."

Why should Bustamante, a public figure already known to have used a racial epithet in the past (he infamously used the word "nigger" while addressing a Black History Month event two years ago) get a pass? Or, for that matter, former California State Assembly Speaker and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, State Assemblyman Gil Cadillo, State Sen. Joe Baca, and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva -- all unapologetic Mechistas?

Ms. Couric, I know you'll get to the bottom of this. They don't call you Hardball Katie for nothing.

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