MECHA may be just a student organization, but there is a driving force behind all this (as your researched links so point out). Ever since the cold war, people who have sought to "conquer" the United States have understood that it cannot be taken by military force, but that it can be taken by infiltration from within. The communist/socialists are eating away at our nation from within and now we also seem to have Muslim-radicals and Chicano radicals doing the same thing.
I don't think that it is necessarily a "bad" thing to have a large voting block of people who want to bring about change. We would have to look at what kind of change they want and their motives to know whether we are in danger from them. The Muslim-radicals seek to convert the U.S. to Islam and force us all under it's religion. The Chicanos, up until recently have been seen as a group just seeking the American Dream.... but perhaps it's time that we take a closer look at real motives. Just exactly what kind of changes to they invision taking place if and when they become a powerful enough voting block? Will they want exclusionary rights (as in this is OUR state, Gringo's get out), will they want to vote themselves re-distribution of the wealth and reparations, will they begin insisting that "under God" can only mean being Catholic?
Bill O'Rielly has indeed "touched off a tempest". But perhaps its time that we opened our eyes and see what this tempest is all about before it's too late!
I grew up in West Texas, just below the caprock. There were no mexicans, except those who came in to pick cotton each fall. Now, many businesses are owned by hispanics - legal immigrants. There is a Catholic church, now, not just Baptist and Methodist. Their numbers increase. Some do not want to join Mexico, some do.
It never was. It's a radical secessionist anti-American group --- always was and is. The first time I learned the nature of these Chicano groups was from a hispanic guy who grew up in New Mexico --he grew up in a poor but patriotic American family which didn't consider themselves "Mexicans" because they descended from Indians who'd been in the SW USA long before Mexico existed and from Spaniards from Spain. He said when he started college his father told him he had better stay far away from any brown-power groups and that if he didn't, he would show up and drag him out of college and make him work. A lot of people of US hispanic descent despise the Chicano activists because they know what they're about.