Posted on 09/02/2003 12:11:53 PM PDT by Joe Hadenuf
I am familiar with Jerry. This article is from a link on his website.
Thought others may find this interesting. It's about a 5 minute read, but interesting. I apologize if it's been posted previously.
The MEChA Whitewash
By Lowell Ponte FrontPageMagazine.com | September 2, 2003
PONTEFICATIONS
“CURRENT MEChA CHAPTERS STILL USE THE 1960s SYMBOL of an eagle clutching dynamite,” reported the August 30 Los Angeles Times, “but do not subscribe to separatist or nationalistic ideas, according to members and faculty who work with the organization.”
“Yes, MEChA went through a nationalist period,” acknowledged Rodolfo Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University Northridge near Los Angeles, “but most people in this country went through a nationalist period.”
Thus goes the frantic covering and back-filling now underway on campuses and in the media to whitewash and conceal the radical political roots and current agenda of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the only major Democrat on California’s October 7th recall ballot to replace Democrat Governor Gray Davis.
Bustamante’s links to this radical, racist organization entered the current debate with my August 11th FrontPage Magazine investigation “Bustamante: The Racist in the Race?” It was and continues to be quoted on talk radio stations across California. Michelle Malkin, author of the bestselling book Invasion about immigration, expanded and graciously credited my probe in her August 20th Creators Syndicate column. In recent days the issue has gained nationwide resonance thanks to Fox News, WorldNetDaily.com, and many other news sources. My thanks to Tony Snow and the other fine journalists at FoxNews and elsewhere for bringing attention to our ongoing investigation here at FrontPageMagazine.com.
On the defensive, Bustamante days ago pooh-poohed his 1970s Fresno State University involvement with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, MEChA, the Chicano student movement of Aztlan, saying that its members “are just like the students when I was there, pretty much they are trying to get an education.”
Bustamante told reporters: “I think the actuality of what takes place in those organizations is to provide student leadership. For me and many, many others, we were running for student government. That’s how I got here today.”
But when asked if he would now distance himself from MEChA’s radical activists and more extreme views, Bustamante evaded giving a direct answer. One reason might be that he continues to need Chicano activist support in the upcoming election and dares not offend that zealous constituency.
But another reason might be that Bustamante in fact secretly agrees with much of MEChA’s radical agenda and has spent his political career as a kind of “sleeper” agent advancing its cause. He might be as Gerry Adams is to the Irish Republican Army, the “legitimizing,” soft-spoken, seemingly-moderate political face for a diverse spectrum of activists, the farthest fringe of whom are outright terrorists bent on overthrowing the government where they live.
Whatever his motives, Lt. Gov. Bustamante refuses to renounce MEChA.
To read recent Bustamante-defending reports in the liberal press, or to hear Mr. Bustamante’s own whitewash of MEChA, one might think that this organization – whose motto is Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (“For the race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing.”) – is nothing more than a student pride organization that fosters good study habits and wholesome group spirit shared over moderate plates of nachos and glasses of Dos Equis beer.
But MEChA’s motto is Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada, “For the race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing.”
As Malkin has rightly observed, imagine the fate of any Republican politician if the media learned that he had belonged to an organization with the motto: “For the Aryan race, everything. For the non-white races, nothing.” He would, this column notes, be branded an encourager of “hate crimes.”
But the only difference between this and MEChA’s literature, notes Malkin, is that mechistas (as Bustamante acknowledges he was) substitute the words “Bronze” and “mestizo” for Adolf Hitler’s words white and Ayran.
This group favors a different Master Race from Hitler’s, but MEChA’s long-term aim is no less bent on becoming racial political masters over all those parts (and peoples) of the United States ever claimed by Mexico.
“Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans,” says the radical document El Plan de Aztlan. “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.”
The goal of this plan for “the Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze),” it says, is to roll back “the brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories…the northern land of Aztlan….social, economic, cultural and political independence is the only road to liberation.”
This plan’s “organizational goals,” are clearly collectivist. “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,” it says. It does not spell out what these “Chicano defense units” are. (Neither did Fidel Castro explain what his neighborhood Committees for Defense of the Revolution would be until he had consolidated his dictatorship.)
“It’s nationalism! It’s socialism! It’s national socialism!” observes astute blogger Stefan Sharkansky. “It’s where Cruz Bustamante got his start in politics!”
And in a chillingly racist phrase that could have come straight from the mouth of Adolf Hitler, El Plan de Aztlan proclaims “that the call of our blood is our power.”
Among Democratic presidential hopefuls, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.) has endorsed and embraced Bustamante. Some Lieberman supporters subsequently began giving money to Bustamante’s campaign. It’s worth remembering that in the 1920s a few Jews contributed to Hitler because he spoke of vague plans to give the Jews their own “separate country,” never mentioning that the land he had in mind was six feet underground in a death camp mass grave. Senator Lieberman, a moral man and Orthodox Jew, ought to be asked why he is supporting this politician with links he refuses to renounce to an overtly racist, anti-Semitic organization.
Los Angeles Times reporter Matea Gold confirms that “several MEChA Web sites link” to this document, which Gold writes “was written at the National Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in March 1969, a month before MEChA was created.
The site this column hotlinks to above is from the University of Oregon MEChA chapter, one of about 300 on campuses around the nation (100 in California alone), where as of September 1, 2003, El Plan de Aztlan was actively posted as if it were official MEChA literature.
But as Leftist activists scramble to conceal incriminating evidence and cover their racist tracks, web pages like this might at any moment vanish or be replaced with sanitized, edited texts or goody two-shoes material.
Another example of MEChA’s true nature is its emblem, visible here from the MEChA web site of the University of Michigan. (At the Univ. of Michigan, a newly-required essay about whether and how an applicant has been “helped by affirmative action” has just replaced the unconstitutional point system in helping admissions officers give racial preferences to Hispanic applicants. Needless to say, white male applicants cannot claim to have benefited from such help, a clear clue as to their identity.)
As the MEChA Constitution also on this site explains, “The official symbol of this organization shall be the eagle with its wings spread, bearing a macahuittle in one claw and a dynamite stick in the other with the lighted fuse in its beak. The acronym MEChA shall be above the symbol with the phrase ‘La Union Hace La Fuerza’ [“Union makes Strength, Force, Power”] below.”
Unlike the majestic eagle in America’s Great Seal, with 13 arrows in its left claw and the olive branch of peace in its right, the MEChA eagle is a purely violent symbol. It is a bird of prey with dynamite in its left claw and in the other a [MEChA-misspelt above] macahuitl, the stone-age sword that Aztec warriors used to conquer and enslave neighboring tribes.
The macahuitl is a wooden stick whose two edges are each lined with razor-sharp blades of chipped volcanic glass, obsidian. The “bronze” stone-age Aztecs had not yet reached the Bronze Age of metallurgy that other peoples had achieved and surpassed with iron thousands of years earlier. But the Aztec macahuitl could nevertheless decapitate an unarmed Indian farmer with a single blow, which is how the imperialistic, colonialist Aztec exploiters used it.
(And speaking of exploitation, Malkin notes that many of these campus MEChA chapters, especially at state universities and colleges, are given your taxpayer money with which to promulgate their racist views.)
But has MEChA mellowed into a benign organization, as Bustamante claims it already had “by the time I got there in the 1970s”? Is it in any way today racist, separatist, nationalist, Leftist or violent?
Pressed four times by reporters to explain his views of MEChA ideas, Bustamante finally broke down and said “Racial separation is wrong” before changing the topic and returning to his usual evasions. MEChA, as we noted earlier, does not advocate racial separation as much as it does racial domination. “Where we are a majority,” says El Plan de Aztlan, “we will control.”
But last year at age 49 Bustamante saw nothing wrong with accepting the degree he at last finished via correspondence courses at Fresno State University in a segregated Hispanics-only graduation ceremony. This ceremony had an invisible sign out front that read: No whites, blacks, Asian-Americans or Jews will be admitted.
As my previous column about him documented, he also saw nothing wrong in punishing Anglo reporters for asking tough questions by, as a public servant on the public payroll, for several weeks answering questions only from the Spanish-language press. No reporter mentioned this when Bustamante loyalists days ago in Fresno demanded that Arnold Schwarzenegger resign from the board of a group that favors English as America's common language for everybody.
MEChA certainly continues to make racist, nationalist literature available, as evidenced by its web sites continuing to banner El Plan de Aztlan with its proposed reconquista of the western United States, or as El Plan calls the region, “northern Aztlan,” the to-be-reclaimed northern once-and-future provinces of Mexico.
In reading the defenses of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and his membership in MEChA in the Leftist press, the careful observer notices what is deliberately omitted from such stories. In the August 30 Los Angeles Times news article, for example, Matea Gold never addresses an obvious question: If MEChA calls itself the Movement of Chicano Students for Aztlan, what does this odd word Aztlan that they are seeking mean? She never spells out any answer.
In Aztec mythology, their namesake Aztlan was a land across the ocean to the east from which the Aztecs were believed to have come. It was a vast island, their myth says, that sank and forced the people to take to boats to save their lives.
Otherworldly Californians are quick to point out the parallels between Aztlan and a tale the Greek philosopher Plato told 2,500 years ago, purportedly passed on by ancient Egyptians. Plato told about how an advanced civilization fled in all directions from an island continent west of the Straits of Gibraltar that sank in a single day and night for which the Atlantic Ocean would be named, a place called Atlantis. Was Aztlan the lost Atlantis? Were the Aztecs Atlanteans? The similar names are striking, if inconclusive.
MEChA uses the term Aztlan in a much more primitive, uninformed way to mean all lands ever occupied by Mexico, including the western United States. MEChA’s “Bronze” race that dwells in these lands – especially Mexican-Americans, legal and illegal – perceive no “capricious frontiers” between the U.S. and Mexico nor between their ethnicity and that of Mexicans.
A few facts can dispel some of this silliness. If Mechistas are so “Bronze” and opposed to “foreign Europeans,” why do they speak only another European colonial language, Spanish? They demand that the Spanish Armada sail again against England as it did in 1588, and that Spanish be accepted as a second official language in the United States alongside English. But Mexico forbids any second language, outlawing the official use even of the Nahuatl Aztec language still spoken by millions of poor Mexican peasants.
If Mechistas are, like up to 85 percent of Mexicans, Bronze-skinned Mestizos of mixed Spanish-Indian ancestry, then why do they support Cruz Bustamante? As my earlier column implied, and as famed Hispanic journalist Raoul Lowery Contreras days later confirmed as a guest on my national radio show, Bustamante comes from that racially pure elite among Mexicans who moved from Spain but never intermarried with Native Americans.
If Bustmante appears tan, this might have come from a mating centuries ago with Muslim Moors during their 800-year occupation of Spain or who converted to Christianity after 1492. But he is seeking office under false colors.
Bustamante is not an “indigenous” Mestizo with ancient Indian claim to the lands of California. He is descended entirely from Spanish colonialist exploiters, not from the Native Americans his ancestors victimized. How can Mechistas dedicated to La Raza in good conscience vote for Bustamante, who is just another European conquistador descended from the Vandals (namesake of Andalusia) and other Roman-Germanic tribes that occupied Spain and became the Spaniards?
Despite his lack of Indian genes, Bustamante has already received $800,000 for his run for the Governorship from two casino-rich Native American tribes, with lots more to come. Republican Tom McClintock, rumor has it, will also receive up to $4 million from such tribes – not enough to win, but enough to bankroll ads that will split the Republican vote and cause Arnold to lose. It makes little difference, but McClintock ought to be asked by reporters whether the tribes funding him – all of which have a record of tilting Democratic – have gotten his agreement not to use the money on ads critical of Bustamante. (These tribes have their own reasons for disliking Gray Davis.)
As to Bustamante seeking the Governorship of California, it’s worth noting that California was settled by Spaniards, not Mexicans. After Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, these Spanish Californios declared their independence from Mexico but were brutally suppressed by the Mexican Army. The Indians, meanwhile, were victimized by both Spain and Mexico.
The California missions were confiscated by the Mexican Government and were returned to the Roman Catholic Church only by American President Abraham Lincoln.
When a tiny contingent of Americans shoved aside token Mexican military occupiers and took over California almost without firing a shot, many Californios welcomed John C. Fremont (later the first Republican candidate for President in 1846) and his Bear Flag Republic supporters almost as Liberators.
MEChA’s historic and cultural claim to California in behalf of Mexico, to cite one example, is absurdly weak. Like Hitler’s dubious claim to the Sudetenland, it is based largely on quirks of language and immigration.
But this is not to say that if elected Governor Cruz Bustamante would not attempt to turn California into a second Mexico. He has already come close to promising to do what Mexico did in 1938 by seizing American oil facilities and creating a socialist oil monopoly called PEMEX. Bustamante days ago said he would impose economic regulation and price controls on oil in California, thereby either forcing oil companies out of business or setting them up to get favorable prices Mexican-style, by paying La Mordida, “the bite,” bribes to government officials like Cruz Bustamante. Perhaps Mr. Bustamante should be asked if he has discussed a deal to fuel California cars with gasoline directly from PEMEX, and if so what his cut of any such deal would be?
“With gasoline being the absolute lifeblood of most California families, it is about time that Californians had a say in being able to make sure that they are not being gouged,” said the Lt. Governor. But oddly, this concern for working-class drivers did not prevent Bustamante from conspiring with fellow Democrat Gov. Gray Davis to illegally triple the car tax on these same poor people.
Even the Leftist Los Angeles Times editorially ridiculed Bustamante’s “cheap shot” as foolish policy that would “exacerbate oil shortages and encourage a black market. Bustamante even picked the wrong location for his announcement: an independent gas station whose owner has no say in how oil companies set prices. The disbelief that greeted the idea may be an indication that he, too, is not quite ready for prime time.”
“Gasoline – and the business of selling gasoline – is part of interstate commerce that belongs to Congress to regulate, if at all,” noted St. John’s University Law Professor Anthony Sabino. “With all due respect to Mr. Bustamante, he is either very ignorant of the law, or he’s getting incredibly bad advice from his advisors, or it’s a publicity stunt.”
A similar disbelief and very little respect greeted Bustamante’s attempted coup d’etat, his proposal weeks ago that he would permit a recall vote to remove Gov. Gray Davis but would forbid voters from picking a replacement, thereby automatically making Lt. Gov. Bustamante the Governor.
As noted in my previous column about Bustamante, even Democratic officials sat Cruz down and explained that California was not yet Mexico, where such coups are a longstanding custom. We have this little limitation on political bosses called the Constitution, albeit an annoyance Bustamante will dispose of as soon as he has the power or the votes. California has not yet become Mexifornia.
But those votes for dictatorship in California may soon arrive. A desperate Governor Gray Davis has said he will sign a bill he vetoed in the past called SB60. This bill opens the way for illegal aliens to obtain California Driver’s Licenses upon presentation of an acceptable identification with a number on it.
California law used to require a Social Security card or Federal taxpayer identification number, which implicitly demonstrated citizenship. But in its revised form this Democrat-concocted legislation opens the way to acceptance of “any identifier or number that is deemed appropriate by the department [of Motor Vehicles].”
Democrats in control of every statewide office and both houses of the legislature have refused to spell out what identifications would be accepted. Could a valid California Driver’s License be issued upon presentation of a Matricula Consular card and its number issued by the Mexican Government to its citizens as identification? Sponsors of the bill refuse to say, but this clearly seems to be their intention.
Anyone applying for such a license is expected to check a box indicating that they are a U.S. citizen, and if they do then Motor Voter passed by a Democrat-controlled congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton automatically registers them to vote. No follow-up is done to confirm citizenship. In fact it becomes illegal for poll officials even to question the citizenship of anyone thus registered casting a ballot.
This Driver’s License might soon include a digitized finger- or thumbprint print, along with a tripling of the license cost to all Californians to pay for this new technology. But thumb prints will not be checked for voting. Comparisons can be made mostly by California law enforcement officers. But the proposed law would largely prohibit or stymie any routine sharing of such digitized thumbprint data with the Department of Homeland Security to help catch terrorists.
The proposed Democrat license law would also make it easier for someone to visit Mexico, give his California Driver’s License to a friend to use in crossing the border, and then back in the U.S. declare his license lost and get a quick replacement. The Border Patrol, remember, will not be given automatic access to California’s digitized thumbprints. If you think the Mexican border leaks like a sieve now or makes it easy for terrorists to enter the U.S., wait until this new Democrat measure applauded by the Left and, of course, Cruz Bustamante becomes law.
This goes beyond mere cynical politics and power grabs by the Democrats. This kind of licensing of Mexicans illegally inside the United States can greatly increase our vulnerability to cross-border terrorism.
The author of this nightmare bill is State Senator Gilbert Cedillo, who represents East and Downtown Los Angeles in Sacramento. When an Assemblyman, Cedillo was asked why he believed illegal aliens should be allowed to remain in the United States and replied: “They were here first.”
In his official biography, Cedillo says he “received his law degree from the People’s Law School.” From its web site we learn that PCL was founded in 1974 “by people and organizations, including the Asian Law Collective, the La Raza National Lawyers Association (LRNLA), the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG).
It is “not accredited by any traditional bar association,” the site reads. “However, PCL is licensed by the California Bureau of Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education of the Department of Consumer Affairs” and its graduates are eligible to sit for the California State Bar Examination.
The People’s Law School, the site says, “was created to address and balance inequities in our law and society. PCL’s goals are to advocate people before property, human rights, women’s rights, tenants’ rights, consumer rights, workers’ rights; to fight discrimination, economic and political oppression; and to enable and empower those who have been historically denied legal resources and protections. If you seek to become a lawyer or advocate for those who already control the economic and political power in our society, look elsewhere.”
On another page, the People’s Law School boasts that its powerful graduates include “legislative leaders (including the former Speaker of the California State Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa).” Yup, clearly they are not involved with the powerful.
“We only admit those students who, regardless of their quite varied political, spiritual, cultural or social backgrounds, have demonstrated a commitment to progressive social change, have an awareness of working class issues and will employ the skills gained at the school to further these goals….” Reads another page of PCL’s web site. Translation: only hardcore Leftists need apply to this factory for the manufacture of radical lawyers….the kind who can defend the Mechistas who in 1996 were videotaped beating up demonstrators who dared to protest against illegal immigration.
From my two columns about Cruz Bustamante and MEChA, you have now begun to acquire an education about some long-hidden forces manipulating your government and society. Here’s a pop quiz. What racist, radical student organization did Antonio Villaraigosa and Gilbert Cedillo both belong to at the University of California Los Angeles during the same 1970s decade Mr. Bustamante, who also would become Speaker of the California State Assembly, attended Fresno State University?
A hint: Chicanos at UCLA demanding their own studies department in 1993 reportedly staged protests the damage from which reportedly cost $500,000 taxpayer dollars to repair. As El Plan de Aztlan advocates, “For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts.”
If you answered that Villaraigosa and Cedillo both belonged to MEChA, give yourself a grade of “A.” If you did not, then read this and my previous column on the topic again.
Everything in these columns is already known, or could readily be found with hard work, by the nation’s major news networks, news magazines and newspapers. Interesting, isn’t it, that they have so little interest in providing you with this information about this group whose graduates wield huge power and influence inside the Democratic Party? By keeping this information from you, they are whitewashing MEChA and the special interests California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante serves.
If Theo endorses a candidate that supports the Mexican equivalent of the KKK, then he will get what's coming to him. The fact that Bustamante is getting a pass on his affiliation with this anti-American, racist hate group is a scandal in itself.
Would you consider it a smear to investigate if Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to disavow the Austrian Nazi Party?
From the MEChA National Webpages:
The fundamental principles that led to the founding of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán are found in El Plan de Santa Barbara (EPDSB). The Manifesto of EPDSB sees self-determination for the Chicana and Chicano Chicano and Chicana Movement in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (EPEDA). A synopsis of El Plan stipulates:
1) We are Chicanos and Chicanas of Aztlán reclaiming the land of out birth (Chicano and Chicana Nation);
2) Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture;
3) We are a union of free pueblos forming a bronze nation;
4) Chicano and Chicana nationalism, as the key in mobilization and organization, is the common denominator to bring consensus to the Chicano and Chicana Movement;
5) Cultural values strengthen our identity as La Familia de La Raza; and
6) EPEDA, as a basic plan of Chicano and Chicana liberation, sought the formation of am independent national political party that would represent the sentiments of the Chicano and Chicana community.
So there's the plan, in part. Here are some of their fellow travelers:
If you honestly think this has no legitimate place in discussions about the potential next Governor of California, you are honestly not thinking. As it is, the fact that this man is currently the Lieutenant Governor and supports the Aztlan movement deserves some serious scrutiny.
None of this took any digging at all. It's all within easy reach on the Internet. And there is much, much more to this than the sampling I have posted here. This is the stuff that's posted in English, I wish my Spanish was better, because there is some really interesting stuff out there in Spanish, as best I can tell. Maybe Babelfish can help out...
I cannot believe you would soft-pedal this if you knew what was really going on here. Race card? Check out these sites and then tell me who's playing the race card.
Hint: Beware of racists who claim to be victims of racism.
How many Jews did mecha kill? Poor comparison.
With the coming election, someone out there may want to contribute or come forward to offer new information that may help people learn more about the candidate.
Am looking for new information to substantiate the old documentation. Such as an old photograph sitting in someones drawer, leads on associates and where they are now, long forgotten notes or recording from meetings, or debates, last duties and activities, dates, times, possible college radio station recording of debates or statements etc
Again, with the coming election, someone out there may decide to come forward with something that has, up to this point, remained hidden or forgotten.
Thanks for the information however, I do appreciate it.
I don't. It's a left-leaning college club. What have they accomplished?
Source? There's plenty to bash him on...quit searching.
This is what you come up with out of my post? Fine, conceded.
What do think about the rest of the post? Specifically, why do you keep dodging the issue of just what MEChA really is?
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