Thirty years ago the Brown Berets were active, a sort of latino version of the Black Power movement. I even recall a riot in East LA organized by some latino race groups. I don't know that it got much coverage outside of LA, it was eclipsed by antiwar demonstrations of the time and other such events. I was in high school in SoCal in the late 60s when I first ran across MEChA style conciousness, although I don't know that MEChA itself was involved. Certainly the ideas of revolutionary Mexican racial activism and resentment against the United States were around.
There are plenty of outlets for Mexican American culture, but MEChA is different. It's based on identity politics, with a racial and political grievance against the United States and its non-latino majority. It's not simply social and cultural. It may or may not be dangerous. It certainly has the seeds of discord in its founding principles.
I first ran into a few years ago in Atlanta while listening to a group of primarily illegal immigrants from Mexico. A friend, from El Salvador, explained to me that it was regularly and widely discussed among those from Mexico. They were not dangerous, it was mostly propoganda. What concerns me is the rising parallel culture that helps meeting their objective of non-assimilation. Is there a phrase more often used then the melting pot, a concept they reject. Given the population and size of the California economy, I think it's in every citizen's interest to know where Bustamante stands.
Exactly. Moderate and non-racist Chicanos went for the groups that weren't about race hatred and racial supremacy--- there were the farmworkers union which was even leftist but not white-hating and not promoting the overthrow of the US government or the takeover by Mexico of half the USA.