Old 10-13-2009, 01:37 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2009
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To early activist Tijerina, the white man was up his ass and dancing on his hemorhoids, the “Anglo race” was psychopathic. Almost every one of them with a sinister, conspiratorial anti -“Indohispano” agenda. Tijerina wrote Johnson and Nixon on a regular basis concerning the land grant cause and his several incarcerations, but believed that both were out to get him using the vast resources of the US Government.
It seems that quite a few people, including Jose Angel Gutierrez' father and other people Tijerina would describe as "Indohispano" , regarded Tijerina as a dangerous lunatic. When asked why he was against the land recovery movement, Senator Montoya of New Mexico said that he wasn't against land recovery (for land grant heirs), but that he was against Tijerina, then described Tijerina as a racist who would pit Anglos against his people and added that Tijerina "is not from here... he is not one of us" (Tijerina was from Texas). No doubt that Montoya is regarded by Chicanista thought as a "vendido coconut"
On the other hand, writer Richard Rodriguez also disliked Richard Nixon (but was fascinated by Nixon's character as he was Benjamin Franklin's), but had a much different view of Nixon and Johnson:
Quote:
…The Negro Civil rights movement became, during Johnson’s administration, the great American novel. America had to admit that the game had been rigged for millions of its own citizens… If America were to persist as a novel, then the opening chapter had to be repaired, at least to the extent that a black child could imagine Harvard in the distance. The revised chapter would henceforth be titled “Affirmative Action”…
Throughout the Johnson administration, domestic considerations of race remained black and white. Baptist hymns were converted to statistics. And since race, not social class, was the nation’s most important metaphor for social division, Americans of every description were advancing their claims to government redress by analogy to Negro disadvantage.
Statistics were transported into hues and distributed along a black and white spectrum. In college, because of Lyndon Johnson, I became a “minority student”. But it was not until Richard Nixon’s administration that I became brown. A government document of dulling prose, Statisical Directive 15, would redefine America as an idea in five colors: White. Black. Yellow. Red. Brown.
To a generation of Americans - the first generation of affirmative action, these catagories became alternatives for any more subjective self-description…
In Six Crises, Nixon recalls that his mother, Hannah, prayed he might become a Quaker missionary to Central America. In a secular transposition of that vocation, Nixon ended up my Godfather. Because of Nixon, several million Americans were baptized Hispanic.
After all Richard Nixon had written about how hard work wins the day in America, finally it was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass all the old rules. Through he agency of affirmative action… I had, suddenly, a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat.
The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working class kid - the sort he had been - who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a “minority” in numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically “represented” in the board room, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were “under represented”, those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress…
Myself as a child of fortune? Lyndon Johnson might do for the Victorian benefactor; was mine, in any case. During Johnson’s administration I became eligible for affirming moneys. I did not initially question this diversion of my novel, and Richard Rodriguez, the child of fortune … who thought his American entitlement came as a descendant of Benjamin Franklin - our “forefathers,” he had been taught to say, and he believed it! -Richard progressed in a direction more British than American.
Benjamin Franklin would have never qualified for affirmative action… None of them would have qualified - Franklin, Johnson, Nixon.
My election saw me through the last years of graduate school - and beyond, to this very page.
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