40 yrs of Chicano Studies

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Old 10-13-2009, 01:32 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
Enlistee

Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 316
Default
While the beginning of the Chicano movement in the early 60’s had many streams which became a river, the rhetoric and wording of Chicanismo can be traced to several individuals who could be described as founding fathers.

One of them, Reies Tijerina, was designated “First national hero of Aztlan” in 1969 at the conference hosted by Corky Gonzales’ bunch in Denver, and is required reading in Chicano Studies.

From a diary entry in 1974 in Tijerina‘s autobiography:

Quote:
The Anglo created the Black Legend against Spain. For more than three hundred years that false propaganda was used until the western world turned against Spain.

Using false propaganda, the Anglo has gotten into two world wars to defend the root of it’s race: England.

Later, for the past twenty-nine years they have used false propaganda in opposition to Communism.

They have used the same type of false propaganda against the land recovery movement and me.
The origin of the Black Legend was the Spanish Priest Las Casas, who witnessed and decried the swift near extermination of Caribbean Indians by Spaniards in a very few years after discovery.

The English merely ran with the tale. The French may have latched on to it too, because If I remember right, de Toqueville wrote in DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that if it hadn’t been for the fact that Indians grew all the food in New Spain, the Spaniards would have exterminated them.

England, France, and Spain have almost always been enemies of one sort or another, broken only by matters of temporary convenience.

The rest of Tijerina’s statement speaks for itself.

Tijerina’s autobiography is a tough read for me, nearly every page says nearly the same thing, like an endless loop of about 200 hundred words merely re-arranged to repeat the first page’s message over and over and over again.

I have to read it in small doses.