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Old 10-23-2009, 06:15 PM
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Old 10-13-2009, 01:37 PM
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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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Old 10-23-2009, 06:16 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:06 PM
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Here are some more Rodriguez quotes (five posts).

I don't like to quote so extensively, but it's the whole meat of the issue.

Rodriguez 1)

Quote:
...Consider my father: when he decided to apply for American citizenship, my father told no one, none of his friends, those men whom he had come to this country with looking for work. American citizenship would have seemed a betrayal of Mexico, a sin against memory. One afternoon, like a man with something to hide, my father slipped away. He went downtown to the Federal building in Sacramento, and disappeared into America.

Now memory takes her revenge on the son...

I once had the occasion to ask a middle class Mexican what he admires about the United States, (a provocative question because, according to Mexican history and proverb, there is nothing about the United States to admire). He found only one disembodied word: “organization”. When I pressed the man to anthropomorphize further, he said, “Deliveries get made, phones are answered, brakes are repaired” (indirect constructions all, as if by the construction of unseen hands)...

Mexico, mad mother. She still does not know what to make of our leaving. For most of this century Mexico has seen her children flee the house of memory. During the Revolution 10 percent of the population picked up and moved to the United States; in the decades following the Revolution, Mexico has watched many more of her children cast their lots with the future; head north for work, for wages, for life. Bad enough that so many left, worse that so many left for the gringo...

I would see them downtown on Sundays – men my age drunk in Plaza Park. I was still a boy at 16, but I was an American.

Or they would come into town Monday night for the wrestling matches or on tuesday nights for boxing. They worked on the ranches over in Yolo County. They were men with time on their hands, They were men without women. They were Mexicans without Mexico...

My parents left Mexico in the twenties: she as a girl with her family; he as a young man, alone. To tell different stories. Two Mexicos. At some celebration - we went to so many when I was a boy – a man in the crowd filled his lungs with American air to crow over all, !VIVA MEXICO! Everyone cheered. My parents cheered. The band played louder. Why VIVA MEXICO? The country that had betrayed them? The country that forced them to live elsewhere?

I remember standing in the doorway of my parents' empty bedroom.

Mexico was a memory – not mine. Mexico was mysteriously both he and she, like this, like my parents' bed. And over my parents' bed floated the Virgin of Guadalupe in a dime store frame. In its most potent guise, Mexico was a mother like this queen...

A true mother, Mexico would not distinguish among her children. Her protective arm extended not only to the Mexican nationals working in the United States, but to the larger number of Mexican – Americans as well. Mexico was not interested in passports; Mexico was interested in blood. No matter how far away you moved, you were still related to her...

In 1959, Octavio Paz, Mexico's sultan son, her clever one -philosopher, poet, statesman - published the Labyrinth of Solitude, his reflections on Mexico. Within his labyrinth, Paz places as well the Mexican American. He writes of the Pachuco, the teenage gang member, and, by implication, the Mexican American. “The Pachuco does not want to become Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma”.

This was Mother Mexico talking, her good son; this was Mexico's metropolitan version of Mexican Americans. Mexico had lost language, lost gods, lost ground. Mexico recognized historical confusion in us.

When we return to Mexico as turistas, with our little wads of greenbacks, our credit cards, our Japanese cameras, our Bermuda shorts, our pauses for directions and our pointing fingers, Mexico condescends to take our order (our order in halting Spanish), claro senor. But the table is not clear; the table will never be cleared. Mexico prefers to reply in English, as a way of saying:

!Pocho!

The Mexican American who forgets his true mother is a pocho, a person of no address, a child of no proper idiom.

But blood is blood, or perhaps, in this case, language is blood...

And most Mexican Americans lived in barrios, apart from gringos; many still retained Spanish as if in homage to her (Mexico). We were still her children.

As long as we didn't marry...
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Old 10-23-2009, 06:16 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:08 PM
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Rodriguez 2)

Quote:
Mexicans will remember this century as the century of loss. The land will not sustain Mexicans. For generations, from Mexico City, came promises of land reform. This land will be yours.

What more seductive promise could there be to a nation haunted by the memory of dispossession?

The city broke most of its promises...

The Goddess of Liberty... may well ask Mexicans why they are so resistant to change, to the interesting freedoms she offers. Mexicans are notorious in the United States for their skepticism regarding public life. Mexicans don't vote. Mexicans drop out of school.

Mexicans live in superstitious fear of the American diaspora. Mexican Americans are in awe of education, of getting too much schooling, of changing too much, of moving too far from home.

Well, never to be outdone, Mother Mexico has got herself up in goddess cloth. She carries a torch, too, and it is the torch of memory. She is searching for her children.

A false mother, Mexico cares less for her children than she does for her pride. The exodus of so many Mexicans for the U.S. Is not evidence of Mexico's failure; it is evidence, rather, of the emigrant's failure. After all, those who left were of the peasant, the lower classes – those who could not make it in Mexico.

The government of hurt pride is not above political drag. The government of Mexico impersonates the intimate genius of matriarchy in order to justify a political strangle hold.

You betray Uncle Sam by favoring private over public life, by seeking to exempt yourself: by cheating on your income taxes, by avoiding jury duty, by trying to keep your boy on the farm.

These are legal offenses.

Betrayal of Mother Mexico, on the other hand, is a sin against the natural law, a failure of memory...

Mexico always can find a myth to account for us: Mexicans who go north are like the Chichimeca, - a barbarous tribe antithetical to Mexico. But in the United States, Mexican Americans did not exist in the national imagination until the 1960's – years when the black civil rights movement prompted Americans to acknowledge “invisible minorities” in their midst. Then it was deemed statistically that Mexican Americans constituted a disadvantaged society, living in worse conditions than most other Americans, having less education, facing bleaker sidewalks or Safeways.
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Old 10-23-2009, 06:17 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:11 PM
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Rodriguez 3)

Quote:
3
The sixties were years of romance for the American middle class. Americans competed with one another to play the role of society's victim...

In those years, the national habit of Americans was to seek from the comparison with blacks a kind of analogy. Mexican American political activists, especially student activists, insisted on a rough similarity between the two societies – black, Chicano – ignoring any complex factor of history or race that might disqualify the equation.

Black Americans had suffered relentless segregation and mistreatment, but blacks had been implicated in the public life of this country from the beginning. Oceans separated the black slave from any possibility of rescue or restoration. From the symbiosis of oppressor and the oppressed, blacks took a hard realism. They acquired the language of the white man, though they inflected it with refusal. And because racism fell on all blacks,regardless of class, a bond formed between the poor and bourgeoisie, thence the possibility of a leadership class able to speak for the entire group.

Mexican Americans of the generation of the sixties had no myth of themselves as Americans. So that when Mexican Americans won national notoriety, we could only refer the public gaze to the past. We are people of the land, we told ourselves. Middle class college students took to wearing farmer-in-the-dell overalls and they took, as well, a rural slang to name themselves: Chicanos.

Chicanismo blended nostalgia with grievance to reinvent the mythic northern kingdom of Aztlan as corresponding to the southwestern American desert. Just as Mexico would only celebrate her Indian half, Chicanos determined to portray themselves as Indians in America, as indigenous people, thus casting the United States in the role of Spain.

Chicanos used the language of colonial Spain to declare to America that they would never give up their culture. And they said, in Spanish, that Spaniards had been the oppressors of their people.

Left to ourselves in a protestant land, Mexican Americans shored up our grievances, making them alters to the past...

Ah, Mother, can you not realize how Mexican we have become?

But she hates us, she hates us.
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Old 10-23-2009, 06:18 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:15 PM
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Rodriguez 4)

Quote:
Chicanismo offended Mexico. It was one thing for Mexico to play the victim among her children, but Mexico didn't like it that Chicanos were playing the same role for the gringos.

By claiming too many exemptions, Chicanos also offended Americans. Chicanos seemed to violate a civic agreement that generations of other immigrants had honored: “My grandparents had to learn English.”...

In the late 1960's, when Cesar Chavez made the cover of time as the most famous Mexican American anyone could name, he was already irrelevant to to Mexican-American lives insofar as 90 percent of us lived in cities and were more apt to work in construction than as farm workers...

Politics can easily override irony. But, by the late 1980's, the confusing “we” of Mexican Americanism was transposed an octave higher to the “we” of pan-American Hispanicism.

Mexican Americans constituted the majority of the nation's Hispanic population. But Mexican Americans were in no position to define the latitude of of the term “Hispanic” - the tumult of pigments and alters and memories there. “Hispanic" is not a racial or a cultural or a geographic or a linguistic or an economic description. "Hispanic" is a bureaucratic integer – a complete political fiction. How much does a central American refugee have in common with the Mexican from Tijuana? What does the black Puerto Rican in New York have in common with the white Cuban in Mimi? Those Mexican Americans in a position to speak for the group – whatever the group was – that is, those of us with access to microphones because of affirmative action, were not even able to account for our own success. Or were we advancing on the backs of those who were drowning?
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Old 10-23-2009, 06:18 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:17 PM
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Rodriguez 5)

Quote:
Think of earlier immigrants to this country. Think of the Jewish immigrants or the Italian. Many came, carefully observing Old World distinctions and rivalries. German Jews distinguished themselves from Russian Jews. The Venetian was adamant about not being taken for a Neopolitan. But to America, what did such claims matter? All Italians pretty much looked and sounded the same. A Jew was a Jew. And now, America shrugs again. Palm trees or cactus, it's all the same. Hispanics are all the same.

I saw Cesar Chavez again, a year ago, at a black – tie benefit in a hotel in San Jose. The organizers of the event ushered him into the crowded ballroom under a canopy of hush and tenderness and parked him at the center table, where he sat blinking. How fragile the great can seem. How much more substantial we of the ballroom seemed, the Mexican-American haute bourgeoisie, as we stood to pay our homage – orange women in fur coats, affirmative-action officers from cigarette companies, film makers, investment bankers, fat cats and stuffed shirts and bleeding hearts – stood applauding our little saint. Cesar Chavez reminded us that night of who our grandparents used to be.

Then Mexican waiters served champagne

Success is a terrible dilemma for Mexican Americans, like being denied some soul – sustaining sacrament. Without the myth of victimization – who are we? We are no longer Mexican, we are professional Mexicans. We hire Mexicans. After so many years thinking ourselves exempt from some common myth of America, we might as well be Italians.
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Old 10-23-2009, 06:19 PM
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Old 10-15-2009, 11:46 PM
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Next day or three I want to get into the Denver youth conference and get into the origin of the farfetched concept of Aztlan and contrived north of the border "indigenism" of people with south of the border Mexican mestizo origins, as well as a smattering of associated issues.

I might take a couple days off or post on something off topic but relevant in the meantime.
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