Home > The Far Right and Anti-Mexican Racism
The Smearing of Bustamante - The Far Right and Anti-Mexican Racism
By Jorge Mariscal - Counterpunch - August 30, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/mariscal08302003.html
It would be tempting to dismiss the recent media flap around the
candidacy of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and his membership in the
student organization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán
(MEChA) as much to do about nothing. But for those of us who have
been following over the last decade the political propaganda of
anti-Mexican hate groups, the controversy indicates just how far the
rhetoric and tactics of the extreme right have entered the media
mainstream.
As Bustamante’s poll numbers began to rise, his affiliation with
MEChA over twenty-five years ago surfaced as a hot topic on FOX
news. Bill O’Reilly used his "No Spin Zone" to do a spin on MEChA
that was straight out of the far right’s playbook. According to
O’Reilly, MEChA was a racist and violent organization that hated the
United States and advocated the ceding of the Southwest back to
Mexico. O’Reilly’s ideological great uncle, Rush Limbaugh, had
introduced the topic in mid-August. Lesser neo-con talking heads,
columnists, and websites ran with it and soon the same charges
appeared in otherwise reputable newspapers and across cyberspace.
In fact, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and the rest were merely sampling the
rantings of their slightly loonier right-wing cousins. Fueled by
rapidly shifting demographics, especially in California but also in
the Deep South and Northeast where there are now sizable Mexican
communities, an upgraded form of white fear has been taking shape
for several years. Drawing upon the repetoire of racist images
created by the John Birch Society and other extremist groups during
the Cold War, these new nativist ideologues sense the impending end
of their white privilege.
Writing for the internet newspaper World Net Daily in 2001 (home to
the media conservatives O’Reilly and Joe McCarthy apologist Ann
Coulter) two months after September 11th, Joseph Farah described a
radical Chicano group called "La Raza." According to Farah:
"Activists who see themselves as ’America’s Palestinians’ are
gearing up a movement to carve out of the southwestern United
States—a region called Aztlán including all of Bush’s home state of
Texas—a sovereign Hispanic state called the República del Norte.
The leaders of this movement are meeting continuously with
extremists from the Islamic world." The fear of a brown planet so
muddles the neo-con mind that Mexican Americans move easily from
being radical separatists to covert al-Queda operatives.
The MEChA student organization has been a particular obsession of
Glenn Spencer, founder and lead storm trooper for his "American
Patrol" and "Voices of Citizens Together." Spencer has been at the
forefront of leading vigilante groups whose stated objective is to
"protect" the U.S. southern border, and he popularized the idea of
MEChA as a "Ku Klux Klan-type" organization determined to take back
the Southwest.
A Washington Times article reported on Spencer’s words of wisdom
delivered to a group of conventioneers in Virginia in 2002: "With
hundreds of Mexicans illegally crossing the United States’ southwest
border daily, Mr. Spencer said, conflict between the U.S. Border
Patrol and Mexican authorities could touch off strikes, protests,
and riots by Hispanic militants in the United States-a combination
border war and civil war that "could happen any day," he said."
(Washington Times, 2/25/02).
The fantasy of MEChA as a key element of a Mexican American fifth
column within the United States found its way into Republican
presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan 2001 bestseller The Death
of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil
Our Country and Civilization. MEChA, warned Buchanan, is "a Chicano
version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation...and is unabashedly
racist and anti-American."
When student activists created the MEChA organization in April of
1969 at a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
it was in the context of educational reform. Numerous Chicano
student organizations had already appeared as part of an emerging
political consciousness among Mexican youth in the United States.
Issues of access to higher education, racism, sexism, economic
injustice, Cesar Chavez and the farm workers’s struggle, and the war
in Southeast Asia contributed to the increase in activism.
Educational reformers decided that MEChA could serve to consolidate
the diverse student groups under one banner. Today, former mechistas
include elected officials, teachers, attorneys, doctors, publishers
of business magazines, and heads of corporations. Far from being
exclusionary and racist, MEChA chapters have been at the forefront
of establishing coalitions with other ethnic groups (including white
folks) on college and high school campuses across the country.
One month before the Santa Barbara meeting, at the First Denver
Youth Conference in Denver, Chicanos and Chicanas heard for the
first time the "Plan espiritual de Aztlán." A plan of action that
included demands for bilingual education and appeals to "love and
brotherhood," the "Plan" was preceded by a lyrical prologue written
by the poet Alurista. As he recounts in the PBS documentary series
Chicano!, Alurista had written the prologue as a poem designed to
instill ethnic pride and hope for the future. Whatever political
claims might have existed in the prologue, they were imprecise at
best.
It is not surprising, however, that the prologue to the "Plan" is
what sends right-wingers into a frenzy. What the prologue asserts is
the basic historical fact that indigenous and Mexican peoples
inhabited the Southwest before the arrival of the United States.
There is no denying this important detail, and there is nothing that
those who would "seal the border" or foolishly equate MEChA with the
Klan can do to change it.
And so the prologue to the "Plan," a poem written almost thirty five
years ago in a period of increased social activism and high-flying
rhetoric, is presented as exhibit number one in the nativists’s
paranoid attack. One need look no further than the 2001 campaign for
mayor of Los Angeles to find an early example of the use by
Republican operatives of fringe group slander against MEChA. In that
race, candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, who had been a member of MEChA
as a student, was similarly tarred and feathered.
Now the far right has trotted out the same ridiculous charges in an
attempt to undermine Bustamante and influence a democratic election
with distortion and innuendo. Whether or not one is a Bustamante
supporter, what should concern every citizen is that the hate
literature of the extreme nativist right is now required reading in
the FOX newsroom.
Jorge Mariscal is a professor at the University of California, San
Diego, a Vietnam veteran, and a former mechista. He can be reached
at: gmariscal@ucsd.edu
[for more information on MEChA, go to: