Mr. Ceasar Tony Montoya letter published April 8 contained a few
inaccuracies and misconceptions evincing a definite, shall we say,
bias. I would like to address those misconceptions.
Mr. Ceasar Tony Montoya letter published April 8 contained a few inaccuracies and misconceptions evincing a definite, shall we say, bias. I would like to address those misconceptions.
First: I do not live in a million dollar house on the hill. I live in a 1,463 square foot house less than a block from city hall, in a mostly brown neighborhood. Some years, we are the only Anglos on our block. At present, there are at least two other Anglo families. I think that’s a record for the 19 years we have lived here.
Is it not rather bigoted of you, Mr. Montoya, to assume that I don’t live in the barrio?
My point about scandal and corruption in the governments of Mexico and the USA seems to have gone over your head, so I will reiterate it. In the USA, corruption is a scandal. If a Republican is caught doing what he oughtn’t, he resigns quickly before he can be voted out.
Democrats sometimes get away with things like stealing secret documents or money laundering at Buddhist temples or adultery in the Oval Office, (depending on what one’s definition of sex is, of course), because the press is less apt to make a stink about scandalous acts committed by a Democrat. In Mexico, corruption and bribery are so widespread as to be not worthy of comment.
Mr. Montoya says that it is not for me, a mere Anglo, to understand the reconquista or the Aztlan movements, and that he will never claim or attempt to understand what it is like to be an Anglo. I find these to be rather bigoted remarks. I fully intend to keep trying to understand other human beings.
The most amazing statement Mr. Montoya makes is “Our movements do not seek the physical reconquista of California or any other land.”
The Aztlan website, www.aztlan.net, says otherwise. It is also a sickening sewer of anti-American and anti-Semitic vitriol.
The National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) is a little less overt. Its first objective is to liberate nuestra gente (our people). And its official symbol is “the eagle with its wings spread, bearing a macahuittle in one claw and a dynamite stick in the other with the lighted fuse in its beak. The acronym MEChA shall be above the symbol with the phrase “La Union Hace La Fuerza” below.” Unity does (or makes) Force.
The Mexica contingent is the most extreme. They state that merely liberating the southwestern United States is not enough. They want to take the whole USA and Canada and unify it with Central America into what they call Anahuac.
They back up their claims with some bogus history interspersed with a smattering of truth. Their website is www.mexica-movement.org . The good news is that they despise the reconquista, Aztlan and La Raza movements as being too timid in their goals and too Eurocentric. I love it when my ideological opponents fight amongst themselves.
The other good news is that a recent Zogby poll found that Americans had a negative reaction to the marches of misguided zealots protesting the re-criminalization of illegal immigration. The protests backfired, especially the signs saying things like “This is our continent, not yours!” and “We are indigenous! The only owners of this continent!”
In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt said:
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Precisely.
