Even as
Minutemen vigilantes prepare for their next round of armed Mexican-hunting on
the border near San Diego, a bitter contest is unfolding in Los Angeles County
as anti-migrant hate groups, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Minutemen
vigilantes target a monument that upholds the relationship of indigenous
peoples � tribal and Mexican � to the land.
In
opposition to the racist attacks, a major celebration of the Danzas Indigenas monument � La Reconquista de Justicia, Paz, Libertad y Amor
- will take place on Saturday, June 25th at 3825 Downing Ave in Baldiwn Park from 11 AM until 2pm.
The Battle
of Baldwin Park:
Land, Genocide, Memory and Denial
Part One:
�This land was Mexican once, Indian always, and is, and
will be again.�
���������������������� �����������������������������������������������������- Gloria Anzaldua
Had she led the uprising
in Warsaw against the Nazis, had this been Europe, had this �not been an uprising of Native
Americans against the Spanish, had she been a man, her name might be legendary.
"I hate the padres,� she said, �and all of
you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my
ancestors and despoiling our tribal domains...."
Her name was Toipurinah.
She led the uprising of the Tongva (Gabrieleno) people against Mission San Gabriel 220 years
ago, on October 25th.
She was a medicine woman, 24 years of age. Her
rebellion defeated, she was banished from her land forever.
There is a monument to her now, a reminder in stone
of her spirit.
Called �Danzas Indigenas� it was designed by preeminent Chicana muralist Judy Baca.
Near a massive stone arch, the floor plan of the
San Gabriel Mission is laid out on the Earth. Near what would have been the church altar a low
rock prayer mound stands as a call to her and a resting place for her spirit. Tongva elders Vera and Antonio Rocha, now deceased, suggested the creation
of the mound to Baca. They said �we could create a prayer mound and her spirit,
which was separated from her land, could find peace.�
Toipurinah was 21
when Los Angeles was founded near the Tongva village
of Yangna,
nine years old when the Spanish invaders first arrived in the LA Basin and
eleven when Mision San Gabriel was begun.
She saw 85% of her people die as a result of the
Spanish invasion. Her son suffocated on his own blood from disease brought by
the foreigners.
She grew into a powerful figure among her people,
fluent in several local dialects, known throughout the villages for her
medicine. When the invaders banned the sacred ceremonies of her people she knew
the time had come to strike.
Uniting the chiefs of five villages behind her,
they laid out a workable plan that, in the face of betrayal and exposure, was
defeated. Toipurinah was captured, tried and exiled.
Records in Spain�s
Casa del Indio show that Toipurinah
was made the object of an Inquisition, and listed as a �she-devil� by the
mission fathers.
Ultimately, among her people, almost no one survived.
Between 95 and 98 percent of California's
Indians were exterminated in little more than a century. Her people were
enslaved, both in the missions, and later by the Anglos who followed. Indians
forced into servitude in the missions received about 700 calories a day �
roughly the same allotment of food as offered to the slaves of Buchenwald by the Nazi regime.
The 1835
census counted only 535 Tonva remaining of what had
been a population of 10,000 when the Spanish arrived, and 1,500 at the time of Toipurinah�s rebellion. Only 300 Tongva
people survive today.
When Anglos came, they publicly declared and
executed campaigns of mass murder with the openly stated goal of the utter
extermination of the Native population.
In American Holocaust David Stannard writes �By 1845 the Indian population of California was down to
no more than a quarter of what it had been when the Franciscan missions were
established in 1769. That is, it had declined by at least 75 percent during
seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the course of just the next twenty-five
years, under American rule, it would fall by another 80 percent. The gold rush
brought to California a flood of American miners and ranchers who seemed to
delight in killing Indians, miners and ranchers who rose to political power and
prominence-and from those platforms not only legalized the enslavement of
California Indians, but, as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public
campaigns of genocide with the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian
extermination.�
Afterward, Stannard writes, �the worst human holocaust the world had
ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and
consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had
leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.�
Today, among
the survivors, almost no one speaks the Tongva tongue
fluently. The words of one of the last fluent Tongva
speakers are inscribed on the Baldwin
Park monument, a testament to the focus brought by Chicana artist Judy Baca, who understood that memory and
will are essential to the survival of a culture under siege. �When the Indians
died, the villages ended,� the Tongva woman said
This is Tongva land. Sunigna � the name
for the area - is remembered in cut stone, accompanied by Tongva
pictographs, on one side of the monument. Cut into the other side is the name
in current usage. Baldwin Park.
If the village died when the Indians died, then the remaining People may die
when � and if - �memory dies.
The
monument, a mere mile from the place of the Tongva
people�s enslavement at the San Gabriel Mission, a mere mile from the site of
their uprising, holds another promise � that this land was Indian, is Indian,
and will again be Indian.
�
To say
that the land was also Mexican, as the monument does, is a distinction with
little ultimate difference. As a rule the Mexican people are
80% Indian �blood,� � the name of the Mexican nation itself derives from the
name the Azteca people called themselves � Mexica.
Today�s Chican@s, like all Mexican people, are native
people, with only the veneer of Europeanization, an enforced forgetting,
between them and their sisters and brothers of the First Nations.
That
enforced forgetting, often on pain of death, occurred in places like the San
Gabriel Mission, where Indians were the first of California�s subjugated �farm workers.�
Patrisia
Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez make the point clearly:
�Like us,
other friends can trace some, but not all of their ancestry. The reason, in
part, is the role the Catholic church and missions played during the colonial
era in "reducing," or culturally obliterating the Indian. The
objective was to create a "Christian," and that
meant to spiritually and culturally stamp out the Indian.
�One
result was that Indians and mestizos developed a hatred towards all things Indian--thus a hatred of
themselves, which led to a denial of their ancestry. In this atmosphere, "Hispanicized Indians" became "mestizos"
and mestizos became �Spanish.��
Mayan and
Mexica libraries burned. �Pagans� � non-Christian Indians - burned at the
stake, whipped and tortured: disease, deliberate slaughter,
enslavement, starvation, overwork and virtual entombment in the silver
and gold mines reduced the numbers of Indians in what is now Mexico by over 90% within a
century. Over 20 million native people died in Mexico alone, part of a
continent-wide holocaust that claimed over 100 million lives.
The languages
and cultures of many of the survivors were obliterated.
They lost
their memory.�
Baca said
of the monument, "I wanted to put memory into a piece of the land once owned
by the American Indian cultures�memory and willpower are what any culture, the
ones living then and those living now, has to have to preserve itself."
Voices
from the peoples who have lived in the area are inscribed in five tongues:
those of the Tongva (Gabrielino,)
Chumash and Luiseno
nations, alongside Spanish and English.
None are
forgotten.
Part 2:
Now It�s Ours:
Race Hatred, White Nationalism, and the Struggle for Aztlan
from
saveourstate.org
�AMERICANS ARE TIRED OF FEELING
LIKE A FOREIGNER IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.� [sic]
������������������������������������������������������������
� Joe Turner, �leader,� Save Our State
_________
�No other major nation has been
built so purely on world genocide. Our whitelife has
no history, no identity, no culture, no economy
without genocide. Outside genocide we are a blank.
�Amerikkkans
want to distance themselves from genocide. You know, it�s always something long
ago (�you can�t change the past�), or far away (�There�s never been anything
like the Jewish Holocaust.�) But genocide is running, right now. It�s not far
away. See, we are the genocide. I mean that literally and precisely. Everything
we are, our bodies, our careers, our plans for our children, has all been made
of genocide.��
-�
Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of
Women and Children
_________
Joe Turner, age 27, is an angry young white man
with a sneering manner. He wants to obliterate the monument in Baldwin Park that stands, in part, as a tribute
to the Tongva Indians, the indigenous group that was
forced into the San Gabriel Mission a mile away. It�s �seditious� he says,
because of the inscription that reads �This land was Mexican once, Indian
always, and is, and will be again.�
His group
has issued a threat that �one way or another� the language �will be removed� by
early July. He also wants to remove the native Mexicans it represents, and the
threat to Anglo domination of the region their presence implies.
The City
of Los Angeles
is now 2/3 peoples of color, has elected a Chicano mayor, and demographic
trends show that the nation as a whole will be half peoples of color by 2050, a
fact that causes no small unease among white cultural conservatives across the
country.
Turner
led a protest against the monument in May in which his band of extremists was
outnumbered by the Chicano community by a measure to ten to one. They were
forced to leave when police claimed they could no longer guarantee the safety
of the racist organization�s members.
His group
plans a repeat performance in late June to �punish� the City of Baldwin Park for allowing
the monument to remain. �We are angry! We are seething with anger and boiling
with rage,� he writes.
�Make no
mistake,� says Turner, leader of the anti-Mexican group Save Our State, �our
opponents are savages.�
Although
Turner claims his group isn�t racist, there can be no mistake about who
Turner�s calling �savage.� His organization � �SOS� for short, is nothing other
than a hate group, one that targets Chican@s,
Mexicans and Central Americans. SOS routinely targets people of color, and has
allies among neo-Nazi, �White Nationalist� and vigilante groups.
Its
leader sees a coming race war, and at least one of its allies has advocated
mass roundups of brown skinned people. It is part of a broader anti-Mexican movement
that has been praised by California�s
governor- who has also praised Adolph Hitler � and acts as a kind of vanguard,
or shock troop, for a broader fascistic movement whose ultimate leadership
controls the White House.
Americans,
Turner says, �are tired of watching their great American culture disappear,
only to watch it be replaced by other cultures that are inferior and
contradictory to everything this country was built upon.� A headline on his
website reads �Aren't you tired of watching your state turn into a third world
cesspool right before your eyes?�
The
�inferior culture� he�s referring to, of course, is Mexican and Chicano culture.
�I have
talked about the perils of cultural relativism and stated that American culture
is superior to other cultures. I make no bones about it,� he maintains. As if
to emphasize the point, the organization�s website is riddled with racist
images posted by his loyal adherents.
�A Day Without a Mexican
is a Good Day Indeed� reads one caption, posted by �no peeky
panish.� Then there�s the image of a burning Mexican
flag, and a poster of a set of handguns that reads �Celebrate Diversity.�
A
Confederate flag, America�s
most enduring symbol of racism, is inscribed with the words �Now It�s Ours!� �
or as Turner puts it, �This is our land. This is our fight. And we are willing
to bleed to defend it.�
Like
other groups on the extreme racist right, Turner�s SOS fears what they call a �reconquista,� that the presence of Mexican and Central American
migrants foreshadows a day when the southwest will be reconquered
by Mexicans and other Indians the way South Africa was retaken by its African
majority.
Racist
groups like SOS believe that Mexican and Central American migrants will unite
with Chican@ radicals to create the nation of Aztlan
in what is now the US Southwest.
As one
SOS member put it, �This nation wasn't "stolen" it was conquered and
it's about to be conquered all over again, it's really just a matter of who
does the conquering this time.� One Turner supporter threatened on the LA Indymedia website that Mexicans would soon find themselves
on reservations, Bantustan � style.
On the
website of SOS and at the neo-Nazi �White Nationalist� Stormfront
site, you�ll see migrants from Mexico
referred to as �invaders.�
While
their agendas are not identical in every respect, SOS and neo-Nazis groups have
more than a little in common.
The
National Vanguard, which has replaced the National Alliance as the US�s largest neo-Nazi group, joined SOS recently
for an anti-immigrant rally in Victorville, just as they joined the Minutemen
in their Mexican -hunting expedition in Arizona.
SOS will be joined by the anti-Islamic hate group The United American Committee
in the next Baldwin Park
protest.
Stormfront.org
posted messages praising the SOS protest against the monument in Baldwin Park. One member
wrote: �perhaps some aspect of this current American resistance to the invasion
of the U.S.
doesn�t yet come in the form of an ideally or completely White Nationalist
group, but for now, any way that this invasion can be repelled is fine with me.
For this invasion could be a "world ender" for American White
Nationals if it is not stopped.�
The
racist website �White Revolution� echoes much of the SOS rhetoric, falsely
claiming, �Hard-working Americans are losing their jobs to nonWhite
illegals��
It calls
on its readers to join the right wing paramilitary group the Minutemen, whose
leader, Jim Gilchrist, will also be joining SOS for the protest against the Baldwin Park monument on
the 25th of June.
Gilchrist�s
recent address to the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (which has
protested side by side with White Revolution members) was the object of an
intense and bloody protest in which a CCIR member ran down several protestors
with his car. He was released without charges by the Orange County District
Attorney, while a young woman who was hit by his car has been the object of
ongoing police harassment.
Gilchrist
is also a member of CCIR, an organization listed by the Southern Poverty Law
Center as a racist hate group.
�
SOS is
not far behind.
Turner
writes: Gone are the days when we allowed our opponents to define the
terminology of the debate.� In an SOS email thread entitled �Racism Redefined,�
SOS members show what he means:
One
writes: �I say: "Racist and proud of it" when they hurl their slime
at me.�
�Avatar�
posts an image of a waving confederate flag and writes, �You call me racist as if it were a bad thing??�
SOS
member �William�, the man who posted the image of the burning Mexican flag
wrote: ��remember, the word "racist" is simply a Marxist term used by
the Left and non-whites to intimidate & bully White people. That's all.�
And, he said � Ignore them. As I said, the term "racist" is simply a
Marxist political tool. It means nothing. Whenever I hear some
filthy Communist or liberal use the term "racist," I ask them to
define it��
Some SOSers deny their racism, while others try to rationalize,
even celebrate it.
�OhighLass� writes �We are not about
hating all Mexicans�I could pass for Hispanic. So, how do we
differentiate? Tattoo "I" or "L" on our forheads
[sic]?�
�
John
Wagner writes �We do NOT want to call ourselves
racist. It is not racist to protect our race, culture and civilization.�
And in a
classic inversion �Joazinha� writes �Most SENSIBLE
citizens are NOT against immigrants for BEING immigrants; we just don't like
the RACIST variety.�
�Last
Great Hope� says, �For what its worth, I don't want it
to come to a friggin' race war. Too many innocents
would be hurt. I won't attack people on the basis of their ethnicity. However,
anyone trying to take my homeland from me is a target.�
But like many white racist groups on the extreme
right, and like the Stormfront member who fears the
worst for white America,
Turner sees a race war coming. He writes, �Many suggest that violence is coming
to California.
Many suggest that a civil war of sorts may be on the horizon.�
In a
straightforward expression of the Minutemen mentality, SOSer
�DWB� writes, �It is the duty of every American to be prepared and to take the
law into our own hands if the government goes against the will of the people,
just like now. We need to shut down the boarder [sic] by force and then we need
to weed out the bad seeds in the government and try them on treason, then
execute the basteds [sic].
The
geopolitics and world view implied in such a stand are made clear on the racist
American Renaissance website, which
has praised the SOS actions: �If Bolivia split up into two nations,
one for the whites and one for the Indians, the new white nation would be
promptly deluged with Indian and mestizo welfare
parasites. So long as there is one white nation left on earth, it will beseiged by diversitoid parasites. Segregation into ethnic states may
be no more practical than multicultural/multiethnic nations. There is, however
a third option.�
That
option is genocide.
While
Turner disclaims any intentions of unleashing violence against indigenous
peoples, recent events paint a different picture.
�Enough
is enough,� he writes. �We have reached the point where we can no longer sit
back and allow our government to aid and abet the illegal alien invasion. We
must respond as our founding fathers would have responded. We must refresh the
tree of liberty.�
The tree
of liberty, according to tradition, is �refreshed� with blood. �Together,�
Turner says, �we will drive a stake through the heart of the 'reconquista' movement.�
Fellow anti-migrant
activist Andy Ramirez of �Friends of the Border Patrol� has denounced Turner,
noting his call for SOS activists to bring baseball bats to demonstrations.
A local newspaper, the Daily Breeze, reported that prior to an
anti-migrant demonstration in Redondo Beach Turner issued a call to his troops,
"Bring your bats, fellas. If we are lucky, we
are gonna need them. PING!"
"You don't incite violence," Ramirez said, according to the Breeze.
"It's racist crap. Emotions are hot to begin with. "What he says is
insensitive, disrespectful and racist. It's neo-Nazi thuggery.
What's next, the sheet and hood?"
The Breeze reports Turner claimed �he would be willing to resort
to violence if anybody opposing the group showed up.�
"I don't mind going toe-to-toe with people, but we're here for a peaceful
demonstration," Turner said.
In the meantime, one SOS member- �oneinchgroup�-
has promised online to arrive at Baldwin
Park for the SOS demonstration on June 25th
armed with a gun. The group is deeply upset that one of its members was struck
with a plastic water bottle at their first foray in Baldwin Park, and, they claim, went to a
hospital for observation, staying overnight.
Press and police reported no injuries, but the SOS website carries
a banner proclaiming �Baldwin Park
1 Survivor � Remember the Water Bottle!� SOS members feel the first �Battle of
Baldwin Park� was a sort of California Alamo for anti-Mexicans. Four SOS
supporters asked the Baldwin Park City Council to offer a �reward� for the
capture of the plastic bottle thrower.
When Hal Netkin, a member of the CCIR
hate group, ran down six anti-racist protestors with his van, many SOS members
saw it is tit for tat � as a fitting response to the attack of the plastic
water bottle.
The orientation of these forces toward violence isn�t aimed just
at Chican@ protestors, however.
City officials say they have received hundreds of racist hate
mails, threats and harassment calls from SOS supporters. Artist Judy Baca has
also been threatened.
The Minutemen�s Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to
be deployed not only at the Mexican / US
border, but has also urged Guard deployment for the upcoming demonstration in Baldwin Park.
Gilchrist�s partner and rival in the
Minutemen, Chris Simcox, known among disaffected
followers as �The Little Prince� and �The Little Hitler� makes the agenda
clear, saying, "Oh, Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the
National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up. They are
hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your
money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil
people."
And this, of course, is the bottom line � roundups of a scapegoated community under a government that is moving
harder and faster toward the extreme Right, toward fascism itself.
Fittingly, these �Patriot� groups are pushing for a new state
sponsored �California Border Patrol� under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
They hope he�ll create it for them, and they may not be wrong. The
Terminator, whose father Gustav joined Hitler�s SS just six months after the SS
led the Kristallnacht pogroms against Germany�s Jews,
�went out of his way to endorse the
Minutemen, calling them �exemplary citizens.� The governor has openly praised
Adolph Hitler, saying "I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from
being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him
for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."
SOS, Stormfront, White Revolution, the
National Vanguard and the Minutemen Project have lots of little men vying to be
big, not least among them Joe Turner.
In the meantime, Turner is leading a series of demonstrations
attacking Home Depot stores, which, he claims, provide a platform for the
hiring of migrant day laborers. Simcox of the
Minutemen describes such actions as �phase two� of the Minutemen media campaign
� having �Minutemen protesters picketing employers who are hiring illegals [sic] and see if we can't make an effort, some
impact there."
Part 3� The Migrants:
Targets of Genocide
�One of the byproducts of fear is
the constant need for scapegoats. The prospects of permanent
war requires the stoking and exacerbation of those fears. Enter �illegal
aliens� and we have a dangerous confluence. The future threat is not from bigots
per se� but rather from the codification and expansion of illegal and subhuman
categories.� �Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodr�guez
�There is nothing in
these lands we walk upon whose foundation is not indigenous. For society to
continue to act otherwise is to continue the practice of cultural genocide.� - ibid
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the genocidal Guatemalan
state, backed by the US,
slaughtered more than two hundred thousand Mayan Indians, demonstrating in
stark relief the connection between white nationalism, state power, ethnic
identity, fascistic protestant fundamentalism, and political violence.
During the 14 month reign of Efrain Rios Montt,
who counts among his closest �prayer friends� Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson, the Guatemalan state annihilated some 600 Mayan villages and
carried out other mass atrocities against Mayan communities they accused of
sympathizing with leftist guerillas, including the rape of women and girls, and
widespread torture.
From 1981 to 1983 alone, approximately 100,000 people, mostly
Mayans, were killed or "disappeared" by the army and death squads. Between
500,000 and 1.5 million were displaced, fleeing to other regions within Guatemala or seeking safety in Mexico or the US.
Tens of thousands of Mayans, fled to Los Angeles. Millions of others from the
region fled fascism, genocide and US imposed poverty.
Ronald Reagan's covert and dirty war against Nicaragua caused 14,000 casualties.
He correctly, but inadvertently, called the US
financed Contra death squads �the moral equivalent of America's
founding fathers.�
As he prepared options to invade Nicaragua, his contingency plans included the
roundup of 400,000 migrants from south of the US border, and their incarceration
in �detention camps.� He feared revolution would spread from Nicaragua through Mexico
to the US.
In El Salvador,
populated largely by descendants of the Pipil Indians
� a group related to the Mexica and Hopi peoples - right wing death squads
funded by the US killed
30,000 people between 1979 and 1981 alone, as the migrations north to the US
began in earnest throughout the region. Ultimately 70,000 died. This is the
story of untold numbers of migrants from Mexico
and Central America. They were driven here by
US Sponsored terror and poverty enforced by US led capitalist institutions like
the World Bank and the International Monetary fund.
Rightist political factions in El Salvador and elsewhere viewed
the death squads as legitimate "counterterrorists,"
in the face of a leftist insurgency, much as the Minutemen and SOS legitimize
themselves through resort to fears of a Chican@ led �reconquista� of the US Southwest.
While developments toward a US-style Christian fascism may
surprise the white left in the US, they come as no surprise to the migrant
populations here, nor to the African and Chican@
communities which bear the weight of mass incarceration � the highest
incarceration rates in the world � as they once bore the weight of white lynchings.
Nor can they be a surprise to the radical Native American
population. The FBI � backed G.O.O.N. Squads (domestic death squads) on the
Lakota reservation in the 1970s killed American Indian Movement supporters at a
rate comparable to the death rate in fascist Chile following the Pincochet coup.
The movement toward fascism in the White House, the racist
targeting of migrants, and the suppression of dissent have been elements of the
far right�s agenda for decades now.
Once, the US
focused on funding torture states and training their Inquisitors in places like
the infamous School of the Americas.
Today, the US
itself is rapidly becoming what it once sponsored. What it practiced on the
native peoples of Guatemala
and elsewhere is now routine in the US prisons of Iraq
and Guantanamo.
The middleman has been eliminated.
The moral equivalent of the fascist Christian fanatic Rios Montt, who carried out the anti-Mayan genocide, is found in
the Christian fascists who hold power in Washington
today, and in their racist shock troops - like SOS and the Minutemen.
Even their target is the same.
Part 4
The Spirit of Toipurinah and the Spirit of the Land
�Up there they say that forgetting
is defeat, and they want to wait for you
to forget and to fail and to be defeated.
They know up there, but they do not want to say it: there will be no more
forgetting, and defeat shall not be the crown for the color of the earth.�
-
Subcomandante Marco, Ejercito Zapatista
Liberacion Nacional,
������������ March
11, 2001 in the Zocalo of Mexico City
__________
�The man from Europe
is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned
his path across the continent.
But in the Indian, the spirit of
the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and
meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be
formed of the dust of their forefather�s bones."
���������������������������������������������������������
- Luther Standing Bear (Lakota)
Hector Perez-Pacheco is the Speaker of
the Aztlan Mexica Nation / Harmony Circle, an East LA group that has protected
Native and Chican@ events in settings as diverse as
the 25th anniversary of the Wounded Knee shootout on the Lakota
Reservation, the struggle of the Dine (Navajo) traditionals
at Big Mountain in Arizona, to the streets of LA during the mass demonstrations
against the anti-migrant measure proposition 187 in the 1990s and the annual
Gathering of Elders here in Los Angeles.
Distinctive in their red and black clothing, the principle purpose
of the group is to guard the ceremonies of Native peoples and to preserve
indigenous traditions, including the Mexica traditions of Mexico. The
�Harmony Keepers� have been active in organizing the recent SOS/ Minutemen
struggles. They do it, they say, �For the love of our people, not for hatred of
our enemies.�
Perez-Pacheco understands the resonance of the Danzas
Indigenas monument under attack in Baldwin park, and
spoke to the meaning of the resistance to the SOS and Minutemen assault. He worked
closely with Tongva elder Vera Rocha for years
protecting sacred sites and ceremonies. The Tongva
elder was also Baca�s principle advisor for �Danzas Indigenas.��
The purpose of the resistance, he says, is �Resurrecting the
spirit of Toipurinah and what she stood for � to
unite her people to fight the oppressive forces. Then it was the Spanish. In
our time it�s the Minutemen and those who think like them.
�The monument says this land was once Indian, and that it will
always be Indian. The monument has enraged the visitors to this land, because
it reminds them it is not their land � this is the land of the nations of the
brown people...
�They want us to forget that we have a responsibility to the land
and to our traditions. It�s our duty as those who are carrying our traditions
to instill our values and principles in our young people and our communities.�
Perez-Pacheco�s
comments are in keeping with the understanding of traditional native elders
like Hopi elder
Martin Gashweseoma, keeper of the Hopi Fire Clan
Tablets, who has spoken of the relationship of the original peoples to the
land.
"Like the Hopi, original
native peoples were placed across this continent, and given special
instructions by a higher being. Each had special functions by which to hold
life in balance, which they were still carrying out when the Europeans arrived.
We know these foreigners once had similar spiritual means for promoting life,
with which they were supposed to bless the native peoples. But they had
apparently misused their power. Most of the native peoples were forcibly
stripped of their culture, language and religious ceremonies, depriving them of
their function as caretakers. Those that remain face imminent cultural
extinction. Clearly these foreigners are not here to help, but to destroy
everything the original people have left, and in doing so, destroy this world.
The only hope for humanity lies in restoring true land title, which is
inseparable from our function as caretakers of life."
In an interview for this article Judy Baca said, �The Hopi elders
told me, �it�s simple Judy, the world is too male.� It is out of balance.�
�It�s as if one could put one�s ear to the land and hear it speak.
The power of the land is in these sites, where even
the most disconnected and hardened people understand that the spirit of what
occurred is embedded in a place� the monument is one mile from the site of the
rebellion and the San Gabriel Mission.�
Baca said Vera Rocha, whose husband Manuel was the spiritual
leader of the Tongva people, would not step foot on the
Mission grounds. �I won�t go in there,� she
said. She told the stories of people from her family who died there.
The first effort to construct the San Gabriel Mission was
destroyed in an earthquake. The Spanish called the river near it El Rio de Temblores. �The Earth,� she said, �shook off the first
mission.� The current mission was built following the destruction of the first.
The Mission
was a fortress against the indigenous people, a prison to keep them in and a
fortress to keep them out.
�The missions,� Baca recounted, �were the first sweatshops.� The people died there in massive numbers not
only from disease but from the brutal treatment they received. The fathers
counted everything- they were little accountants counting everything they took
from indigenous labor, that�s what you see in the records they kept.�
Included in those records were numbers of births and deaths, which
have been used by demographers to study the genocidal death rates suffered by
native people in Spanish missions, including at San Gabriel. �Often deaths exceeded baptisms
of the native people,� Baca said.
The Spanish soldiers raped the women from the day they arrived. Tongva women were locked in cells at night to prevent the
soldiers from raping them continually. When the chief protested the rapes, they
cut off his head and stuck it on a pike.
�That�s why Toipurinah led the
rebellion,� Baca said.
�I�m not surprised we are having such confrontation of opposing
forces at this site because somehow embodied in this place is the conflict that
took place then.
�Now we�re back, now our peoples are strong and we are in a
position not to be victimized at this point.�
�The young women,� she said, �� will be the leaders.�
�Toipurinah is a spirit, an image that
can empower them,� Baca said. The majority of people at the first Baldwin Park demonstration and at the Garden Grove demonstration have been young Chicanas.
�The hope is to bring her spirit back to the site so she would be
an inspiration to young women today, to show them they can lead. This monument
is not a male monument. This is by and about and for these women.�
�We need to amplify the grandmother�s voice and the young women�s
voice. Our young people are without a safe place and without a dream. The
fundamentalist education they are receiving is stripping them of both safety
and the ability to dream.
The Hopi Elders told me, �The grandmothers have to teach now,�
Baca said.
Baca has not advocated a literal �reconquest�
of the land. Like the framers of the �Plan Espiritual
de Aztlan,� she sees the matter in cultural and spiritual terms, not in
military terms, and not as an effort, she said, �to return the land to Mexico
or some other sovereign power.�
She said, �That was not my intention with the monument. I was
positing that the indigenous were returning and that the demographic changes
were in a sense returning the governance perhaps, the presence on the land to the
original peoples.�
The complex debate among the Chican@s on
the �land question,� over the political, cultural and spiritual meaning of
Aztlan, has carried on for decades now. The intact First Nations and those who
follow them and their traditions have been consistent, on the other hand, in
upholding their right to sovereignty.
The SOS supporters and other radical racist groups have a
different, more unified take on the matter. With the election of a Chicano
mayor in LA, these elements believe that the city is already in �foreign,�
non-white, control. They believe LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
will �take orders� directly from Mexico�s neo-liberal president,
Vicente Fox.
Culturally, the issue is also simple from a white nationalist
perspective. One SOS supporter wrote, �Whose land? Here's to white Californians
- all of us - who brought the English language, culture and literature - in
short civilization - to the lowlife ingrates that call themselves 'Indigenous'
people.' Like the latter day children of Israel, we have made the desert
bloom.�
But a blooming desert is an ecological nightmare. Like a dry
ocean, it is the inside �out conception of a people seeing the world upside
down. What has bloomed in fact is an endless stone village, a borderless
metropolis that has consumed the Earth, and that has consumed the waters of the
desert for a thousand miles around it. What has bloomed is a metropolis of
cars, a way of life out of balance, a way that is
choking the life breath from the Earth. It is one of the most imbalanced and
ecologically destructive places on Earth.
The change is immense.
In Ancient L.A., Michael Jacob Rochlin
points to the reality that the city�s current population centers owe their
locations to Tongva villages. �For proximity to
sources of forced labor, Missions and Pueblo
were placed adjacent to Indigenous Villages. Ranchos reoccupied the desolated
sites. Boomtowns replaced ranchos. Grids filled-in open space and melded with
adjacent grids.� Now downtown sits near the site of Yangna,
San Pedro at Tsavingna, Redondo
at Engnovagna. Trails from village to village became
roads and, finally, freeways.�
A reviewer from UCLA wrote, �A section about Suangna,
the largest of the Gabrielino [sic] villages, is
illustrated by images of its likely location today: an Ugly Duckling used-car
lot, traffic beside an oil refinery, neo-Nazi graffiti on a storm drain, an
empty field.�
The destruction of the land is also documented in Blake Gumprecht�s monograph, The
Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible
Rebirth.
Twenty six Tongva villages lay near the Los Angeles River, which �meandered
this way and that through a dense forest of willow and sycamore, elderberry and
wild grape,� among �vast marshlands that were home to myriad waterfowl and
small animals. Steelhead trout spawned in the river, and grizzly bear roamed
its shores in search of food.� �These
areas were �a sometimes impenetrable jungle of marshes, thickets and dense
woods.�
By the mid-1800s �the once tree-covered plain was now barren and
desolate.� The forest had been decimated. The river had become a seasonal dry
wash and �the once-ample stream had become a local joke.� Today �Nearly all of
the water that now flows in the river is treated sewage, authorized industrial
discharges, and street runoff.�
It had become, to turn the litany of the anti-migrant racists back
on itself, a �cesspool.�
For the Tongva, Chican@
and other indigenous peoples, The most devastating oppression that has been visited upon us is the
destruction and deprivation of our function as caretakers of land and life, and
it is this, first and foremost, that we must seek once more.
In the
words of Hopi Elder Martin Gashweseoma, ��Clearly
these foreigners are not here to help, but to destroy everything the original
people have left, and in doing so, destroy this world. The only hope for
humanity lies in restoring true land title, which is inseparable from our
function as caretakers of life."
Former
American Indian Movement leader John Trudell reminds
us, �All they know is how to act in a repressive, brutal way...Power...we are a
natural part of the earth. We are an extension of the earth,
we are not separate from it. We are a part of it. The earth is our mother. The
earth is a spirit and we are an extension of that spirit. We are spirit. We are
power. They want us to believe that we have to believe in them and depend upon
them and we have to consume these consumer identities and these religious
identities and these political identities and these racial identities. They
want to separate us from our power. They want to separate us from who we are.�
The
lesson is this.
The Earth
does not belong to us.
We belong
to Her, and are inseparable from Her, even in exile.
In the
struggle for Baldwin Park,
our spirits are returning to the Earth, like the spirit of Toipurinah,
returning home.
