The Minutemen had a brief window in time to discuss the effects of a destabilized economy in Mexico resulting in massive immigration across the invisible borderline. Instead they focused on nationalism, false patriotism and other appeals to the far right. The Minutemen eventually got their wish fulfilled when the neo-nazi skinheads appeared to support them at their rally. Though they tried to distance themselves from the overt racist skinheads, the connection was made and the public began to distance themselves from the Minutemen..

Initially i defended the Minutemen because the issue of illegal immigration is based on economic inequality between the US and Mexico. While i constantly waited for the Minutemen to point this out as an obvious issue, they repeatedly failed week after week. That it is accepted for the US to be the source of wealth and that Mexico the source of poverty induced labor was never mentioned as the source of the problem of illegal immigration. Vincentes Fox and George Bush are responsible for enabling these inequalities to continue indefinitely, thus justifing a false need for expensive taxpayer supported patrolled border wall from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico..

In their appeal to the far right the Minutemen ignored the economic inequality and supported the band-aid measure of an ineffective border wall. The only migrations the border wall prevents are those of endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelope wondering why the European immigrants decided to build a huge wall dividing them from their water and food sources. Not to mention the indigenous peoples of the desert who were disconnected from their relatives by concrete and barbed wire. Reminders of WW2 concentration camps may be appropriate when indigenous people are stopped and harrassed by INS officers while traveling in their own land to visit family..


article below from;

Indigenoue People's Human Rights Project;

http://www.hrusa.org/indig/reports/Tohono.htm


"The Tohono O’odham Nation’s tribal lands were divided in the mid-1800s by the Gadsden Purchase and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the location of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. These treaties bisected pre-existing tribal lands.

Initially, and for over one hundred years, the Tohono O’odham were able to pass freely over the border. However, in the mid-1980s the border was tightened in an effort by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Consequently, a barbed wire fence dividing the reservation in half and increased border patrol has made passing across the border difficult for tribal members. Entry anywhere but official check points is illegal and the entry points nearest to the reservation are 90 to 150 miles away.

The barbed wire fence marking the border inhibits travel of the Tohono O’odham throughout their tribal lands, however, crossing the border at legal check points also creates problems. These problems arise from lack of documentation, border patrol harassment, and an inconsistent policy of the INS toward the Tohono O’odham.

The Tohono O’odham people seek the ability to cross borders uninhibited. An open border for the tribe is important for several reasons. First, kinship and traditional ceremonies are vital to preserve and maintain culture. The border policies constrain the ability to travel to sacred sites, hindering the practice of religion. They also constrain ongoing cultural practices of travel and language, and the ability to pass these cultural practices on to the Tohono O’odham’s children. Second, the border splits families. Some family members are in Mexico and unable to cross the border to visit family on the U.S. side. Third, the border prevents members from getting adequate health care. All members of the Tohono O’odham tribe, including Mexican nationals, are entitled to the basic services provided at the reservation clinic overseen by the U.S. government, but the border policies prevent this."





There's a great deal more to be said about the borderlands, maquiladora sweatshops, femicides, water theft from Rio Colorado, etc.. that is left out of the discussion when the Minutemen become the center stage issue. Who can address the problems of coercion to labor in industrial agriculture fields like the Imperial Valley when immigrant workers are exposed to pesticides on a daily basis and the crops are watered with rio Colorado agua stolen from the formerly productive delta, home of the Cocopah peoples, neither Mexican nor US?

article from Kumeyaay;

http://www.kumeyaay.info/movies/speechsong.html

"When Onesimo Gonzales, the village chief, was born in 1934, Hoover Dam was just taking shape and the Colorado River was untamed. The delta (area) then supported a marshland and silt-rich estuary covering 1.9 million acres.

"The river was everywhere and nowhere, for (it) could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the gulf," traveler Aldo Leopold wrote in 1922.

Eighty years ago Leopold wrote of "awesome jungles...lovely groves...still waters of a deep emerald hue." He described (the area as) an Eden alive with colorful birds of every size, deer, bobcats and coyotes.

Chief Onesimo Gonzales explained (2001), "Our river is gone. No more fishing. Trees are dead. No one plants. The wells are dry."

The 45 remaining families coax murky water for washing from a distant (well), but for drinking or cooking they wait for trucks that sell clean water...the plight of El Mayor typifies what is happening around the world...."


another article links the drought in Iraq's Tigris/Euphrates delta with the Colorado delta;

http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/dapril/28_restoration.html

"The tale of the Mesopotamia Marshes echoes the story of the Colorado River Delta, once a similarly Eden-like wetland in the midst of the North American desert where the Colorado River emptied into the Sea of Cortez.

By the 1970s, the 3,000-square-mile oasis of the Colorado River Delta had returned to desert, the river flow siphoned off to irrigate lettuce fields and fill swimming pools, and the delta-building sediment sieved out by upstream dams. One small marsh remained at the delta's edge, kept alive by runoff from irrigated farms.

The diversity of the delta seemed lost: The endemic vaquita porpoise is the world's most endangered mammal; the unique totoaba fish, which grew to 7 feet long and 300 pounds in the rich estuary, is rare; the flood agriculture and fishing culture of the native Cocopah people is nearly forgotten."

They are having more patrols than ever, they are expanding everywhere and their leader is running for congress.

yes good question, how do you figure they falied?

perhaps you are thinking of the mexicans failed ruse to claim the bull-caca 'aztlam"?

Anyway, thank you MM and all concerned Americans who stood for and still stand for, this great country
AMERICA.
you are definately not alone, supported by all, this a thank you from a NATIVE AMERICAN.

I like the original post referencing MY PEOPLE, the NATIVE PEOPLES.
thing is, luna, with all respect, you have totally failed to admit that MExiKKKo has a larger part to play in this old tirade of " let us blame America".

1. mexico has NO part or claim to any lands held or had been held, historically, culturally, etc. , that are claimed or known by present-day tribal first-nation Peoples.
2. any such claim by mexicans is pure, utter and unadulterated bullshit.
3. WE still hold the mexican( who is considered a "white-man"(no offense to you or anyone else))
accountable for the last 513 years of systmatic oppression/destruction/genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
4. the nation of America has made some restitutions to Native Americans in these past centuries, not all and not to satisfaction, but nearly, the scars run deep, but we will DEFEND America, god bless it.
5. mexico and the mexican are far behind in realising their great atrocites against OUR peoples.
what makes it harder to believe....
is that Mexico does not even recognize its own fecculant stink that it is mired in.
Mexico to this very day, to this very hour, continues its raging assault upon the Indigenous Nations, both here in America, and in mexico.
6. even stupider, they(white-man/mex/xican/european/colonialists)
will now tell you that "the evil gringo has stolen our(?) land.."
7. at what point did these shit eating colonialists suddenly come up with that one??
8. there is not one TRUE NATIVE or Tribal Group, who will support the mexican take over of Native lands, or especially America.
like we would actually support mexico????hell no!!
9. the thing missing in the above "oh them bad gringo, poor Natives stories" is any mention of how we are right at this very moment,
still having a struggle with mexicoo.
more later..

hope to hear more

>restitutions to Native Americans in these past centuries, not all and not to satisfaction, but nearly<

who the hell have you been talking to? Tanto?

Screw you "native" and your scum sucking new friend Daisy Chain.

What is so stupid about the Aztlan movement is:

1. Mexico only owned "aztlan" for 24 years. Even Spain owned it for 300yrs. and the American Indians even longer!

2. They stole it from the American Indians. Native Americans are very different from Mexican Indians.

3. Mexico murdered, tortured and enslaved thousands of American Indians and sent them back to Mexico as slaves. Tons of American Indians despise Mexico and their racism toward Native Americans.

4. Mexicans are horribly racist against their OWN indigenous peoples. They keep them like trash. For years they never required their indigenous Indians to go to school to keep them down and consequently still they are the poorest, most uneducated people in Mexico. On TV they have to hide their faces for fear of being murdered in Mexico by the Mexicans! Mexicans hate blacks, they hate their own Indians (look who runs the Mexican gov't and you can see the racism).

4. The majority of Mexico is made up of MESTIZOS - meaning part indigenous and part Spaniard. SPAIN IS IN EUROPE so the majority of Mexico has European blood. Their scummy talk about sending "gringos" back to Europe - well, then almost all of Mexico will have to go to Europe FIRST! How dumb!

5. Mexicans want to impose Spanish on Americans. There barely exists a Mexican who knows how to speak a one of their native languages. Instead they all speak the language of their WHITE SLAVEOWNERS (Spain) and as they are so proud of having been slaves to Spain wish to push their slaveowners language on us. Aztlan is the dumbest, most illogical movement in existence.

Aztlan is an idea that native americans from the southwest are all one culture. It's like a myth. It's different from older myths because it's based on modern anthropological and scientific evidence. The evidence gives birth to the idea, which, in turn, creates political unity. This isn't necessarily good -- Hitler was into similar ideas -- but, it's what it is. It's better to start with a basis of truth, and the truth is that there is cultural history between the southwest and northern mexico.

Most of Mexico is not European. The Europeans were, and always have been, a ruling minority. The idea of "the mestizo" exists, partly, to deny rights to full blooded indigenous people. It's not that different from the racist idea of the "white mutt" being more authentically "american" than people of color who are not mixed. It's identical to the what happened with native americans in the usa, who were given more rights if they were half-white.

On the left, I think most Chicanos identify with, or at least are aware of indigenous connections, and may even view their political history as an extension of native american history, rather than of mexican history. I'm starting to come around to this idea, and it's interesting because it actually makes more sense.

The logical disconnect that Gringa notes is only illogical because she fails to distinguish between her opponents who identify with mexico, and her opponents who identify with indigenous. She also doesn't account that these two perspectives can co-exist in the same group or even the same person, to some extent, because in the usa, people aren't forced to choose one side or the other.

take into account that last census in mex.
10% 'white'
80% "meztizo"
and only 10% Indigenous.
It is this 10% of Native People that have a
living cultural connection to Indigenous culture.

the lie is that 'meztizo" was a political instrument for the ruling classes.
it did nothing for Indigenous people.
the rhetoric of 'aztlam" is a big sham