It should say, get off the crack, Mr. Pseudo-Mexican. After all,

we're already living in occupied Mexican and Native American

land already, duh!

The Minutemen are real, the illegal invasion is not.

There is no mass migration into the US from Mexico.

All they numbers you have are falsified or misinterpreted to create a political platform for greedy wannabe politicians.

I feel sorry for those of you that have been so easily manipulated. Not because you believ the lies, but because after hearing the truth you defend the lies.

What a bunch of dorks.

So all the people dying in the desert (read law braking ILLEGALLS) are just Americans wandering around for the hell of it?

Now it all makes sense.

By the way this is America, love it or leave it!!!

You know, so long as I'm not personally being gased, Hitler's got my vote.

A Mexican for Jim wrote:

So all the people dying in the desert (read law braking ILLEGALLS) are just Americans wandering around for the hell of it?

Now it all makes sense.

By the way this is America, love it or leave it!!!

======================================

This is Aztlan, so get over it. Put away your insanity and go home.

no Easter Bunnny or Santa Claus either

They came first for the Indians and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an Indian. Then they came for the Mexicans and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Mexican. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.

(BTW you'll want to resample all posted pictures to 600 x 600 max, otherwise the newswire will decompress, resample and recompress resulting in quality loss. You can avoid this loss by doing it yourself in lossless format while editing)

Chicano artist, Ernest M. Saenz, designed this flag to commemorate the Chicano masses defending their community of Baldwin Park, California against the racist "Save Our State" organization. Saenz's original design was inspired by the Cuban Revolution "M-26-7" Armbands, only the artist reversed the fields to symbolize a mirror to that revolution.

Red symbolizes revolution, black is for strength and white the Aztec color for Aztlan (legendary homeland of the Aztecs, the “place of the white heron”, seen by many as the Southwest of the US).

At the center is a Hummingbird icon of Huiztlilapochtli, the premiere Aztec deity and god of war. Saenz chose the Hummingbird because of an eyewitness account of the appearance of a blue hummingbird during the blessing at the counter-demonstration in Baldwin Park on May 14, 2005.

Saenz uses Caló to inscribe the flags he designs to honor the Pachucos that began the Chicano movement. Caló is the unique language spoken by Chicanos, and this flag displays the words "Con Safos", a statement that can be translated as, "Nothing you say will change this". Also on the flag are the words "United People of Aztlan".

To the Aztecs, Aztlan was their place of origin, and the Pachucos of the 60s incorporated the term Aztlan into Caló. Chicanos, most being Pachucos, or greatly influenced by Pachucos, expanded the term Aztlan to mean the lands ceded to the USA by Mexico in 1849.

Aztlan is also an attitude of personal, political, social and economic empowerment necessary to master one's own destiny. This attitude is deeply embedded in the heart of every Chicano and unshakable.

Maybe it seems ironic, hypocritical, even traitorous for a white woman to yell "Racista!" to the minutemen and their ilk. At least, the minutemen seem to think so. And yet I keep doing it, at their border forays, their protests against day laborers, their rallies to destroy Chicano art.

Let me explain myself.

I scream "racist" at the minutemen because I have read my history, of the Texas Rangers formed to evict Mexicans from their land, of Mexican deportations during the Depression, of the bracero deportations of citizens and non-citizens alike, of rounding up Japanese for internment camps, of slavery, of exploiting Chinese railroad workers, of legal rape, of mobs rampaging against Irish Catholics, of Jim Crow, of Jews shipped back to the Holocaust, of "insane asylums" and the repeal of the National Mental Health Systems Act, of the McCarthy trials, of the "special registration" of Middle Eastern men.

The minutemen types will tell you they’re not racist—they oppose all illegal immigrants.

I have yet to see them suggest that Canadians who might wander across the northern border are dirty. French people who overstay their visas aren’t dubbed pariahs leaching off the social welfare system. Vietnamese aren’t told they’re uneducated and uneducable. Nigerians aren’t belittled for having children. Germans aren’t labeled unpatriotic for failing to be bilingual.

Supporters of the minutemen movement will tell you that they don’t object to Chicano/as or legal immigrants.

But they will shoot human beings with weapons carried for that purpose, to prevent more of that Mexican influence from coming across the border. In a time when the world’s fuel supply is running out, when greenhouse gases generate devastating weather, as we’re faced with a government that has abandoned even the platitude of a world at peace, the minutemen spend their weekends hunting Mexicans. While we watch the last legs of a race to see what will first bring about the ruination of the world as we know it, minutemen arm themselves with multiple weapons (all for self-defense, they assure me) and sit in the desert in lawn chairs trying to "score" a migrant. With the planet going to hell in a handbasket, I can only surmise that it’s not the Mexicano/as, weakened by the arduous journey and posing no threat, but the culture they bring and the culture that permeates the U.S. Southwest, that so motivates and terrifies the minutemen.

The minutemen blame migrants for all the woes of the U.S.

And they make up one or two for good measure. The U.S. is basking in below-normal unemployment, and blaming Mexicans for taking jobs is a dangerous diversion from what has always been a part of the U.S. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination against the disabled still deprive people of jobs, and pointing at Mexicans only distracts from the real fight. Scapegoating Mexican migrants for reduced social services is yet another diversion, this time away from thirty years of deep government cuts to welfare, medical, and educational programs (to which undocumented migrants have minimal access anyway). Expelling Mexicans won’t stop discrimination, nor will it restore the New Deal.

The minutemen will tell you they aren’t neo-nazis, and those neo-nazis standing next to them are uninvited sympathizers exercising free speech.

On my side of the protest, when I stand with Mecha members and Brown Berets, I stand a little taller, proud to be allied even at several removes from the Chicano Moratorium and the Aztlan spirit. Across the road Stormfront and National Vanguard members stand among the minutemen, and I assume the minutemen feel about their allies as I do about mine.

The minutemen claim they’re interdicting drug traffickers and terrorists.

Does anyone really believe drug traffickers are strolling across the desert with a backpack of weed? Nor is an aging guy in a lawn chair, gun or no, going to chase away a terrorist. Yet the minutemen can come up with no better cover for their ominous patrols.

The minutemen will tell you that all sorts of Mexican-American groups are racist, supporting Mexican nationalism and the reconquista of the Southwest for Aztlan.

The only nationalist movement I know of that advocates the destruction of other cultures and the subjugation of other peoples is the white supremacist movement. The only culture that demands assimilation is European-American culture. Mexican nationalists, like most other nationalists, struggle for the acceptance and celebration of their own culture, but, the last time I checked, they really weren’t interested in whether I wanted to join them. Only white nationalists are obsessed with converting and assimilating immigrants to (European-)American ways.

I scream "racist" as the minutemen because I know of the Alien and Alien Enemies Acts, of the Chinese Exclusion Act, of the Japanese exclusion clause, of the first deportations ninety years ago, and, concurrent with the formation of the Border Patrol, of the first immigration quotas just eighty years ago. I have learned what a small cluster of bigoted extremists begets in U.S. society: today they foment white mainstream alarm even as the number of undocumented border crossers decreases. I see it in the spreading myth of an "immigration problem" and in the whispered concerns about the increasing population of darker-skinned people.

And I will scream "racist" at the minutemen until I’m heard and understood.

Your words prove that this is not a Chicano thing, but a people thing.