Maybe it seems ironic, hypocritical, even traitorous for a white woman to\r\nyell "Racista!" to the minutemen and their ilk. At least, the\r\nminutemen seem to think so. And yet I keep doing it, at their border forays,\r\ntheir protests against day laborers, their rallies to destroy Chicano art.<\/p>\r\n
Let me explain myself.<\/p>\r\n
I scream "racist" at the minutemen because I have read my history,\r\nof the Texas Rangers formed to evict Mexicans from their land, of Mexican\r\ndeportations during the Depression, of the bracero deportations of citizens and\r\nnon-citizens alike, of rounding up Japanese for internment camps, of slavery, of\r\nexploiting Chinese railroad workers, of legal rape, of mobs rampaging against\r\nIrish Catholics, of Jim Crow, of Jews shipped back to the Holocaust, of\r\n"insane asylums" and the repeal of the National Mental Health Systems\r\nAct, of the McCarthy trials, of the "special registration" of Middle\r\nEastern men.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The minutemen types will tell you they\u2019re not racist\u2014they oppose all\r\nillegal immigrants.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
I have yet to see them suggest that Canadians who might wander across the\r\nnorthern border are dirty. French people who overstay their visas aren\u2019t\r\ndubbed pariahs leaching off the social welfare system. Vietnamese aren\u2019t told\r\nthey\u2019re uneducated and uneducable. Nigerians aren\u2019t belittled for having\r\nchildren. Germans aren\u2019t labeled unpatriotic for failing to be bilingual.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Supporters of the minutemen movement will tell you that they don\u2019t object\r\nto Chicano\/as or legal immigrants.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
But they will shoot human beings with weapons carried for that purpose, to\r\nprevent more of that Mexican influence from coming across the border. In a time\r\nwhen the world\u2019s fuel supply is running out, when greenhouse gases generate\r\ndevastating weather, as we\u2019re faced with a government that has abandoned even\r\nthe platitude of a world at peace, the minutemen spend their weekends hunting\r\nMexicans. While we watch the last legs of a race to see what will first bring about the ruination of the\r\nworld as we know it, minutemen arm themselves with multiple weapons (all for\r\nself-defense, they assure me) and sit in the desert in lawn chairs trying to\r\n"score" a migrant. With the planet going to hell in a handbasket, I\r\ncan only surmise that it\u2019s not the Mexicano\/as, weakened by the arduous\r\njourney and posing no threat, but the culture they bring and the culture that permeates the U.S. Southwest, that so \r\nmotivates and terrifies the minutemen.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The minutemen blame migrants for all the woes of the U.S.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
And they make up one or two for good measure. The U.S. is basking in below-normal unemployment, and blaming Mexicans for\r\ntaking jobs is a dangerous diversion from what has always been a part of the\r\nU.S. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination against the disabled still\r\ndeprive people of jobs, and pointing at Mexicans only distracts from the real\r\nfight. Scapegoating Mexican migrants for reduced social services is yet another\r\ndiversion, this time away from thirty years of deep government cuts to welfare,\r\nmedical, and educational programs (to which undocumented migrants have minimal\r\naccess anyway). Expelling Mexicans won\u2019t stop discrimination, nor will it\r\nrestore the New Deal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The minutemen will tell you they aren\u2019t neo-nazis, and those neo-nazis\r\nstanding next to them are uninvited sympathizers exercising free speech.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
On my side of the protest, when I stand with Mecha members and Brown Berets,\r\nI stand a little taller, proud to be allied even at several removes from the\r\nChicano Moratorium and the Aztlan spirit. Across the road Stormfront and\r\nNational Vanguard members stand among the minutemen, and I assume the minutemen\r\nfeel about their allies as I do about mine.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The minutemen claim they\u2019re interdicting drug traffickers and terrorists.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
Does anyone really believe drug traffickers are strolling across the desert\r\nwith a backpack of weed? Nor is an aging guy in a lawn chair, gun or no, going\r\nto chase away a terrorist. Yet the minutemen can come up with no better cover for\r\ntheir ominous patrols.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The minutemen will tell you that all sorts of Mexican-American groups are\r\nracist, supporting Mexican nationalism and the reconquista of the Southwest for\r\nAztlan.<\/p>\r\n<\/i>\r\n
The only nationalist movement I know of that advocates the destruction of\r\nother cultures and the subjugation of other peoples is the white supremacist\r\nmovement. The only culture that demands assimilation is European-American\r\nculture. Mexican nationalists, like most other nationalists, struggle for the\r\nacceptance and celebration of their own culture, but, the last time I checked,\r\nthey really weren\u2019t interested in whether I wanted to join them. Only white\r\nnationalists are obsessed with converting and assimilating immigrants to\r\n(European-)American ways.<\/p>\r\n
I scream "racist" as the minutemen because I know of the Alien and\r\nAlien Enemies Acts, of the Chinese Exclusion Act, of the Japanese exclusion\r\nclause, of the first deportations ninety years ago, and, concurrent with the\r\nformation of the Border Patrol, of the first immigration quotas just eighty\r\nyears ago. I have learned what a small cluster of bigoted extremists begets in\r\nU.S. society: today they foment white mainstream alarm even as the number of\r\nundocumented border crossers decreases. I see it in the spreading myth of an\r\n"immigration problem" and in the whispered concerns about the\r\nincreasing population of darker-skinned people.<\/p>\r\n
And I will scream "racist" at the minutemen until I\u2019m heard and\r\nunderstood.<\/p>\r\n","author":"Leslie","parent_id":136848,"mime_type":"text\/html","created":"2005-10-10 02:29:11","modified":"2013-11-11 00:35:38","fileurl":""},{"id":137088,"heading":"Well Put Leslie","article":"Your words prove that this is not a Chicano thing, but a people thing.\r\n","author":"Pachuco","parent_id":136848,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2005-10-12 14:58:19","modified":"2005-10-12 14:58:19","fileurl":""}]}