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Anti-immigration forces warn
of plot
TRAVIS LOLLER and PETER PRENGAMAN
AP
Saturday September 8, 2007
On the far fringes of the pro-immigration movement, some Hispanic
activists openly yearn for the day when immigrants rise up and
retake the American Southwest, more than 150 years after the U.S.
annexed it.
"If somebody steals your car, how much of it do you want
back? Just the tires? The seats?" asks Olin Tezcatlipoca
of the Los Angeles-based Mexica Movement.
Mainstream immigration advocacy groups — as well as academics
and experts on nearly all sides of the illegal immigration issue
— dismiss these "reconquista" notions as rhetorical,
not to be taken seriously.
But such talk appears to be galvanizing foes of immigration.
Anti-immigrant activists and some conservatives have seized on
such rhetoric to claim that a conspiracy is afoot among illegal
immigrants to reconquer the Southwest.
(Article continues below)
Jim Boyd, for example, ran a losing campaign for City Council
in Nashville, Tenn., on the single idea of stopping an "invasion"
of Mexicans who he said want to seize much of the Southwest and
secede from the United States.
"They're American citizens of convenience, until they can
start a new country. Then they'll shuck their citizenship as easily
as you or I take off a jacket," he said.
Boyd got only 2 percent of the vote last month. That translates
to more than 8,000 people.
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow with the conservative Manhattan
Institute think tank, called the reconquista conspiracy theory
"a fantasy, a boogeyman."
Similarly, Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's
Intelligence Project, which tracks and monitors hate groups, said
the reconquista idea is "completely bogus" but has "made
its way into the mouths of national politicians and onto the screens
of cable television news."
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and CNN host Lou Dobbs,
both critics of illegal immigration, may not believe in the existence
of an actual plot to retake the American Southwest, but both have
talked about the reconquista theory as an example of the extreme
rhetoric of some Hispanic organizations and pro-immigrant groups.
Charlie Norwood, a congressman from Georgia who died earlier
this year, appeared to accept the conspiracy at face value, accusing
the National Council of La Raza, a mainstream Washington advocacy
group, of acting as a front organization for the "radical
racist group" MEChA, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.
In an article last year for the conservative newspaper Human
Events, he complained of a grant La Raza made to MEChA, which
he said was seeking "to carve a racist nation out of the
American West."
"It doesn't end with secession," Norwood wrote. "The
final plan includes the ethnic cleansing of Americans of European,
African and Asian descent out of `Aztlan.'"
Aztec folklore puts Aztlan in northern Mexico, possibly along
its western coast. Other accounts place it farther north in what
is now Arizona, Colorado or New Mexico.
Mexico's huge territorial losses were a result of defeat in the
Mexican-American War. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded
what are now California, Utah and Nevada, and parts of present-day
Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming, to the United States.
Anti-immigration critics often cite a MEChA manifesto, written
in 1969 and filled with nationalist rhetoric, as proof the organization
has a hidden agenda.
"Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the
fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans,"
the manifesto reads. "With our heart in our hands and our
hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo
nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture."
Marcos Zamora, chairman of MEChA's California State University,
Northridge, branch, said those documents should be understood
in historical context: "People were really radical back then."
The organization's main mission now is to promote higher education
for underprivileged youth, he said.
Many prominent Hispanics, like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
and former California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, were once members
of MEChA, and that only convinces some anti-immigration critics
that the radicals are taking over.
Cecilia Munoz, senior vice president for La Raza, said the accusations
of a radical separatist agenda are "a little like accusing
the NAACP of being the Black Panthers."
"We've been trying to play by the rules and have a polite
policy debate about how to reform immigration," she said.
"And everybody else has got their gloves off and is hitting
below the belt."
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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