Forgetting Our Place…

IT IS TRULY GROSS to me that a popular Latina stereotype for a certain lusty, lazy-minded American man (and I would go as far as to say “hateful” in the extreme of this specific type of racist thinking) is……

Our Constitution does not say that the right to due process is just for citizens. It is a basic human right.

Yeah, that’s precisely it.

Ha exprimido exactamente lo que he pensado sobre la estupidez de los tipos que nos ataquen hoy dia!

The loud, noisy Latino-hating racists who make their hatred obvious are bad enough, but at least they’re open and honest about their bigotry while simultaneously being dumb enough to give us a good laugh.

The people I really can’t stand are the ignorant, subtle “soft” racists who try to soften up their bigotry behind code words, and talk up those trite shibboleths that we’ve all heard: “I don’t hate brown people from south of the border, I just hate illegal lawbreakers, and I want them to assimilate like other immigrants.”

Ah yes, everybody’s favorite thinly-veiled racist code-word, assimilation– aka “turn your back on your people, your family, your culture and your heritage and come work for and empower the same ‘Anglo-Protestant’ power base that’s been brutalizing your people for centuries.”

I’ve long found it curious how, even in the states where Latinos initiated the societies that the Anglos coveted and militarily attacked us for– Florida and Aztlan states como Arizona, Tejas y California– “assimilation” is taken as a one-way street– “y’all brown people gotta become military-lovin’, nuke-worshipin’, environment-neglectin’, English-speakin’, Ay-rab hatin’, SUV-drivin’ good ol’ boys and girls like us Anglos here, you hear.”

Latinos and others, of course, are hounded to give up our identity and solidarity, and then to uncritically support the established, oppressive power base of the Anglo-Protestant elites “who populate the Daughters of the American Revolution” as you eloquently put it– even to the point of helping to attack and stealing from still more oppressed people who stand atop resources that the elites covet (Iraq for example).

Even the US’s own treaties and legal precedents acknowledge the inalienable right of Latinos to settle in the Aztlan corridor and in Florida, protect our people and heritage here, use Spanish con el espiritu de nuestra gente for public purposes in government, schools and offices– and to unabashedly celebrate our holidays and our history. Yet these of course are routinely broken, with those “true Americans” like the Minutemen conveniently forgetting the details they don’t like.

It’s why I detest those Anglo imbeciles who chide us to be “just like other immigrants.” As I always explain to these fools, they even call us by a misnomer– we’re not mere immigrants, we’re a colonized people who were brutalized, humiliated and expelled from our own lands.

As I learned years ago in college, in the wake of the Florida wars and especially following the Mexican War, Latinos suffered no less than 11 wholesale incidents of ethnic cleansing and outright treaty violations and property seizures at the hands of the arrogant Anglos.

These expulsions and ethnic cleansings were a constant tragedy in the 1850’s through 1870’s but they were also repeated affairs even in later decades. The very overrated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that supposedly “liberal” president, was in fact one of the country’s worst racists even by the standards of his own time– not only did he preside over the internment and concentration camps for Japanese-Americans and countenance the worst period of lynchings of American Blacks that the country has ever seen. FDR also facilitated the brutal forced removal (with thousands upon thousands killed) of Chicanos and other Latinos from the Southwest and Florida who had been here for countless centuries.

This of course, on top of dozens of arrogant invasions and resource wars against Latin American countries since the Monroe Doctrine. FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was infamous for this, but even he was outdone by that jerk Woodrow Wilson, who just about never met a Latino country that he couldn’t find some half-baked pretext to invade and murder thousands of troublesome brown people who happened to be in the way of his robber baron buddies.

Not only did the border cross us in 1848, the US Anglo imperialists have constantly made sure to violate our people and to brutalize our societies anew after that. And now these fools have the arrogance to tell us that we should “assimilate” to the same violent culture and brutal power structure, the one that’s never failed to find an excuse to attack our own and other vulnerable peoples? They can forget it!

El poder queda en las manos de la gente, de nosotros y nuestros hijos y el pueblo cuyos manos han construido– y siguen de construir– esta sociedad de Aztlan. Yo nunca voy a aguantar las voces de los Anglos ignorantes que dicen que deberiamos rendirnos a su cultura, lengua, herencia y poder sobra nuestra propia tierra y hogar!

Ellos han tomado tanto de nosotros y nos humillado tanto, y todavia siguen de hacer el mismo, es la hora para hacer valer nuestros derechos, los mismos derechos que aun hoy nos estan intentando de negar.

Viva la solidaridad entre la gente! A mis hermanos y hermanas quien ahorita estan sufriendo la opresión y los ataques odiosos del autoridad Anglo tan falso: Les apoyamos a todos ustedes en su momento de gran necesidad! Estamos juntos y luchamos para nuestra comunidad!

Hasta la Victoria siempre!