New Book Breaks It To Chicano Activists That They’re Kind Of As Scary As The Klan

Speaking of race mixing, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, a new book by Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Gregory Rodriguez is clueing chicano activists like Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (or MEChA) and the Brown Berets, into the seemingly obvious reality that being Mexican-American doesn’t mean you’re pure Azteca. Says the LA Times Book Review:

In “Mongrels,” Mexican identity is no natural-born monolith, but rather a kaleidoscope crafted through creative strategies Mexicans used to resist and adapt to the rigors of white supremacy. Starting from the 1519 Spanish conquest of Mexico, his energetic saga recounts the ways in which Mexicans ingeniously absorbed the conventions of our conquerors by marrying with whites, sampling Anglo culture and even purchasing our way out of racial segregation up until the modern era.

New information? Not as far as we can tell, but it’s good to have a refresher course for the slower ones in the class. And surprise, Rodriguez says, if you go too far in favor of people of color, you come back around the other side as a White supremacist:

[Rodriguez] regards with trepidation the 1970s Chicano “brown power” movement, or movimiento, which represents a “fundamental break” from Mexicans’ long-standing flexible attitude: “Inspired by an Aztec legend . . . the Spiritual Plan of Aztlán, was a call for ethnic unity and nationalism.”

Rodriguez sees the movimiento as a perilous, but temporary, daydream of a uniform Chicano brand that has given way in the new century to the more traditional, fluid constructions of a pan-”Latino” identity: “The Chicano portrayal of Mexican Americans as a unified, downtrodden people preternaturally loyal to their ancestral culture was astonishingly similar to the way Anglo racists had been characterizing Mexican Americans for more than a hundred years.”

‘Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds,’ by Gregory Rodriguez [LA Times]
Earlier: Nerve Studies The History Of Becoming Ethnic By Injection