Författare: xikano_2

From our own Richard Rodriguez ( de reciente acá se está haciendo muy relevante el compa que todos antes odiaban; everybody in the past little Xicano hate object seems to be becoming more and more relevant in American discourse, at times, I think, that he is the last real essayist America has, and he’s Chicano too!)

A great many Americans are alarmed by how much of Mexico is within the United States – the tongue, the tacos, the soccer balls, the street gangs, the Spanish Catholic Masses, the work force swarming into New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The extent of the Mexicanization of U.S. culture renders any notion of a fortified border irrelevant. Twenty-five years ago, Joel Garreau wrote ”The Nine Nations of North America,” in which he described a nation he called ”MexAmerica” – a puzzle to both Washington and Mexico City – encompassing much of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico as well as Baja California. A quarter-century later, one is struck by how prescient Garreau was but also how modest his forecast was.

Aztlán as a metaphorical place to call home – From el Universal, Mexico News.

A TOOL OF LIBERATION What it has meant, in short, is an inspirational tool of liberation – a ”metaphoric center place” in the words of the book’s two lead authors – for a Chicano population historically repressed at worst and ignored at best. Reviving the idea of Aztlán in the 1960s and 1970s not only reinforced for Chicanos a sense of where they came from, it allowed them to still be there.

Aztlán, then, is today not so much a mapable geographic location as it is an allegorical construct that, as lead authors and the exhibit’s curators Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, tell us, ”represents a place of origin, a point of emergence from the past, and a focus of longing.” Aztlán’s rediscovery coincided with early Chicano activism, which was led by (but not limited to) Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize California farmworkers.

”Aztlán – as a symbol, an allegory and a real and invented tradition – served as a cultural and spiritual framework that gave Chicanos a sense of belonging and a link to a rich and extensive history,” Fields and Zamudio-Taylor write. As valuable as the point is, the language used to make it is unfor tunately typical of much of the text in ”Road to Aztlán,”

Music: Genesis, Illegal alien

So the mentally spic and spac clean hygiene WASP government in DC insists on putting a wall across the border. One would not expect less. I wrote a minifix on the wall a couple years back.

The wall wasn’t going to go nowhere, really, it was too good an idea and one of the major and best thriving industries in the US has always been security. The jail business has been having its agosto since the late 80’s. So it really ought not to be a big surprise there.

Though the Xicano community has flexed muscle recently, the message of the protests got distorted in all kinds of wierd ways so that gringo mentality managed, as it always does, to get its message across by distorting the very notion of the protests. I am sure Henry David Thoreau was turning over to get a tequila shot at the very moment he heard the stomping that Homeland Security mistook to be an enemy at hand.

Xicano mentality is long from making a dent in American both discourse and narrativewise. I say so because Xicano mentality is different from gringo mentality. We differ radically in so many ideas we could easily make a third party and give both Democrats and Republicans a run for their money.

Both of those parties ignore Xicano concerns.

But Julio, what do you complain about, you are no even an American citizen.

I have sworn allegiance to the stars and stripes too, what makes you think I don’t love the nation that saw me grow in its midst and gave an idea of how the world ought to be? Most of my relatives are American citizens and they raised me like one of their own. I too have sung the American anthem, so it does pertain me, what matters if I am not an American citizen when the land saw me fit to be one of its own?

Either way, the mentality is far from making inroads in Washington because there the framing of the issues is not about concerns that affect my cousins nor my uncles or aunts. It’s about the law and how the law is broken and how gringo folk interpret those laws.

No matter that everyone and their mother in Washington is breaking the law these days.

Tales from TJ
Gay life below the border
BY ROB WILLIAMS AND TED GIDEONSE

This article is not an attempt to reverse all of these popular assumptions about Tijuana, but rather to supplement and complicate them, and to describe our rather boisterously fun bar crawl. Tijuana deserves some of its press. It’s largely considered one of the most corrupt cities in Mexico, but at the same time, it’s one of the richest. (Of course, San Diego is one of the most corrupt cities in the U.S., as well as one of the richest.) TJ is not just the touristy border town it once was, but it’s because it’s a border town – perhaps the most border town-ish of all border towns – that has made it so exciting, liberal, raunchy and wonderfully bizarre. Partying in Tijuana, in gay Tijuana, is, well, boisterously fun, but being gay in Tijuana, living gay in Tijuana, is more complicated. According to gay men living in San Diego who were born in Tijuana, their hometown is a terrible place to be gay. At the same time, gay men living there now have a different view.

Via: The Gideonse Bible: It’s gay! It’s TJ!

I can’t help notice the noise that the right wingnuts make regards Aztlán and Chicanos and the whole culture clash enchilada. Specially English.

I still have a few problems with English. I grew up never feeling that English was part of me. It was a terrible atmosphere. Every vowel, every consonant got the third degree. You can imagine how that makes a brown kid feel surrounded by adults telling you that you don’t speak English when all along that is all you ever do.

The pocho phenomenon is a reaction to this constant language tit for tat in California. Pochos just realize what we dummier chicanos refuse by resisting full assimalitation: they integrate and merge in the culture forgetting and asserting their americanness at the cost of Spanish and our culture. At least they skip the language pains that are detrimental for later self-steem.

Up to this day I still don’t feel American enough. Though I am. It is easy to put in words and write down, yes, am American, pocho, chicano, watcha gonna do about it? Another to live it.

For many of us, English has always been a language of repression. The language that white americans use to put us down because our language alas! merge with our Spanish and churns out new sounds that are alien to ’real’ English speakers.

That is why many Xicanos seek themselves to academia, to heal themselves, to prove the very thing they have always suspected, that they are American, that there is nothing wrong them.

I don’t know why gringos always feel we are never American and just wish they stopped there but they don’t. They have to have proof that we are Americans. Gringo Americans will always deny our existence. They are not ready to admit that our history is tied to the land and that even though part of our history doesn’t appear in English it sure does appear in Spanish. Why are they ready to deny us our existence as a people baffles me. It is almost as if they believe so much in their destiny, their place in history, that there is no room for nothing more tham white America in the good ol’ US.

Juan Cole says:

Shimon Peres says he wants to remind Iran that it, too, can be wiped off the face of the earth, implying that Israel is capable of obliterating it with its nuclear arsenal. Peres also had the gall to blame Iran for provoking a nuclear arms race in the area!

Is Peres really implying as much?

Reading Reuters has become a painful act of recently. I just don’t know what pseudo reporters or their honchos do with language but they sure need more time to invest in language courses. One of those phrases that riles me a whole bunch is the following:

By Dean Yates and Allyn Fisher-Ilan

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, should bear in mind that his own country could also be destroyed, Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres said on Monday.

I learned via the Agonist and Juan Cole that Ahmadinejad has said something very different:

The speech in Persian is here:

Sorry that I misremembered the exact phrase Ahmadinejad had used. He made an analogy to Khomeini’s determination and success in getting rid of the Shah’s government, which Khomeini had said ”must go” (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

The phrase he then used as I read it is ”The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).”

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope– that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that ”Israel must be wiped off the map” with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Translation are trycky but even more tryckier are the personal translations we do to serve our own purposes.

Some of the Xicanos in what can, & only can, be deemed as a loose confedaration of goodie-two-shoes Xican@s bloggers who can’t seem to make up their mind about nothing, have sent me an email whereby I get accused of not only being a lousy pocho but a traitor to all semiotic principles to which Aztlán adheres to.

Yes, I said what?, too.

I know who hijacked the nascent xicano blogsphere from its craddle and turned it into this ugly no determination sissy crowd that we see now a days. But I won’t say who it was because I might hurt his feelings.

Either way I got the mail. These artificial xicanos would have me believe that because I don’t adhere to the Aztec/Maya mythology I am not a Xicano, besides, they say, you live in Sweden, not Aztlán. Ok.

First of all these are the same Xicanos that will defend spanish above all decrying that spanish is tantamount to xicanismo. That is a lie. For centuries there has been xicanos whose first language is not spanish but one of the 62 native languages from proper México that raza have brought with them to the US as they trekked the land towards Aztlán or that they had way before 1848. I think in particular the Apache languages and the Comanche and Yaqui languages just to name three.

Second of all. While the Aztec culture gave me a sense of belonging it also gave me a sense of feeling betrayed. My raza is Southwestern and most southwestern indigenous cultures are far and beyond the Aztec/Maya duality that tends to nurture the Xicano ens. This means that most of my real history has been erased from my conscience.

I am a proud Xicano from the Southwest and from the Norte of México. My language and manners will attest this any old day of the year for those who want to question my Xicano ens.

Dios mio, I didn’t know California was a spanish word either!

Could someone tell the Israeli friendly newsoutlet called Reuters, yes, I know, I am on the fringe of being called antisemitic, never mind am only 39 and really have not a shred of anything to do with nazis or any simpathies with a destruccion of beautiful Tel Aviv or beautiful arab-israeli Jerusalem under the rule of right wing nuts the likes of Binyamin Netanyahu otherwise known as bibi or the butcher of Lebanon known as Sharon in a coma, that California has and will always have a spanish history?

Or am I to understand that even though Reuters is a well and successful newsoutlet their reporters can and only can deal with the present when and only when the Reuters top honchos deem it it is worthy to dig into the past?

Can you imagine a California, a New Mexico, a Colorado, a Nevada, a Texas without a spansih past? English speaking Reuters seems to think so.

Dragging it through the mud for personal gain.

I mean what else can be said of those that are insanely obsessesed with the idea that Xicanos are helt bent in returning Aztlán to México. It be suicidal, I have argued, it would be a kamikaze act on part of the Chicano people to return Aztlán to the México yet the wingnuts in the US hearken nay.

Specially at technorati. The Aztlán tag is filled with right wing nuts decrying an invasion of sorts.

Take back Aztlán from the right wing nuts who’ll distort the very fabric of América. Xican@: everytime you write of Aztlán in your blog make a tag for it at so that technorati can pick it up because if we don’t do it now it might just be too late later.

Ok, there needs to be a Congress of Xicanos soon to speak about Aztlán, what it stands for and specially what kind of flag, if there be need for one at all, shall we lay our eyes upon.

PS: if the protests on May first didn’t make it clear for all, Tijuana is Aztlán!

Heck, let’s ruffle some feathers over at Michelle no ethics Malkin:Foto originally uploaded by Juan Manuel. Kiss, kiss darling.