Thanks for chiming in Observer, just want to make one minor point: I am not - although I can see how I gave that impression - one who believes that a college education is only good if it brings in income. Certainly that is not the case, and as one who has contemplated getting a degree in Philosophy, I am well aware of educations value in itself, outside of its monetary value.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Here goes…

Unlike many people indoctrinated with capitalistic ideals, I do not necessarily view the pursuit of “higher-education” as a vocational endeavor. Indeed, I find the pay off of education to be its intrinsic value. That is, for me, the real prize is expanding my base of knowledge and not necessarily the material wealth I may acquire as a result of that knowledge. Consequently, I whole heartedly disagree with Alfonso’s assertion that earning a degree in Chicano Studies “gets you no more than a job at Mc Donalds flipping cheeseburgers.” On the contrary, the knowledge acquired in the acquisition of a Chicano Studies degree will undoubtedly secure for its owner much more than a job in any vocation. That is, the intangible wealth in knowledge is often the real crackerjack.

I do agree that ethnic nationalism, or ethnic-chauvinism (a term I think is more fitting), is a socially debilitating enterprise, which is likely to only arouse counter ethnic chauvinism. Such a volatile situation, as history teaches, can lead to racial strife and the “balkanization” of a region. In this vein I do agree that a Chicano Studies curriculum, which includes the rhetoric that Chicanos are residing within “Occupied America,” as Chicano Studies Professor Rudolpho Acuña would have us believe, has the potential to create an atmosphere of separatism among at least some of its students.

Is it reasonable to question whether or not an insulated college curriculum that teaches this type of rhetoric, either in entirety or in part, as a social axiom that is to be unchallenged rather than a social hypothesis to be objectively studied beneficial to society in general and Chicanos in particular? In my opinion, it is not only reasonable to question and discuss this question it is also the scholarly and responsible thing to do.

As far as pushing for a statewide amendment in the teaching standards to include a curriculum of pre-Columbian history that is on par with the one that La Academia Semillas del Pueblo has most likely implemented- that seems a bit unrealistic. Teachers are already unable to cover the history standards that are currently mandated, which makes it unlikely that, even if the standards were amended, that the indigenous curriculum would be covered in many history classes. So, it is understandable as to why Mr. Aguilar has sought public funding and accreditation for a curriculum that is more to his and the school’s consumers (parents and students) liking.

Now oso, your implied assertion that by virtue of their ethnicity, so-called minority students “should know” already be well versed in the historical laws and social occurrences that were racist and immoral is a bit surprising. It is unclear if you are being flippant or if you have some good reason to conclude that minority freshmen ( freshperson?) would have some reason to know of these historical injustices.

Furthermore, the link you provided, which was supposed to have shown how ethnic studies has furthered our understanding of race by providing “a more sophisticated perspective of what race is and what it is not,” was nothing more than an chronology of events “leading to the establishment of the [Ethnic Studies] department in Fall 1969 to Fall 1996.” Nowhere did I find the mentioning of race much less what constitutes race. So, I have to ask, how have ethnic studies enriched our understanding of race?

I would argue that many within ethnic studies have worked to retard our knowledge of race. In fact, the soft censorship from the Left has done a masterful job of stirring up racial hysteria at the mere thought of researching population/race differences. Jared Diamond, author of “Guns, Germs, and Steele” notes, “Even today, few scientists dare to study racial origins, lest they be branded racist just for being interested in the subject.”

When you have scholars like Henry Luis Gates Jr. saying race is a “misnomer” and “proving” his point by rhetorically asking “who has seen a black, or red person, a white, yellow or brown person,” and asserting that, “These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality.” It’s easy to see why some geneticists opt to tread carefully in the racial charged waters of public funding. Perhaps, Mr. Gates would like to tell us which anthropologist, geneticist, and/or biologist have argued the existence of “black, red, white, yellow, or brown” races. In the public arena, where the attention span is short, vitriolic rhetoric tends to trump scholarly measured words.

As to your “not so bright” friend and his “impoverished” understanding of the “social construct that is race”: it would seem that understanding of many on this subject are lacking in knowledge. Indeed, to suggest that “race” is merely a social construct belies the fact that there are biological differences within human populations (races). For example, we know that Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans differ in some respects genetically, and that some these differences manifest into observable physical differences (e.g. hair texture & skin color).

Jon Entine (Author of “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It”), in his essay entitled “The Straw Man of ‘Race’” (2001), quoted Ranajit Chakraborty, a population geneticist at the University of Texas Science Center in Houston, as saying: “The classification of human ethnic or racial groups remains a vital, important feature in understanding the nature of human evolution.” However, Entine notes that, “The precise number and grouping of races will always be somewhat arbitrary, as race is in part a social construct. Typology, the typing of humans into categories, is akin to wrestling an octopus into a shoe box: no matter how hard you fight with it, you still have something dangling out somewhere.” However imperfect racial categories are it is clear that, as Mr. Entine writes, “that some population groups do resemble ethnic or racial groups,” and that race is more than a social construct.

Raza isn’t racist
The Latino student club MEChA is more about culture and education than reconquista.
By Gustavo Arellano, GUSTAVO ARELLANO is a staff writer with OC Weekly, where he writes the “¡Ask a Mexican!” column. A portion of this essay originally appeared in the Weekly.
June 15, 2006

THE REVOLUTION always finishes the same way: Someone claps. Then someone else. Someone else. Others join. More. Faster. More. Everyone in unison. Rhythmic. Louder. Faster. Finally, someone shrieks, “¡Qué viva la raza!” (Long live the Mexican race!). “¡Qué viva!” (May it live!), everyone screamed in response. And then we go off to continue the reconquista.

The above scene ends just about every meeting of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), the high school and college club for Mexican American students that scares the bejesus out of everyone else. Frankly, I don’t blame everyone else.

Starting with the name (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán, “Aztlán” referring to the mythical Aztec homeland that prophecy held was north of Mexico and would be repopulated by descendants of the People of the Sun), continuing with slogans like Entre la raza todo; fuera de la raza, nada (Within the race, everything; outside of it, nothing) and concluding with that tribalistic clapping circle, the average MEChA meeting might look to outsiders like a gathering of brown-skinned brownshirts.

That’s at least how anti-MEChA alarmists see it. For them, MEChA is what the Communist Party was for McCarthyites — a boogeyman of an organization you can use to spook citizens away from the aspirations and causes of its ex-members. The casualties include Antonio Villaraigosa in his first mayoral race, Cruz Bustamante in his unsuccessful 2003 gubernatorial run and Gil Cedillo every time he tries to get the Legislature to approve driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

Now KABC-AM (790) is playing the MEChA card against the Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a charter school in Lincoln Heights. Because the MEChA chapter of Pasadena City College supports the school, goes KABC’s reasoning, Academia Semillas del Pueblo is obviously a racist school teaching kiddies to reconquer the Southwest, one Nahuatl lesson at a time.

It doesn’t help MEChA’s case that Semillas del Pueblo Principal Marcos Aguilar, a former UCLA Mechista, once dismissed the importance of Brown vs. the Board of Education during an interview, adding that “the white way, the American way, the neoliberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.” Or that members of Pasadena City College’s MEChA chapter recently destroyed an entire run of the campus newspaper because they considered the paper’s coverage of one MEChA event inadequate.

But, as in Islam, a few indige-nazis are stains sullying a noble organization. I should know. I am a Mechista.

As both a member of the invading army and a proud son of Mexican-hating Orange County, I can testify that, without a doubt, MEChA is harmless.

Sure, the organization’s founding documents, the Plan de Santa Barbara and the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, call for a Chicano homeland. But few members take these hilariously dated relics of the 1960s seriously, if they even bother to read them. Little of the modern-day MEChA remains separatist, other than the occasional Che-spouting junior and a few cute mestizas with Aztec names like Citlali who sport Frida ponytails, black-frame glasses and Chuck Taylor high-tops.

MEChA’s primary objectives are not secessionist but educational (get as many Latino high schoolers into the universities as possible and help them stay there) and cultural. For many Mexican American students, MEChA is their family by proxy, a support network for those of us who were the first in our families to graduate from high school, let alone college.

The open-borders philosophy expressed by many Mechistas isn’t born from an irredentist ideology but from their experience of having relatives divided by borders. All that raza clatter isn’t racism, it’s the traditional way immigrants climb the success ladder — through solidarity and education. The loaded term itself is better understood as representing the immediate community, not as a proclamation of Mexican superiority to all other races.

Look, I get the widespread skepticism about MEChA’s intentions. I myself was apprehensive about joining the club when I attended conservative Chapman University in Orange. I had heard whispers about the obsession with protests, the vitriolic speeches bashing everyone who wasn’t brown, the infamous MEChA clap.

But then I actually attended a meeting. I encountered some extremist rhetoric — but it was aimed at increasing Latino enrollment on our minority-deficient campus and mentoring at-risk high school students. And it wasn’t just Latinos involved in this radical clique. We had African Americans, Asians, gabachos … even a Kazakh student named Amir who proudly wore his MEChA shirt complete with the organizational logo: an eagle gripping a stick of dynamite and looming over a banner that reads “La Unión Hace la Fuerza” (Strength Through Unity). We cared about bettering the world, and MEChA allowed us to do something about it.

We protested Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he appeared on campus; we supported striking janitors and held events for all the major Mexican holidays. But mostly we spent our free time recruiting high school students to Chapman and holding educational carnivals for elementary niños y niñas.

Chapman administrators loved our dedication, holding us up as models of what others could aspire to. My fellow Mechistas went on to work for nonprofit organizations, consulted for the Democratic Party, became bankers and psychologists, made it in Hollywood, interned at the Cato Institute — and this Mechista went on to graduate summa cum laude from UCLA and work for a free newspaper. Not a single Mechista in our group dropped out.

Years later, I proudly call myself a Mechista. To be a Mechista is to care for those who face the same struggles you once did, to preach the gospel of education to immigrants so they can prosper and assimilate. To be a Mechista is to be American — an American with sore hands from so much clapping, that is.

Thanks for chiming in!

Oh yeah, and about that friend of yours, his comment sounds so ‘out there’ that clearly, he must have been joking, come on now, how could you even take a comment like that seriously.

I think two things need to be separated here and, so far, they haven’t been. There is ethnic nationalism and then there are ethnic studies departments. In my opinion, the first is very bad and the second is incredibly useful and necessary in dealing with what are too often overly simplistic attitutes towards the social construct that is race.

The other day, for example, a very good (but not so bright) friend of mine said something along the lines of this: “seriously, I’ve read scientific studies that say that the Mexican race and homosexuality are mutually exclusive.”

The “Mexican race”!! So impoverished was his understanding of race and racialization (not to mention biology) that I could only chuckle in response.

Ethnic studies departments including Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, and the others have made huge strides in giving American society a more sophisticated perspective of what race is and what it is not. Any doubters would be well served by skimming through this history of ethnic studies.

With all that said, I do agree with two of HP’s main points (if indeed he has any at all). First of all, I’ve never understood why ethnic studies classes are always filled with minority students. Why does a minority need to learn about all the racist government policy since the United States’ inception? If there’s anyone who already knows that injustice, it should be them. It would make more sense to me if ethnic studies classes were filled with young, privileged, white students while minority freshmen headed straight for the science and engineering buildings. Instead, when a white student signs up for an ethnic studies class, (s)he is usually treated as as “I wanna be brown and down” poser filled with white guilt rather than someone sincerely interested in a history left out of high school text books.

Meanwhile, those minority ethnic studies majors usually defend their choice by saying “I want to do something that helps my people” only to get stuck in the insulated ivory tower. (I’m not trying to hate)

As far as La Academia Semillas del Pueblo goes, why restrain indigenous American (ie. “The Americas”) history to a single charter school instead of pushing for its inclusion in the greater public school curricula? I feel bad for the students of that school. Even though they might have a better understanding of indigenous and Chicano history, they’re going to miss out on a lot because of their segregation from the rest of society.

It seems that use of ethnic politics is good for a few (e.g. ethnic study professors), but bad for “minorities” in general.

-cindylu

I know; thank the Mexica (Aztec, for those not in the know) Gods the strong-arm tactics didn’t work! J/K

I never wrote that “The hunger strikes did not lead directly to the creation of a Chicana/o Studies department.” I guess you just like to “nitpick.”

However, does their economic interest outweigh the likelihood of ethnic tensions arising from such demonstrations? Will the bulk of Chicanos be better off?

Chicano Studies Department? We don’t need no stinkin’ Chicano Studies Department!

Btw, I will be visiting that very famous bookstore of Chancla’s in a couple weeks, so I will let her know what area of her store she should keep reserved for your upcoming book (hopefully a large area… ).

Thanks for chiming in you two!!!