Looks like La Reconquista fable is making a come back. Blogging amiga Liza Sabater from Culture Kitchen posted on John Derbyshire’s recent blog post – titled “Aztlan North” – on the National Review Online’s blog The Corner. Derbyshire cited the percentage of Latina/o students in the schools of Storm Lake, Iowa, and then wrote: “Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?”
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Aztlan North [John Derbyshire]
Incidentally, while hobnobbing with those Midwesterners at Storm Lake, Iowa — their surnames mostly taken from the Stockholm, Oslo, and Berlin phone books — I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way — of course! this is Iowa — and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness (“These Mexican restaurants are really great!”)
Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the “Student Stats” on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:
- High school: 32
- Middle School: 43
- Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.
Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?
In order to understand the concept of Aztlán, it is important to understand the historical experience of Chicanas/os, an experience that has been rendered invisible by institutional discourses in the US. Stereotype, of Mexican Americans as “dirty, lazy, drunken, cruel, violent, treacherous, fanatical, priest-ridden, ignorant, and superstitious,” which were formed in early interactions between Anglos and Mexicans helped to foster exploitative practices which continue today.
The concept of Aztlán was originated by the poet Alurista in the year 1969 at the conference organized by Corky Gonzales in Denver. In an interview, Alurista said:
“People call California, Arizona, Nueva Mexico and Colorado Aztlán, but really, Aztlán is wherever we are. We don’t recognize borders. It’s more a matter of cultural/political identity. When I say this is our land, I don’t mean that we own it. Who owns anything?”
Aztlán was a spiritual concept which was meant to unite all Xican@s. Derbyshire’s post is nothing more but a racist appeal from the far right.