Author: mopress

Post 9/11 Doctrine Heads South

By Greg Moses

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: Gringo is as Gringo does. When for instance a row of 92 percent neo-Europeans unfold their lawn chairs in the Arizona desert to spy on Mexicans, things are beginning to look Gringo. When Schwarzenegger praises the work of that vigilante border patrol as it expands into California, that’s looking very Gringo too. But when nobody around you is able to express the least bit of concern, you know you’re living in Gringo Nation for sure.

Yes I know, Schwarzenegger and the border watchers share a language of legality. All they are doing, Schwarzenegger agrees, is assisting in the job of law enforcement because government has failed to do a proper job. But the plain word for this kind of activity is vigilante — not volunteer. And I shall explain why I say this.

When you volunteer for something like border patrolling, you go to the border patrol and say, may I volunteer? Either they have a volunteer program or they don’t and if they do have one, you get yourself coordinated with the proper authorities. The Minutemen showed up to the border independently and announced they would be performing border patrol activities.

If we take Schwarzenegger’s lead in adopting Minuteman language and collapsing the distinction between vigilante and volunteer, how do we stay straight at the same time with his claim that he approves of immigration so long as it is done in a legal manner? As soon as you’ve worked your way into this conceptual pocket, where legal order is most easily recognized in vigilante practice, well, you’ve made it official for the world. We are running a vigilante assisted immigration program.

Not only is Schwarzenegger exercising severe lapse of judgment in confusing his role as terminator with his role of Governor, but he is at the same time underestimating the racist antagonism that underlies the vigilante movement. We hope he does not have to see hugely ugly consequences in order to learn his lesson, but he is taking such an obvious risk in that direction that he can be fairly blamed for gross negligence if this little game he’s playing spills off the board into the streets.

Let me address the underlying racism of the Minuteman movement in a moment, but first let’s be sure we have this vigilante business nailed down, because in Gringo Nation, the vigilante nature of the Minuteman action is not easy for many to perceive. For instance, here is a fresh email:

You are one of many who has repeated the lie that the Minutemen are “vigilantes”. If watching the border and reporting illegal crossings to the border patrol makes one a vigilante, then there are neighborhood watches all across the country that need to be broken up. Given that nobody in the Minutemen has been charged with any crime, taking the law into your own hands is illegal, and that the Minutemen have been under extreme scrutiny, how are they vigilantes? Please explain. If you can’t, then please advise on whether you are stupid, ignorant, or simply incapable of telling the truth.

Okay, if I’m going to go around using Gringo language, then I guess I have to accept accusations that I’m a stupid ignorant liar. Touche. My chickens also come home to roost. But let me try to address the neighborhood watch question.

Here are two web pages. One for the City of Austin Neighborhood Watch Program and one for the Civil Homeland Defense of Tombstone. City of Austin Neighborhood Watch. Civil Homeland Defense of Tombstone. Do you see any difference here? Notice how the webpage for the Neighborhood Watch Program has been posted by the Austin Police Department with a city contact number. And yes, the Tombstone servants of the “sovereign citizens of these United States” also provide a contact phone number, but you can see that one group is coordinating their activity under law enforcement supervision while another group uses language that has a contemptuous vigilante tradition.

The MinuteMan Project offers plain reasons for their invitation to join their voluteer corps and seek training under the Civil Homeland Defense:

the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more “toys” to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.

Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious “melting pot.”

The result: political, economic and social mayhem.

Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the various sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.

Or as a Texas correspondent writes today, Mexican immigrants are “averaging us down.” He taunts: as editor of a Texas Civil Rights Review, I must be calling for a nation of “garbage collectors” that will put me out of business because none of them will be interested to read my work. That’s the gist of his argument in so many words. I wonder when his trash is not picked up, how long does he usually wait to complain about that?

Another correspondent with a Texas Tech email address sends me an article by Frosty Wooldridge, a smiling fellow with a spiffy eponymous website who says the USA is like the Titanic about to go down if we don’t steer clear of a cultural iceberg:

From stem to stern, our English language is under assault and our schools are drowning in ethnic violence, rapes, drugs and gang warfare. In California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies from non-paid services for 350,000 annual ‘anchor babies’. Ten million illegal immigrants displace jobs from America’s working poor and depress wages for many others. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis and other diseases ‘pour’ into our country within the bodies of illegal immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate ‘female genital mutilation’ and subjugation of women are growing in enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself can not stand.”

These are the sentiments cresting in the MinuteMan Project. How is Schwarzenegger going to play nice with this movement and promote the immigrant ideal? Is Schwarzenegger’s immigration initiative something like Nixon’s China? Is he going to be able to open doors with this nationalist enclave and bring it out of its isolation? As I say, the risk he takes here he should well enough know. Having stirred this pot, he must be prepared to swallow the consequences.

Some of the MinuteMan sympathies come from self-described “pro-labor pro-environment progressives” who argue that, “If there were no illegal Mexicans, employers would raise wages to attract legal Americans to work.” And I have said from the very beginning of my work on Gringo Vigilantes that there is some force behind this labor analysis. But how much weight do we give to illegal aliens when we assess income tendencies in America? Or to put the question another way, do you know what a scapegoat is?

Real income (adjusted for inflation) has been stagnant for decades, unions have been falling apart, corporations have been seeking third world wages wherever feasible, and we have a plentiful border patrol already. Stories of crossings are not cakewalk stories. So with widespread secular trends that cut across all cultural groups and with law enforcement making things pretty
difficult already, how in the world does a “pro-labor pro-environment progressive” wind up sending ME the email of rebuke when I denounce my solidarity with Gringo Vigilantes?

May I remind my esteemed correspondent that I live in a Right to Work State? Do I see MinuteMen taking their binoculars into the galleries of my legislature? No the MinuteMen pay no attention to economics, unions, corporations, border patrols, or law making because all these things are felt to be out of reach. But they can spy on Mexicans. Their move taps into widespread frustration because people feel that things are slipping away from democratic control, a feeling that Schwarzenegger must admit that he has not been able to reduce.

Of course during times like these, when the answer seems so simple as unfolding a lawn chair, frustrated people will hear any alternative that is just as simple. But a national labor plan will be a truly complex and unprecedented thing to achieve. In order to achieve a national labor plan, we will have to take our eyes off of illegal Mexican immigrants and begin to speak with seriousness about everything else we know.

For instance, where is it written into economic law that the more an economy grows in population the less robust it must become in opportunity? What does an expanding population need in order to thrive? Do we have no answers? Will a shrinking population improve home economics? Shall we just split up into a thousand Luxembourg’s? Or do we have to think about other factors besides immigration and population growth in order to get the qualitative answers that we will need? Even without any immigration before us wouldn’t our economic assumptions require us to eat ourselves alive anyway?

From Mexican to cataclysm lies an obviously tempting scapegoat logic. Is this to be post-9/11 headed South? I’m beginning to feel just a little bit like I did on Sept. 21, 2001, the day after Bush Jr. delivered his post 9/11 manifesto. Has everyone around me lost their minds? Are we to be led so jubilantly into a vigilante future?

When immigrants huddled into New York harbor they disembarked upon a city that offered free colleges. So the answers are not very mysterious. Education is one principle of prosperity that growing nations can practice. In South Texas where is the education that awaits immigrants? The Texas Supreme Court will return from its Fourth of July break this summer to consider litigation over South Texas schools. The state legislature has wasted nearly forty years evading its plain responsibility to fund vigorous educational programs. As a consequence ignorance and stereotypes grow.

Health care also would count in this direction. With a robust public system of health funded like we fund blitzkriegs through Falluja, we wouldn’t be whimpering about our complete inability to visualize a healthy future as more immigrants arrive.

Or labor practices. Factories have been constructed along the borderline during the past generation, and they have been placed just to the South where they can dodge the jurisdiction of OSHA and the Labor Department. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, Texas holds firm to its Right-to-Work allegiance, making worker organization very near impossible on this side of the border also.

Education, health care, and labor policy. Here are three clear areas with outstanding records of wrong-headedness in high places. Instead of motivating responsibility in these areas however Schwarzenegger and his MinuteMen are making a scene over Mexican immigrants. These are old tricks of the Gringo Manual. Starve a population, then blame them for their hunger. Shoot holes through their school budgets then blame them for being unable to learn. Put the hospitals out of reach and blame them for not being well. Prohibit union power and blame them for serving corporate interest. And when they nevertheless make their way in the morning to work, by all means, be sure to blame them for that too.

By Greg Moses

The Gringo Vigilante article has hit a bad nerve, and complaints are flowing in. Which is just the kind of thing we like to see. Lots of opportunity to listen and respond about civil rights issues today. This is a live one. Below are three emails to start with. But first, something I ran into while researching my replies:

As I was writing up the immigration story below, a report coming out of the Center for Immigration Studies argues that anti-aging effects of immigration will be modest.

Immigration in an Aging Society: Workers, Birth Rates, and Social Security (April 2005) By Steven A. Camarota

I didn’t find the study prior to publication of my little pro-immigration romp. Although the study would have dampened the tone of my “fountain of youth” effusions, it remains a credible conclusion to draw that the anti-aging effects of immigration trend in the beneficial direction. In other words the more immigration we have coming the younger we get as a nation, even though overall it is difficult to affect the large momentum of the aging trend.

Much of the discussion in the immigration study is misleading since it dwells upon the anti-aging effects of past immigration.

In the year 2000, immigrants who had arrived since 1981 were on average 33 years old (compared to nonimmigrant average of 36). But post-1991 immigrants were on average 28 point something years old. As time goes on, the difference between the average age of immigrants and nonimmigrants widens.

At the present time says the study there is not much difference between the average ages of immigrants and nonimmigrants. Which sounds so irrelevant that you have to wonder why they took so long studying past immigration in the first place.

The article does offer evidence collected from federal sources to address the pertinent question of anti-aging effects in the future. As with aging, so it goes with social security. The more immigration the better with similar modesty of overall results.

But what’s more important about the study is that practical effects of immigration one way or the other hardly surpass marginal to modest impacts. Which means that if one can not find in immigration a panacea for aging demographics, one can hardly blame immigration for severe structural ills either.

* * *

So far, mail is running 100 percent negative. One email from New York simply accuses me in the subject line of being “Another Liberal Idiot!!!” without any message attached. No doubt the author of the email sees enough liberal idiots in New York that the characteristics become self evident. And there are many days when I do miss that crowd. But imagining New York without robust immigration? Maybe it is simply the experience of walking the New York streets that guides my pro-immigration instincts. Dylan in his memoir calls New York City capital of the world. You couldn’t say a thing like that without immigrants. By the same token, I dream that San Antonio could become capital of the Americas.

Of course there is no way to put shipping lanes through San Antonio, so maybe Houston has to be the going chance for Texas. It is already a city with international flair.

* * *

Another email cites some interesting things to consider. At least the author takes some time to provide evidence:

The Wall Street Journal says we should open the border, because the immigrants will work for a “reasonable” paycheck.

The border watch people blames the EMPLOYERS for the immigration problem.

How can workers unionize if they get undercut?

Japan seems to do well without cheap labor

Should rich people not do their own laundry?

The combined effect of these items I take to support some kind of labor nationalism by pointing out that American workers would be in a better bargaining position as an island unto themselves. And I can see the logic. It does have some force to it. But labor nationalism is a volatile game to play within an American context. The weakness of American labor results in large measure from racism. And racism in an American context is difficult to untangle from labor nationalism.

The minutemen vigilantes claim all kinds of ways not to be racist. They claim to be only 92 percent of European descent. But then they post long diatribes against the Southern Poverty Law Center and Morris Dees. Their explicit message of “law enforcement not racism” has functional consequences not so simple to contain.

From an international perspective of human rights, it would be best if there were labor planning forums organized around robust worker power. I know that’s not happening. But the proposal at least establishes a conceptual approach to the problem of Mexico-USA labor relations which have to be thrown into a complex 500 year history. In the context of the American Southwest, immigration is a family issue in the sense of involving parties that have long and intimate acquaintance.

Or to use another analogy, the USA-Mexico border runs like a track through your typical Southern order of things, with Mexico on one side of the tracks and USA on the other. It fools no one to pretend that the inequalities between the two sides of the track result from entirely independent histories. Therefore it remains for me incredible to argue that any human solution can be confined to either national framework.

I don’t have any opinions about whether the rich should do their own laundry. Elton John once said (I believe to David Frost) that laundry represented a kind of emotional threshold issue for him because of his rampant wealth. One thing he had to work out as part of his general recovery was an ability to do his own wash. It had for him a kind of Zen value. I hope I’m not taking the point too seriously, but I would think that a progressive answer to the laundry question would depend on the labor conditions of the hired help.

BTW: Hope you enjoyed your visit to Texas, Sir Elton. It couldn’t have been better timed. Congratulations on your engagement. (Editor takes break to vacuum bedroom.)

* * *

A third email asks: “Such bizarre racism is quite unbecoming of a “progressive.” I understand that it’s cute and fun to characterize the Minutemen and by association all of White America as “gringos,” but think: when the Hispanic population outnumbers the gringos in America in 50 years, will your charming little race-based comments about White people as illiterate, greedy, and inherently evil be taken so lightly? When will the racism line reverse? I don’t understand this latent hypocrisy in your essay.”

Hmmm. I guess cute and fun come close to describing the intended tone of the article. But racism? I consider the article to be anti-racist. Whether the tone will hold up in fifty years is a good question — thanks for asking — and precisely the reason that I implore the borderland vigilantes to reconsider their posture at this point in time, while it is possible to lighten the still somewhat playful charges of idiocy, illiteracy, and greed.

* * *

Oh look, more negative emails coming in. Stay tuned.

Notes on Misplaced Autonomy

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / Global Resistance Network /
Dissident Voice

SouthWest Border Vigilantes say gringos should drop everything they are doing and go stand shoulder to shoulder at the Mexican border to prevent anybody from walking North.

In response, I’m not saying gringo vigilantes are altogether stupid people, because there are most likely many areas of life where they display dignity and intelligence. The sooner they return to those areas the better.

Yet suppose for the sake of peacemaking that we find common ground with vigilantes in their pure anxiety about the border. What they are worried about is a swamped labor market where more people share fewer jobs and declining pay. That anxiety has some basis in reality.

But it is misleading to see the chief cause of the labor problem along an imaginary line that separates the USA from Mexico. Blame America’s problems on Mexicans? The battle cry of the border vigilante is evidence that we live in desperate and confused times.

Where border vigilantes should look is toward the tallest skyscrapers of their hometown cities, up to the penthouses where business plans are being hatched to pay ever fewer American workers ever smaller paychecks. There is where the vigilantes should stand shoulder to shoulder not letting anyone down the elevators until a national labor plan is laser printed and signed by each and every penthouse occupant and posted on the internet in pdf format.

Not only will a national labor plan manage existing American workers toward peak participation, but it will also show how immigrant workers will continue to be integrated (or re-integrated) into an expanding labor market.

America has always been able to do this for gringo immigrants — work them in. And so the sons and daughters of gringo immigrants should demand a plan to “work in” immigrants yet to come. Do unto others, etc.

It is just plain sick to see gringos standing at the Mexican border as if their own gringo forefathers walked the Bering straits or paddled the great oceans to get here 10,000 years ago, got to know all the plants and animals, bred corn and tapped pulque, discovered tomatoes and tortillas. Inhospitality however is a gringo specialty and the sickness we are quite used to seeing, even when they have their mouths stuffed with fajita enchilada specials. For shame.

We must remind border vigilantes that unemployment was nowhere to be found in America prior to gringo arrival which means essentially that gringos have to figure out how they are going to take responsibility for solving at least one problem they carry with them everywhere they go. Because now that everyone has adopted the advanced gringo economic scheme that is never offered as an option, unemployment has spread like smallpox.

Blaming Mexicans for the effects of a poorly managed USA labor policy is a sign of intellectual and moral weakness, as if the leading question asked by the vigilantes is not who is most responsible for this mess but who can we most easily pick on.

But those are the easy truths to face, because they are all rooted in the past. More difficult truths of labor anxiety reach into the future, because gringo nation for the first time in history is about to get old. This is the truth of the social security crisis.

As gringo nation prepares for old age, it will have more to figure out than where to get its retirement checks from. Because retirement checks must be spent. And in order for there to actually be an economy in which to spend the retirement checks, old gringo nation is going to have to figure out how to get some youth into its economy — youth that gringo nation cannot itself provide.

Nor will the cure be found in proposals to deport lower paid immigrants in a dim-witted attempt to raise the average taxable income of an aging nation. Gringos who offer this plan seem not to be aware that where there are no lower paid workers there cannot be any higher paid ones. This systematic failure of their economic comprehension arises most naturally from gringo assumptions that wealthy people make themselves rich.

And yet, we have to sympathize a little with gringo illiteracy in economic theory, because they are just repeating what they are taught in schools. They are taught for instance that gringos themselves made gringo nation rich. And so they assume that gringo nation will be richer without lower paid Mexicans. The logic is as deluded as it is explainable once you see what gringo nation really means by excellence in education.

Now you could unionize the lower paid immigrants and get their paychecks raised up to a living wage. But if you do away with the labor that lower paid workers provide you would have what Douglas Turner Ward called a “Day of Absence” (1965) more recently dramatized in “A Day without a Mexican” (2004). What gringo ideologues tend to forget is that so-called menial labor gets done because without it no fortunes can be built. If you deport all the immigrants who do that work, someone will have to be found to take their places. If it’s a higher average income that you want, why not raise the wages?

So when gazing across the economy from penthouses high atop the USA, planners will have to tell us, are they capable of solving this problem of working in immigrants as usual — just like they did for their own gringo selves — or not? If not, then gringo vigilantes will have found a proper place to lose their tempers.

Where planners won’t do their planning, that’s where activism is needed, autonomously creating the economy that planners have abandoned.

But for the time being, it turns out to be a very handy exercise to have gringo vigilantes standing at the borderlands where they can look around. Because just to their South bubbles the fountain of youth that their aging economy needs. It will come as a gift if they let it in.

As they stand there looking around at the great crossing grounds that is their last best hope for a grateful old age, they can ask, what do we need to build here as welcoming mats?

And I have no doubt about it, as soon as the gringo vigilantes begin to work out answers to the “welcome mat” problem, we’ll see how intelligent and creative they can be. They will still be gringos, God bless them, but they won’t be vigilantes anymore.

* * *

Note: by way of full disclosure, the author is a recovering gringo.

By Greg Moses

To try to remember a dream. What could such an effort be worth? In
the end one would only have a memory of a dream to show for it. And so
what? Could the time taken to remember a dream be better spent
forgetting it?

So we forget our dreams right away. Up in the morning and after it
— after something anything more solid than a memory of a dream could
be.

But something curious happens to memories and dreams when locked
into thick prison walls. In prison, dreams never dare to escape. Humans
spirits deprived of any spiritual refreshment from paint chipped blocks
and bars will have their fountains, so up through the night come the
dreams.

In the spiritual landscape of the order of things, prisons
therefore are a society’s dream reservoirs. If the walls aren’t built
thick enough, dreams would come flooding out like a tsunami and drown
every bullshit idea in the way. That’s why we have so many thick prison
walls in America.

According to statistics released on Sunday (why Sunday?) the USA
once again ranks top in the world for the dream dams we call prisons.
More than 2.1 million folks jammed into a system that includes federal
prisons (139 percent full); state prisons (116 percent full); and jails
(94 percent full). Nearly 100,000 of those prisoners serve time in
prisons that have been privatized to make some profit which just goes
to show you there is nothing that money will refuse to buy.

In the dream of April 16 that we copy below, Ramsey Muniz is visited
by memory of ancient land, imaginary kingdom Aztlan, where the Aztec
dance unconquered, and every step they take is upon land they never
have to apologize for walking.

We read the dream of Ramsey Muniz in the context of April 11, when
Harvard Professor of Divinty David Carrasco, as the 19th Annual Americo
Paredes Lecturer speaking to a full house in the Santa Rita Room on
Guadalupe St. showed slides of some of the dreams of Aztlan painted during 16th Century land negotiations. As the dreams of Muniz remind us, those negotiations are still under way:

‘We are One’

Enclosed are words received in a dream…

4/17/05
10:45 PM

Mi Citlalmina y mi gente de Aztlan:

As I shared with you on the telephone, I had
a dream – was it a dream, or was it reality of life
and heart, which only seeks justice, love, and the
freedom of all humanity? It is written in our ancient
Mexicano history that dreams, visions, and appearances
of our ancient council of elders would be recorded
for our future. The writings, dreams, and visions
were all so powerful and connected to nature, that
even modern day scholars cannot comprehend. From
the beginning of our creation we have been in tune
with universal nature, stars, moon, sun, and Mother
Earth.

During the last eleven years confined in the
prisons of America, as a Mexicano political prisoner
in exile, I have prayed extensively in the steel,
cold darkness of oppression – not for myself, but for
a symbol, a sign, a message of enlightenment of hearts
in order to share the journey and direction that we
must take as a race, as a people, in order to obtain
justice, liberation, and in due time, land.

Before I proceed any further, I will share with everyone in
Aztlan and the Holy Land of Mexico that on
April 16, 2005, I awoke from a dream within the midst
of our ancient past. Immediately I sat on the chair
next to my writing table, and wrote an entire
page — with such foresight — then returned to
bed and immediately fell asleep. When I awoke in
the morning, after more than thirty minutes, I
glanced at the page that I had written. I will share
the first part of what came from my dreams:

Cultura/Nuestra Cultura Espiritual Primero
"The Mexicano cultural ancient beginning and/or its
creation will eternally and ultimately bequeath the
manifestation of us to fulfill our spiritual prophesy
of once more becoming one. Nosotros somos uno. This
is the beginning of our ancient cultural Mexicano
spiritual mandate for the 21st century."

Tezcatlipoca (Ramsey Muniz)
April 16, 2005
U.S.P. Leavenworth

"Nosotros somos uno" is a phrase that should
become part of our daily lives, conversations,
participation, and at the end of the night it should
be a part of our spiritual message to Topan (heaven).
We are one! Regardless of where we find ourselves
this very night, we are all one! To be one from
within thousands of miles going south, east, west
or north is power.

Oppression in our past has managed
to divide our people and eventually conquer all
schools of thought or philosophies, providing
a scheme of labeling us with different names
and brands. It is for these reasons that America
has labeled our people into the 21st century.
American now wishes for all of us to become
Hispanics or Latinos for the sole purpose of
becoming different from our Mexicano sisters and
brothers who have journeyed from the Holy Land
of Mexico into the United State of America. We
should embrace our sisters and brothers who have
given their lives by the thousands in the hot
deserts and in the strong currents of the Rio
Grande River, rather than separating them from
our own heritage and generations.

To argue that we are different is to permit oppression by those who wish to divide and conquer our lives with
false illusions, and control the lives of nuestra
gente in general. For the last thirty years or
more, we have embraced and shared with the masses
of nuestra raza in the barrios, our communities,
our schools, and in state and federal prisons our
cultural revolution in all Aztlan.

The United States has been in wars and/or conflicts in all
the world for the last thirty years. During that
period of time, our sisters and brothers came like
never before in our history into America. They
crossed the borders after 9/11, and homeland security
came into existence. After several census taken
of our raza, they became alarmed by the number of
Mexicanos who came to join the pursuit of justice
and liberation. We will no longer be the minority
in the Southwest of the United States. We will
become the majority and will continue to grow
in numbers. It is written that we will never
stop growing in numbers until the land also
becomes a part of us.

Vigilantes, conservative groups and others have become so alarmed of the number of raza crossing the borders that now
they too guard the borders, which will be crossed
by our people.

The dream and its relationship to the human
crisis at the borders clearly reveals that we
Mexicanos must begin to express how proud we are
to be Mexicanos once more after many hundreds of
years of oppression and imprisonment. We were
one from the beginning of our creation. We must
reach into our cultural past as if were only
yesterday. Our teachings, our philosophies,
our ideals, and our spirituality must all relate
to nuestra cultura.

The time has come to make a
definite commitment to the life of our Mexicano
cultura. A race and/or nation without cultura
will never come into existence. The more that
we reach for nuestra cultura Mexicana the more
spiritual our hearts and minds will become. To
all of our raza in Aztlan I share the following
words of wisdom:

We want only to show you something
we have seen and tell you something
we have heard…that here and there
in the world and now and then in ourselves
is a new spiritual Mexicano creation…

Tezcatlipoca (Ramsey Muñiz)

Yes, without question or doubt, throughout
all Aztlan there is a new spiritual Mexicano
creation. We will now become what we were from
the beginning – a free race, a free nation, a
free land.

Immigration will become the national issue
which United States politicians will use to
blame for all negative results in America. Our
sisters and brothers will be trea

ted as if they
were responsible for the oppression of America.
We must immediately take the political position
that our sisters and brothers from the Holy Land
of Mexico, who find themselves in the United
States, be granted full amnesty.

We will take a strong political position against the
United States trying to pass oppressive procedures
against nuestra raza on the issue of immigration.
Besides, if we were to study history in terms of
to who was here first, we would win immediately.
Our sisters and brothers from the Holy Land will
be blamed for all economical and financial
downfalls. But at the end it doesn’t matter,
because we have more compassion in our hearts
for humanity.

We are one! We must be proud of who
we are. Our history is one of pride, heart,
and intelligence. We must let the world know who
we are, and that we are proud to be Mexicanos. As
a group we must also begin to communicate directly
with other Mexicanos who are in tune with our
cultura and historia.

No longer will our raza hold their heads down
in shame. No longer will we be afraid or fear the
sacrifice for liberation. We will no longer be oppressed.

In exile,
Tezcatlipoca
Mexicano political prisoner

www.freeramsey.com

Note: letter from Ramsey Muniz conveyed via email April 24 from Irma L. Muniz.