The start of MexAmerica?

MEXAMERICA

Nine Nations: Mexamerica
by Jason Godesky

What barely-closeted racists^{1, 2, 3} have called the “crisis” of the United States’ “broken borders” has become a major issue for the 2008 presidential election. Should English be made the official language of the United States? All the current Republican candidates support such a measure—and most Americans, thinking they’re supporting a recognition of their national language, say they support a very different thing, an official language (the difference, put simply, is that where a national language acknowledges a demographic reality, an official language is being a jerk about it—making it illegal to use other languages in any kind of government-issued communication). Should a giant fence be built along the Mexican border, emulating the smashing historical successes of projects like the Maginot Line or the Berlin Wall, at enormous expense?

The United States has a long and ignoble history of virulently racist treatment for any new immigrant group. As Miami’s former mayor, Maurice Ferre, put it as he mocked American racism:

Look, okay, I understand. It was just us Americans before. We had to accept those damn Jews and then we had to accept those damn Catholics, and even the blacks got in. And the Indians made their pitch with Wounded Knee, then came the youth movement, and now we got all these crazy kids and they’ve got rights. And now you got gray power to counteract black power, and Claude Pepper is passing bills left and right that say you can’t discriminate against an American just because he happens to be old.

In that, today’s Hispanics are simply the latest in the line following blacks, Irish, Jews, German “Krauts”, Italian “Dagoes”, and even Catholic “Papists.” In another sense, however, today’s Mexicans have more in common with Native Americans. In one segment aired by the Colbert Report covering some citizens setting up a shabby fence along the border, an elderly woman says, “This is my country. I’m not going into your country. Please don’t come into mine.” That might be a reasonable sentiment, except for its complete ignorance of history. She did go into their country; we all did, in one of the most shameless and unjustifiable acts of American imperialism before the invasion of Iraq—the Mexican-American War. At the heart of the entire “Mexican Debate” lies an historical truth few U.S. citizens are willing to admit to: we invaded Mexico, stole the southwest by force, and have ever since been struggling to keep a natural bioregion divided. The waves of “illegal immigrants” are in their country; it’s the gringos that are the invaders.

Native Culture: Aztlán

The seven caves of Chicomoztoc

The name of “Aztlán” comes originally from the ancient Nahuatl origin myth that they came from Chicomoztoc, the place of the seven caves, and each cave was the birthplace of one of the seven Nahuatl tribes: the Xochimilca, Tlahuica, Acolhua, Tlaxcalan, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Mexica. The tribes left the caves, and founded the city of Aztlán. In some tales it is a paradise, analogous to Eden; in others, the Aztecs (named for Aztlán) are tyrannized by the Azteca Chicomoztoca, whom they escaped and fled south. The god Huitzilopochtl forbade them from calling themselves Aztecs anymore, and instead they called themselves Mexica; it was 19th century scholars who resurrected the term “Aztec.” The legend of their migration to Tenochtitlán (now underneath Mexico City) is the central Mexica foundation myth. It remains essential to Mexican identity today; the vision of the eagle alighting a cactus that marked the location of Tenochtitlán as blessed by Huitzilopochtl still adorns the Mexican Flag, and the very name of “Mexico” derives from the Mexica.

When the legends are traced back, the location of Aztlán generally falls in what is now the southwest United States. This area has always functioned as a single bioregion with northern Mexico and Baja California—a single desert bioregion bound by the same seasonal cycles and the same flora and fauna. Before the Mexica, the Toltecs similarly migrated south into the ruins of the Teotihuacano empire from regions generally around the southwest United States, while the native cultures of the southwest, like the Hohokam and the Anasazi, show evidence of significant cultural diffusion from Mexico’s civilizations.

Anglos with a stereotype of persons of Mexican ancestry as pickers of fruit and drawers of water like to forget history. Americans who mutter darkly about “alien hordes” ignore the fact that, like the French of Quebec, the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest were here first. MexAmerica bulges hundreds of miles north of the border into New Mexico, Colorado, and California, because, for example, a flourishing Spanish civilization existed at Santa Fe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Santa Fe Trail was important to Missouri frontiersmen in the early 1800s, because it opened up trade to a city then already two hundred years old. Place names, from San Antonio to Los Angeles, bespeak the ancient Spanish presence. The northern borders of California, Nevada, and Utah are at the 42nd parallel, because that’s where the Spanish empire of Alta (Upper) California (as opposed to Baja [Lower] California) ended.

The conquistadors and the padres saw this region whole, without imaginary lines creating divisions between the state of Sonora and the state of Arizona. The desert was the same, the cactuses were the same, the climate was the same, and the people were the same. And the descendants of the conquistadors are still here. Hispanics in New Mexico still refer to themselves as Spanish, rather than Mexican-Americans, partially out of snobbery, but also out of a sense of historical accuracy. In Santa Fe, because of intermarriage, the lineage is thoroughly European. Mexican-Americans, by contrast, claim a far more indigenous North American ancestry. Their forefathers may have been European, but their maternal ancestors were Aztec and members of the other highly developed nations of Central America that flourished before the white man came.

The Anglo world is the latest invader of these parts, not the Indian, Mexican, and Spanish. It’s the borders that have moved, not the founding cultures. There are great numbers of Hispanics in the Southwest who can’t be told by ignorant Anglos to go back where they came from. They are where they came from.⁴

Hispanic population in the United States (2000 Census)

The border as we have it today was drawn by the Mexican-American War. Looking to expand into what is now the southwest, Andrew Jackson sent his good friend Sam Houston to provoke a war, so that Texas could gain its independence, and then cede that independence to the United States. Houston was the terrorist of his day, but he succeeded in his mission, and in 1845, Texas was annexed by the United States. Mexico never recognized Texas’ seccession, so the United States’ annexation was an invasion of Mexico. The war was as divisive then as the Iraq War is today, and for many of the same reasons. Proponents supported the war for grasping America’s “Manifest Destiny” by sweeping out the inferior races and establishing an American Empire that would rule with an iron, blood-stained fist. Critics assailed it for many of the same reasons that critics assail today’s Iraq War: as an unjustifiable, imperialist act of aggression. In his classic essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau argued that while asking Americans to do the right thing was obviously asking for far too much, that we could at least refuse to do the wrong thing, or to aid our government in the commission of evil. The two, co-equal evils of the United States government that Thoreau turns to, again and again, are slavery, and the war in Mexico. After the U.S. army burned Mexico City to the ground, the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, granting the United States the territory that would eventually become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. The remainder of Arizona and New Mexico (south of the Gila River) was bought from Mexico five years later in the Gadsden Purchase.

If we look at the pattern of Hispanic immigration into the United States, it becomes clear that the driving force is basically the nonsensical nature of the border itself, drawn by an unjustifiable war. Mexicans are simply moving back into their own country. The concentrations of Hispanic population shown by the 2000 Census do not follow the arbitrary borders drawn by imperialist conquests, but they do follow the boundaries of the actual bioregion of Mexamerica.

The proposed nation of Aztlán

It’s mostly extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that bring up Aztlán today. They speak also of a Reconquista that Mexican immigration represents. These elements do exist among Mexicans, but they are extremely marginal, and also largely right-wing, militant, nationalistic movements. They share many points in common with neo-Nazis, including a perverse preoccupation with “purity” and a vicious homophobic streak. The Reconquista, sadly, exists mostly in the rabidly racist imaginations of avid white supremacists. When Lou Dobbs aired a piece on Aztlán on CNN, he used a map from a white supremacist group.⁵

It is not entirely a fantasy, though; a fringe of militant Mexicans do espouse a dream of restoring Aztlán and reuniting the Mexamerican bioregion.

There’s a legend that has acquired popularity among some of today’s young Chicanos. The origins of the great Indian civilizations like the Toltec and the Mayan have always been shrouded in mystery. But the first Aztec said they came from Aztlán, and their descriptions of it tally with what today is the United States Southwest. Azdan literally means white earth, and when a bulldozer flattens the top of a hill for a San Diego subdivision, white earth is what it’s pushing. The legend continues that Aztlán will someday be regained by the sons of the Aztec, and a new civilization will flourish. The land will once again be regarded as holy, and oppression be brought to an end.

Already, there are Mexican-Americans who refer to the five-state region of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas as Aztlan.⁶

There seems to be more than a little self-fulfillment to such a prophecy; the restoration of Aztlán would erase the nonsensical border drawn by the Mexican-American war, and when borders align with real, bioregional boundaries, everything becomes much, much easier. It’s trying to divide in half what functions as a single, ecological whole that invariably runs into trouble—and nowhere is that trouble more evident in North America than in Mexamerica.