Mexican Nationalists: Racist or Honest?

This is not difficult to translate. The Spanish is fairly elementary, yet not colloquial. I wonder if it was written by a university student for whom it is a second language, such as a second-generation American from a Latino family. What is difficult is to make sense of it.

"Mexican Nihilist Society: To restore that which is sacred in life

Energy alone is able to change form. Among the states in which energy can exist are mass and light. Mass can be called potential, cold, solid, etc. Light can be called kinetic, warm, fluid. When our grandparents saw these beautiful accomplishments, they perceived that all things are related to each other. And thus they understood that everything else on our planet has these dualities, including we ourselves. So, every particle in our bodies was once part of the nascent universe. For them, we humans were not some kind of extraterrestrials. We are but part of this energy and movement: the solar system. In turn, the solar system is one molecule in the galaxy, and our galaxy, likewise of the universe. Our ancestors named this universe Our Creator Ometeotl. As a result the members of the community of Anahuac observed the cycles that govern our planet, all the motions and reactions that are Ometeotl."

It's hard to fathom why anyone would find this threatening. "Sophomoric" is the word that comes to mind. It smacks of university students with too much time on their hands and not enough upper-level courses on their transcripts. In any case I don't agree that this is a nationalist sentiment. If anything it seems to be transcendent, implying that all nations are one people, and that all people are merely a component of the universe. It is certainly not racist.

Ometeotl is an Aztec god of duality: he has both a masculine and feminine persona. He is a perfect mascot for a philosophy that stresses duality.

Anahuac is the Aztec language name of a location in pre-Columbian Mexico, but the name is said to also occur in other related languages of the Indians of the southwestern USA, suggesting a legend that goes back thousands of years into the diaspora of the first "Amerind" wave of migrants into the Americas from Siberia ca. 15,000BCE. This unremarkable oral history of preliterate nomadic tribes is consistent with the Aztecs' legend about arriving in central Mexico after a long trek that started more or less in southern California.

The name Anahuac (like another name for the Aztec homeland, Aztlán) has been co-opted by extremist groups agitating for a reunification of former Mexican land taken by the U.S. by military force--a movement that gets a lot of press but does not have the support to warrant being taken seriously. I see no indication that the Mexican Nihilist Society has any connection to this movement; they just happen to also find charm in the symbology of the name Anahuac.

 

There is more than one "Chicano Power" movement. Some of them use "la raza" as a rallying cry, some of them are racist, and some of them fall into both categories. This thread was started with a reference to a specific movement, the Mexican Nihilist Society. The phrase "la raza" does not appear anywhere in the quote that was posted and not only do I not find anything remotely racist in it, but if anything its philosophy is transcendent and anti-racist.

Chicano Power is a phenomenon of second-generation Mexican-Americans in their late teens and early twenties, the kids who wake up in their university dormitory one morning exclaiming, "My god, my parents never even taught me to speak Spanish." Most of them seem to outgrow it in adulthood without passing it on to their own children, who by the third generation are thoroughly assimilated.

 

I lived in the Southwest for most of my life, I speak Spanish, I've hung out with Chicanos since they called themselves Mexicans (I was the only Anglo in an East L.A. rock band), and the last time I was in L.A. I tracked down the store named Aztlán and chatted with the people who run it (in perfect English).

For the last five years I've lived in the Washington DC area and I know people who are active in both Maryland and Virginia politics. I was practically attacked by pig-lovin' rednecks for speaking out in sympathy for the family of the teenager who was killed by a Fairfax County cop over a $30 dollar pancake house tab and the family of the optometrist who was killed by another Fairfax County cop for running a gambling operation--but not the traditional all-American Friday night police poker game. You can't live here and not know all about Senator Allen's "macaca" gaffe and the furor about the proposed elevated Metro railway over Tyson's Corner or the feud between northern and southern Virginia. I also cheered Montgomery County police chief Moose who caught the Beltway Snipers and tried to create an I Heart Moose bumper sticker but couldn't get it to market fast enough.

I've been a linguist for fifty years and my slant on anthropology is identifiably based in language history, something a number of members have commented on, often critically. My unremarkable and uncontroversial knowledge of the dawn of agriculture is no greater than what you could pull off of a Google search in five minutes.

Nonetheless, some of my understanding of prehistory comes from reading the daily paper. The Washington Post covered the discovery of figs as the earliest known cultivated crop last year. I still have the February 23 front page article on my desk reporting the discovery of a tribe of chimpanzees in Senegal who have been observed building spears to hunt small game; just haven't gotten around to sharing that one yet.

 

Well, you know what Abe Lincoln said: "I'm writing you a long letter because I don't have time to write a short one."

I don't study assiduously, so much as remember things I've already learned.

I appreciate the constructive criticism.