A Trip to Bustamante's Latino Bookstore Palm Springs, Ca

The guy who made the video is clearly just another angry idiot, probably a member of the Minutevermin. He's inarticulate, not very knowledgeable, and was not prepared for the assignment which he apparently assigned to himself. His knowledge of history is about on par with the average American, which means it's dismal.

I lived in L.A. for most of my life and I've been in dozens of Latino bookstores and other shops. They range from conservative to liberal, religious to political, just like shops run by Euro-Americans. There are a lot of stores on Hollywood Boulevard that stock posters and other merchandise he would find far more offensive than a photo of Pancho Villa.

Every revolutionary kills people because every revolution is a war and wars kill people. A lot of Americans died in the Mexican revolution because a lot of Americans took sides and went down to fight in it. If you volunteer to fight in a war you're accepting the risk of getting killed.

What the idiot didn't mention, and probably doesn't know, is what Pancho Villa's revolutionary movement has turned into during the last century. It is actually now called the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partida Revolucionara Institucional): the infamous PRI. It's as conservative as the Republicans or the Soviet Communists. The country is run by rich people and the poor people--especially the Indians--are treated like dirt.

The revolution failed and old Mexico simply reinvented itself. Pancho Villa would puke.

"Here comes the new boss. Same as the old boss."

 

What "difference"? As I said, I didn't see anything in there that I haven't seen in a hundred other bookstores in greater Los Angeles. It almost looked like a franchise. "Look Mabel, that's the poster I had in my dorm room forty years ago, and hey they still remember Cesar Chávez, how nostalgic." Anybody looking for the tools of a revolution would hardly shop there.

 

Do you live in California? You talk like an outsider. Our politics are always full of crazy people. We just find them entertaining. Jerry Brown as governor was a real hoot. The Lieutenant Governor of California has very little power, much less than someone like Cheney, who really is scary. It's not like Bustamante can actually accomplish anything. The chance of him becoming governor is about zero and any party that puts him on their ticket is committing suicide. Frankly I think Arnold has learned politics in a hurry by having to back-pedal from his mistakes, and it will take someone of legendary proportions to beat him. We love actors, after all we're the people who gave you Ronald Reagan.

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Every group has its radical fringe of crazy young people--just look at PETA or the Southern Baptists. The Aztlan "movement" is just a predictable pendulum-swing by second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants who woke up one morning and "realized" that they had "lost touch with their roots." None of them is actually stupid enough to want to join Mexico, live under its bourgeois government that comically calls itself "revolutionary," and become impoverished. And few of them are stupid enough to think they could create an independent nation and make it work--remember that they watched Texas try that from close range.

Young people of every ethnic group get very passionate in California and do a lot of stupid crap. I certainly did my share back in the 1960s, when the "Chicano power" movement, as it was then called, was just building up steam and a lot of us civil-rights demonstrators kind of supported them because we were young and stupid and didn't think things through very well. Personally I prefer that to life here in the Washington area, where nobody ever gets emotional about anything. It's like both the men and women are "Stepford wives." Downright spooky.

 

La palabra se escribe ese.