From our own Richard Rodriguez ( de reciente acá se está haciendo muy relevante el compa que todos antes odiaban; everybody in the past little Xicano hate object seems to be becoming more and more relevant in American discourse, at times, I think, that he is the last real essayist America has, and he’s Chicano too!)
A great many Americans are alarmed by how much of Mexico is within the United States – the tongue, the tacos, the soccer balls, the street gangs, the Spanish Catholic Masses, the work force swarming into New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The extent of the Mexicanization of U.S. culture renders any notion of a fortified border irrelevant. Twenty-five years ago, Joel Garreau wrote “The Nine Nations of North America,” in which he described a nation he called “MexAmerica” – a puzzle to both Washington and Mexico City – encompassing much of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico as well as Baja California. A quarter-century later, one is struck by how prescient Garreau was but also how modest his forecast was.
Aztlán as a metaphorical place to call home – From el Universal, Mexico News.
A TOOL OF LIBERATION What it has meant, in short, is an inspirational tool of liberation – a “metaphoric center place” in the words of the book’s two lead authors – for a Chicano population historically repressed at worst and ignored at best. Reviving the idea of Aztlán in the 1960s and 1970s not only reinforced for Chicanos a sense of where they came from, it allowed them to still be there.
Aztlán, then, is today not so much a mapable geographic location as it is an allegorical construct that, as lead authors and the exhibit’s curators Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, tell us, “represents a place of origin, a point of emergence from the past, and a focus of longing.” Aztlán’s rediscovery coincided with early Chicano activism, which was led by (but not limited to) Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize California farmworkers.
“Aztlán – as a symbol, an allegory and a real and invented tradition – served as a cultural and spiritual framework that gave Chicanos a sense of belonging and a link to a rich and extensive history,” Fields and Zamudio-Taylor write. As valuable as the point is, the language used to make it is unfor tunately typical of much of the text in “Road to Aztlán,”