Annotations for Subject-headings: Chicano Movement

Latino USA commentator, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, is based in California. In Brownsville, Texas, a group of Chicanos and elders from Indigenous populations in the US and Mexico gathered recently for what they called the 17th Encuentro of the National Chicano Human Rights Council. The group is part of a movement which began in the 60s to help Mexican Americans reconnect with their Indigenous roots. Today, the movement is taking a new turn involving Chicanos in a spiritual reawakening foretold in ancient Indian myths, which caused them to action on human rights and the environment. From Brownsville, Lillie Rodulfo and Lucy Edwards prepared this report.

[natural sound] This weekend, council members have brought their families to camp on the grounds of the Casa de Colores. The multicultural center sits on 360 acres of prime farmland along the U.S.-Mexican border order.

[conch chell sounds] With the sound of a conch shell, a Mexican shaman, Andre Segura, calls a group to worship in a sacred dance of the Indigenous that the Aztecs have practiced for thousands of years. They also are called to reunite with the Indians of Mexico in their common struggle for equal rights. Elders like Segura say when Chicanos answer the call of the Danza, they are joining in a revival of the Indigenous spirit that is happening throughout the Americas. [Ceremony natural sounds] "This reawakening of the spiritual traditions," the elders say, "was foretold by Indian leaders centuries ago. Danzas and other Indigenous ceremonies carry a strong message of preserving the earth and all its people."

Andre Segura's Danza Conchera contains the essence of Aztec or Toltec thought in the entire worldview.

Chicano author Carlos Flores explains what happens when a Chicano worships in the sacred tradicion of the Danza.

When the Mexican-American decides to call himself a Chicano, basically what he's doing is declaring publicly that he's an Indian. In effect, what we're seeing here then is Mexican-Americans through their connection with an Indian shaman, I guess you could say, practicing the sacred.

Susana Renteria of the Austin-based PODER, People Organized in Defense of Earth and its Resources, offered passionate testimony at the conference. Her group has worked hard to focus attention on environmental racism in the Mexican-American communities in Austin.

They take toxic chemicals and inject it into Mother Earth. They inject it. It's like when you put heroin in your veins, and you're contaminating your whole blood system. That's what they're doing to Mother Earth. The water is the blood in her veins, and they're injecting these chemicals into, and they wonder why we have so much illnesses, why we have so much despair.

[meeting natural sounds] The council heard hours of testimony like this on a wide range of issues, bringing into focus everyday realities for Chicanos, such as the disproportionate number of Mexican American prisoners sentenced to die and the alarmingly high incidents of babies born in the Rio Grande Valley with incomplete or missing brains. Opata Elder Gustavo Gutierrez of Arizona, one of the founders of the council, offers this prophetic warning.

The moment that we start losing our relationship between Mother Earth and ourselves, then is when we get into all this trouble, and I think that what has happened to the people that are in power, they have the multinational corporation. They have lost their feeling about what is their relationship between the Earth, and the only thing they can think about is how to make money, and once that is the main focus, how to make money, then I feel that we're really in a lot of trouble.

[Danza natural sounds] The shaman, Andre Segura, says, "The Indigenous ceremonies that are part of every council meeting provide a spiritual foundation to unite Chicanos, as they speak out for the rights and the rights of all Indigenous."

Buscar dientro de su corazon, dientro de su-

Search your heart and soul as to how you feel about the Indigenous. The Chicano roots come from Mexico, and accepting this will unite the Chicano people.

[Singing, natual sounds] The Chicano Human Rights Council was formed in the 1980s to address the human rights violations in the southwest. The council teaches Chicanos how to document abuses that affect their community. The testimony they hear in Brownsville will be presented at international forums, such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. (Singing) For Latino USA, with Lucy Edwards, I'm Lily Rodulfo. (Singing)

They live there in that mountain, in that magical mountain, and they believe that it was the abode of the gods, the good God [inaudible 00:24:38] and the bad God [inaudible 00:24:41], tonight we have been talking about family and we said back there, families understand one another. They work together, they fight together, and at times we have fought. But tonight we're together. And I wanted to comment on the fact that as I was looking around, I said, the Puerto Ricans that are being honored today are bringing the Black into the group, which is a very good thing for us to do. Sometimes we forget that that race is also part of us. I wanted to say that because sometimes you look around and you say, "well, you're the only one."

We must teach the Anglo world the meaning of cultural fusion. We must teach the Anglo world the meaning of cultural unity because we have it in our bloods and in our families. Uno saleprieto otro saleguero.

Playwright Luis Valdez is the founder of El Teatro Campesino and recognized as the father of Modern Chicano Theatre.

I stand before you as an Indio, as un Indito, to celebrate the literature of our people. I don't look cultured, I look illiterate. I have been asked as a grown man whether I can read, but that's my advantage because I'm always underestimated. People never know what I'm going to come up with. [Laughter] Así es que cuidado.

We built the pyramids because we were mathematicians and we were brain surgeons and we were poets, and my people have been in Sonora and Arizona and in Aztlan for 40,000 years. So I embrace America and I know that we've all been taught in our schools that the name came from Americo Vespucci, cartographer of the new World. That wasn't the only place that America came from. The Peruvian, Las Peruanos, Peru had a name for this place. They had a leader called Tupac Amaru, which means the feathered serpent. What did Tupac Amaru called this place? Amaruca. Amaruca.

The Mayas had a name for this place too. They called it Americua, the land of the four winds because they had a myth that here in the Americas, in Americua, the four winds came together, the four great roads, the white road, the black road, the yellow road, and the red road, and they all met at the naval of the universe, the spot that joins heaven and Earth. That is the Mayan vision, and that is my vision of our raza, of our American raza, of our Hispanity, of our American Hispanity. Asi es que, Thank you. Que viva la raza, que viva America.

Playwright and film director Luis Valdez.

This year there's been an unprecedented interest on the part of East coast publishers in Latino themes and literature. St. Martin's Press, for instance, has come out with its first Chicano mystery novel, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz by Manuel Ramos. The novel follows this story of a middle-aged Chicano lawyer unraveling the mystery of an old homeboy's death in the sixties. Juan Felipe Herrera has our review.

It is late night Denver. We have the booze thirst for one more soul search in a city packed with blue blood prosecutors and urban developers. We are after love too. In the brown buffoon stance of middle-aged Luis Montez, we follow the drowsy meditations of this ex legal age Chicano lawyer, an accidentally trip into an old homeboy's death, Rocky Ruiz. In the sparse language and short jabs of 21 chapters, we listened to Montez decipher Rocky's last days in Denver's Aztlan, the mythical land and moment of Chicano's 60s unity. Montez doesn't look back willingly. He seeks this home base by accident. In broken desks and hidden journals, he uncovers the old student walkout days, Chicano Power chance, and Red Beret rallies. Montez is more interested in finding his own life center at Lawley's Taco Shack over beans and bourbon, slouch and sport bars, or in his collapsing legal practice, he half digests the city machine.

He doles over his divorce, his abandoned kids, and Jesus, his fading father. Montez feels the grip of hooded men and the heat of racial slurs as he plays back Rocky's killing. Yet all Montez can do is whimper. He spills nostalgia and spits barrio desolation until he traces the sudden death of another companero, Tino Pacheco. Tino's death leads him to Rocky's last night and breaks open the trap door to Los Guerrilleros, a tight-knit Chicano homeboy crew of the 60s led by Rocky Ruiz. Finding Rocky requires fumbling through romance, sex, and the voices of wives and stark eye Chicanas. Montez meets Teresa Fuentes, a Chicana with multiple names and guises. By day, the only minority lawyer working for an upscale firm. By night, a silvery persona with a secret assignment in Denver that will unravel the mystery around Rocky's death. Montez is condemned to seek who killed Rocky Ruiz. Why is the crew of the old Movimiento Gang being quickly taken out in cold blood?

Montez finds the answers in shreds. The truer keys come from the private knowledge and power that Teresa and her mother, Margarita, possess. Although the figure of Rocky Ruiz at times appears utopian and forced, this is outweighed by the complex development of Teresa's and Margarita's voice. Manuel Ramos writes a ballad where we must discover the hero and the heroine, where we must rise through a post-modern turf of laws, cultural rupture, and reassess the meanings of a bygone social movement that only comes to us in memory fevers in two-fisted blows against the 21st century in the elegance of versions of women in male-centered networks. Who is this lawyer dude Montez? Maybe it is not Rocky. We are after. Maybe we are looking for the 90s hombre, alone now. No longer surrounded by his homeboy vatos. No longer insulated by his self-made narratives for justice and revolucion. Ramos asks us, "Who will search for him? Who and where is he now?"

Juan Felipe Herrera is a writer and professor in the Chicano and Latin American studies department at California State University in Fresno.

This poem was written for Elizabeth Ramos, who upon discovering that she was HIV positive, became very active in the fight against aids and who died November 6th, 1988. Death by Association for Elizabeth Ramos.

[Background--music--symphony] I never knew her when she was healthy, when she could run or walk in the sun or rain. I never knew her when she was able and willing to play with her children, feed them or cloth them. In fact, I never really knew her, never met her or even talked to her. But I heard her once in an interview and cheered her at a rally, listened to her dreams that she so clearly stated, "I want to buy a house. I want to go to Disney World and always in between the words I want to live and see my children grow." A long time ago, unbeknownst to her, she came across death by association and her world was never the same again. In the end, thanks to her, we come across life by association and in the end, our world will never be the same either.

Marta Valentin is a poet, musician, and radio producer living in Boston.