La Causa Salt Lake City

I Am Joaquin

by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales

Yo soy Joaquín,
perdido en un mundo de confusión:
I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,
confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers have lost the economic battle
and won the struggle of cultural survival.
And now! I must choose between the paradox of
victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,
or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.
Yes, I have come a long way to nowhere,
unwillingly dragged by that monstrous, technical,
industrial giant called Progress and Anglo success….
I look at myself.
I watch my brothers.
I shed tears of sorrow. I sow seeds of hate.
I withdraw to the safety within the circle of life –
MY OWN PEOPLE
I am Cuauhtémoc, proud and noble,
leader of men, king of an empire civilized
beyond the dreams of the gachupín Cortés,
who also is the blood, the image of myself.
I am the Maya prince.
I am Nezahualcóyotl, great leader of the Chichimecas.
I am the sword and flame of Cortes the despot
And I am the eagle and serpent of the Aztec civilization.
I owned the land as far as the eye
could see under the Crown of Spain,
and I toiled on my Earth and gave my Indian sweat and blood
for the Spanish master who ruled with tyranny over man and
beast and all that he could trample
But…THE GROUND WAS MINE.
I was both tyrant and slave.
As the Christian church took its place in God’s name,
to take and use my virgin strength and trusting faith,
the priests, both good and bad, took–
but gave a lasting truth that Spaniard Indian Mestizo
were all God’s children.
And from these words grew men who prayed and fought
for their own worth as human beings, for that
GOLDEN MOMENT of FREEDOM.
I was part in blood and spirit of that courageous village priest
Hidalgo who in the year eighteen hundred and ten
rang the bell of independence and gave out that lasting cry–
El Grito de Dolores
“Que mueran los gachupines y que viva la Virgen de Guadalupe….”
I sentenced him who was me I excommunicated him, my blood.
I drove him from the pulpit to lead a bloody revolution for him and me….
I killed him.
His head, which is mine and of all those
who have come this way,
I placed on that fortress wall
to wait for independence. Morelos! Matamoros! Guerrero!
all companeros in the act, STOOD AGAINST THAT WALL OF INFAMY
to feel the hot gouge of lead which my hands made.
I died with them … I lived with them …. I lived to see our country free.
Free from Spanish rule in eighteen-hundred-twenty-one.
Mexico was free??
The crown was gone but all its parasites remained,
and ruled, and taught, with gun and flame and mystic power.
I worked, I sweated, I bled, I prayed,
and waited silently for life to begin again.
I fought and died for Don Benito Juarez, guardian of the Constitution.
I was he on dusty roads on barren land as he protected his archives
as Moses did his sacraments.
He held his Mexico in his hand on
the most desolate and remote ground which was his country.
And this giant little Zapotec gave not one palm’s breadth
of his country’s land to kings or monarchs or presidents of foriegn powers.
I am Joaquin.
I rode with Pancho Villa,
crude and warm, a tornado at full strength,
nourished and inspired by the passion and the fire of all his earthy people.
I am Emiliano Zapata.
“This land, this earth is OURS.”
The villages, the mountains, the streams
belong to Zapatistas.
Our life or yours is the only trade for soft brown earth and maize.
All of which is our reward,
a creed that formed a constitution
for all who dare live free!
“This land is ours . . .
Father, I give it back to you.
Mexico must be free. . . .”
I ride with revolutionists
against myself.
I am the Rurales,
coarse and brutal,
I am the mountian Indian,
superior over all.
The thundering hoof beats are my horses. The chattering machine guns
are death to all of me:
Yaqui
Tarahumara
Chamala
Zapotec
Mestizo
Español.
I have been the bloody revolution,
The victor,
The vanquished.
I have killed
And been killed.
I am the despots Díaz
And Huerta
And the apostle of democracy,
Francisco Madero.
I am
The black-shawled
Faithfulwomen
Who die with me
Or live
Depending on the time and place.
I am faithful, humble Juan Diego,
The Virgin of Guadalupe,
Tonantzín, Aztec goddess, too.
I rode the mountains of San Joaquín.
I rode east and north
As far as the Rocky Mountains,
And
All men feared the guns of
Joaquín Murrieta.
I killed those men who dared
To steal my mine,
Who raped and killed my love
My wife.
Then I killed to stay alive.
I was Elfego Baca,
living my nine lives fully.
I was the Espinoza brothers
of the Valle de San Luis.
All were added to the number of heads that in the name of civilization
were placed on the wall of independence, heads of brave men
who died for cause or principle, good or bad.
Hidalgo! Zapata!
Murrieta! Espinozas!
Are but a few.
They dared to face
The force of tyranny
Of men who rule by deception and hypocrisy.
I stand here looking back,
And now I see the present,
And still I am a campesino,
I am the fat political coyote–
I,
Of the same name,
Joaquín,
In a country that has wiped out
All my history,
Stifled all my pride,
In a country that has placed a
Different weight of indignity upon my age-old burdened back.
Inferiority is the new load . . . .
The Indian has endured and still
Emerged the winner,
The Mestizo must yet overcome,
And the gachupín will just ignore.
I look at myself
And see part of me
Who rejects my father and my mother
And dissolves into the melting pot
To disappear in shame.
I sometimes
Sell my brother out
And reclaim him
For my own when society gives me
Token leadership
In society’s own name.
I am Joaquín,
Who bleeds in many ways.
The altars of Moctezuma
I stained a bloody red.
My back of Indian slavery
Was stripped crimson
From the whips of masters
Who would lose their blood so pure
When revolution made them pay,
Standing against the walls of retribution.
Blood has flowed from me on every battlefield between
campesino, hacendado,
slave and master and revolution.
I jumped from the tower of Chapultepec
into the sea of fame–
my country’s flag
my burial shroud–
with Los Niños,
whose pride and courage
could not surrender
with indignity
their country’s flag
to strangers . . . in their land.
Now I bleed in some smelly cell from club or gun or tyranny.
I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger
Cut my face and eyes,
As I fight my way from stinking barrios
To the glamour of the ring
And lights of fame
Or mutilated sorrow.
My blood runs pure on the ice-caked
Hills of the Alaskan isles,
On the corpse-strewn beach of Normandy,
The foreign land of Korea
And now Vietnam.
Here I stand
Before the court of justice,
Guilty
For all the glory of my Raza
To be sentenced to despair.
Here I stand,
Poor in money,
Arrogant with pride,
Bold with machismo,
Rich in courage
And
Wealthy in spirit and faith.
My knees are caked with mud.
My hands calloused from the hoe. I have made the Anglo rich,
Yet
Equality is but a word–
The Treaty of Hidalgo has been broken
And is but another threacherous promise.
My land is lost
And stolen,
My culture has been raped.
I lengthen the line at the welfare door
And fill the jails with crime.
These then are the rewards
This society has
For sons of chiefs
And kings
And bloody revolutionists,
Who gave a foreign people
All their skills and ingenuity
To pave the way with brains and blood
For those hordes of gold-starved strangers,
Who
Changed our language
And plagiarized our deeds
As feats of valor
Of their own.
They frowned upon our way of life
and took what they could use.
Our art, our literature, our music, they ignored–
so they left the real things of value
and grabbed at their own destruction
by their greed and avarice.
They overlooked that cleansing fountain of
nature and brotherhood
which is Joaquín.
The art of our great señores,
Diego Rivera,
Siqueiros,
Orozco, is but another act of revolution for
the salvation of mankind.
Mariachi music, the heart and soul
of the people of the earth,
the life of the child,
and the happiness of love.
The corridos tell the tales
of life and death,
of tradition,
legends old and new, of joy
of passion and sorrow
of the people–who I am.
I am in the eyes of woman,
sheltered beneath
her shawl of black,
deep and sorrowful eyes
that bear the pain of sons long buried or dying,
dead on the battlefield or on the barbed wire of social strife.
Her rosary she prays and fingers endlessly
like the family working down a row of beets
to turn around and work and work.
There is no end.
Her eyes a mirror of all the warmth
and all the love for me,
and I am her
and she is me.
We face life together in sorrow,
anger, joy, faith and wishful
thoughts.
I shed the tears of anguish
as I see my children disappear
behind the shroud of mediocrity,
never to look back to remember me.
I am Joaquín.
I must fight
and win this struggle
for my sons, and they
must know from me
who I am.
Part of the blood that runs deep in me
could not be vanquished by the Moors.
I defeated them after five hundred years,
and I have endured.
Part of the blood that is mine
has labored endlessly four hundred
years under the heel of lustful
Europeans.
I am still here!

I have endured in the rugged mountains
Of our country
I have survived the toils and slavery of the fields.
I have existed
In the barrios of the city
In the suburbs of bigotry
In the mines of social snobbery
In the prisons of dejection
In the muck of exploitation
And
In the fierce heat of racial hatred.
And now the trumpet sounds,
The music of the people stirs the
Revolution.
Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.
And in all the fertile farmlands,
the barren plains,
the mountain villages,
smoke-smeared cities,
we start to MOVE.
La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
Latino!
Chicano!
Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
And
Sing the same.
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
But my spirit is strong,
My faith unbreakable,
My blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!

Excerpts from Reform or Revolution

“The present State is, first of all, an organisation of the ruling class. It assumes functions favouring social developments specifically because, and in the measure that, these interests and social developments coincide, in a general fashion, with the interests of the dominant class. Labour legislation is enacted as much in the immediate interest of the capitalist class as in the interest of society in general. But this harmony endures only up to a certain point of capitalist development. When capitalist development has reached a certain level, the interests of the bourgeoisie, as a class, and the needs of economic progress begin to clash even in the capitalist sense. We believe that this phase has already begun. It shows itself in two extremely important phenomena of contemporary social life: on the one hand, the policy of tariff barriers, and on the other, militarism. These two phenomena have played an indispensable, and in that sense a progressive and revolutionary role in the history of capitalism. Without tariff protection the development of large industry would have been impossible in several countries. But now the situation is different…“

“Konrad Schmidt declares that the conquest of a social-democratic majority in Parliament leads directly to the gradual “socialisation” of society. Now, the democratic forms of political life are without a question a phenomenon expressing clearly the evolution of the State in society. They constitute, to that extent, a move toward a socialist transformation. But the conflict within the capitalist State, described above, manifests itself even more emphatically in modern parliamentarism. Indeed, in accordance with its form, parliamentarism serves to express, within the organisation of the State, the interests of the whole society. But what parliamentarism expresses here is capitalist society, that is to say, a society in which capitalist interests predominate. In this society, the representative institutions, democratic in form, are in content the instruments of the interests of the ruling class. This manifests itself in a tangible fashion in the fact that as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie, and by its State representatives. That is why the idea of the conquest of a parliamentary reformist majority is a calculation which, entirely in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism, pre-occupies itself only with one side – the formal side – of democracy, but does not take into account the other side, its real content. All in all, parliamentarism is not a directly socialist element impregnating gradually the whole capitalist society. It is, on the contrary, a specific form of the bourgeois class State, helping to ripen and develop the existing antagonisms of capitalism.“

DREAM Movement: Challenges With the Social Justice Elite’s Military Option Arguments and the Immigration Reform “Leaders”

Tuesday 21 September 2010

by: Jonathan Perez, Jorge Guitierrez, Nancy Meza, and Neidi Dominguez Zamorano, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: Ruben Hernandez / DreamActivist)

In the history of the civil rights movements, lots of different movements were born, whether they are environmentalist movements, women movements, LGBT movements, Immigrant movements, worker movements, etc… all these groups seek the same thing, liberation.  Liberation from the oppressive forces which seeks to ignore them, from the oppressive institutionalized structures of power that seek to separate these groups from the benefits that the majority reap, from the ability of these groups to empower themselves to shape themselves, to stop the status quo from ‘shaping’ them.

As an advocate and fighter for the immigrant cause, and as a Chicano looking to empower other Chican@s, I would like to tell my brothers and sisters that the time to unite is now. As we face a stronger more oppressive force in the legislature, a force that is attempting to treat immigrants as less than human, a force that is trying to define who we are allowed to love, a force that seeks to keep laborers earning less than livable wages while taking away more of their rights, all while destroying the future land that our future generations must live off of, we must come together even more, in unity, to fight back.

For this fact, I would like to have this one-on-one talk to all my Chicano and Immigrant brothers. I understand the homophobia that exists within our community, a community where machismo defines whether you will be the one calling shots or the one being called the shots on.  But the time in which we let this image of the traditional macho define us must come to an end. Machismo doesn’t demonstrate how tough you are, it only highlights your own weaknesses and your own insecurities, much like homophobia does.  As our machismo begins to be threatened, we often find ourselves putting down our own homosexual brothers, but we cheer our homosexual sisters on. This is because of our own insecurities with ourselves and the fact that we view our Gay brothers as a threat to our manhood because we fear that we might be gay, whereas our lesbian sisters are not a threat and are not viewed this way. In this same way, machismo has come into play against our own sisters, and as males we have a responsibility to recognize the male privilege that we are born with and accommodated with due to institutionalized factors. We are often afraid that our Machismo is going to be taken away. For this same reason we become somewhat of an oppressor towards our own brothers and sisters. Liberation comes with the ability to separate our mindset and our actions from those of the oppressor, and thus all the insecurities that we have and the fears that we have that our own  manhood or machismo is being threatened needs to be eliminated.

As we mature into adults, it is our responsibility to not only eliminate racist vocabulary from the younger generations mouths, but also from our own mouths. Vocabulary that is demeaning to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and our straight sisters as well. Much too often we hear the term “GAY’ being wrongly used to describe something we disagree with, or something we think is stupid. When used in this context, this becomes as bad as calling my black brothers the “N” word, our our Latino Brothers Spic’s, it makes us no better than the oppressor.

As revolutionaries, we have to recognize that our struggles are all in the same. They are liberation movements just like our movement. Our LGBT brothers and sisters face a tougher liberation struggle than most of us ever will, for the simple fact that sometimes not even their family members support them. So it is with great love and understanding that we should seek to help our LGBT brothers and sisters, and our sisters as well, as they continue the battle for liberation.  A true revolutionary will fight for all oppressed people and not make one movement more important than another. The woman’s rights movements, the LGBT movements, the environmentalist movements, Labor movement and Immigrant movements are all in the same. As revolutionaries we must be able to step out from what we believe is the most important battle of the time, and instead focus on the common oppressor that we all share at the same time. No movement is above the other, and as oppressed people and revolutionaries, we have a duty to never do as our oppressor does and make our personal agenda the most important.

All power to the people.

WE WANT FREEDOM
All oppressed people have the right to fully and unconditionally determine their own destiny. We believe that the people will not be free until we are able to determine our own destinies.

WE DEMAND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO SELF-SUSTAINABILITY
We believe the people have a right to full employment without discriminatory policies and practices, fair treatment, and fair living wages.

WE DEMAND AN END TO PATRIARCHY
We believe that all people have the right to control their lives, bodies and destinies. We believe that the patriarchal system has created an environment of discrimination against women and LGBTQ people. We believe that balance between male and female forces should exist in order to help everyone reach their full potential.

WE DEMAND JUSTICE
We believe that people should be tried by a court of their own peers based on age, race, gender, class, and/or migratory status. We believe in the right of people to have a public defender assigned to the defendant at the defendants own discretion. We believe that every tier of the justice system should be based on rehabilitation and not incarceration.

WE DEMAND AN END TO ABUSE OF AUTHORITY BY POLICE
We believe that the police is currently acting as an occupying force in our communities as opposed to being members of the community. We believe that the police force legitimizes abuse, racial profiling, harassment, terror, and provocation because of its position of authority.

WE DEMAND AN EDUCATION SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS EVERYONE TO REACH THEIR FULL POTENTIAL
We believe that every individual has the right to a free education until that individual decides that they have reached their full potential. We believe that an educated society is beneficial to its overall welfare. We believe that the mainstream education system and structure should be multicultural and should educate people on the different cultures equally to allow for knowledge of self.

WE DEMAND AN END TO THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
We believe that the capitalist system has opened the doors to the destruction of environment for the benefit of profit and not the benefit of the earth and its inhabitants. We believe that all measures must be taken by government and individuals to meet the needs of all people without taking the ability from future generations to also meet their needs.

WE DEMAND FULL LEGALIZATION FOR ALL IMMIGRANTS
We believe that as long as there is an economic demand for immigrant labor, and as long as there is a survival need by immigrants, there will be no border security, border fence, or border wall strong enough to stop immigration.

WE DEMAND AN END TO OVERT AND COVERT RACISM IN GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS
We know that racism exists. We believe that institutionalized racism is the cause for many modern forms of the oppression. We believe that ignoring the racist character of these institutions only allows for the continuation of discriminatory practices towards people of color. We believe in the right for everybody, regardless of race, to be given the same opportunities to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.