June 02, 2004

Memo From Mexico, By  Allan Wall

Who Is Jose Angel Gutierrez—And What Does He Want?

Jose Angel Gutierrez, [email him] political science professor and former head of the Mexican-American Studies Center at the University of Texas, Arlington, is a busy man.

Gutierrez was recently in Mexico City at the invitation of the Mexican government to participate in the binational Reconquista jamboree reported in my last column.

The very next day (April 30th, 2004), he was in Kansas City speaking at something called the “Latino Civil Rights Summit.”

There he boasted that:

“We are the future of America. Unlike any prior generation, we now have the critical mass. We’re going to Latinize this country.”

In a puff piece on the conference, Lewis W. Diuguid of the Kansas City Star reported that  

“Gutierrez said people from Mexico, Central and South America are not immigrating to the United States. They are simply migrating because this land had been theirs…Hispanics should never put up with others telling them to go back where they came from” [Hispanics will help build future of U.S., April 18th, 2004] [email Diuguid]

That argument, based on absurd historical claims, completely invalidates the existence of the U.S.A.

Gutierrez also discussed Hispanic demographics. He told the audience that half of the Hispanic population is under the age of 21—and that for every Latino who dies, 5 white people die!

Gutierrez has been saying this sort of thing for some time. Speaking in California in 1995, he said:

"The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we're a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights. What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We cannot—we will not—and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population." [listen here]

The same themes as Kansas City—a claim to U.S. territory, denial that the U.S. is a legitimate nation-state, exultation over Hispanic demographic growth.

If a white English-speaking American expresses displeasure over the prediction that his ethnic group (if present trends continue) is destined to lose its majority status, he will be called a “racist.”

But Hispanic activists publicly gloat over the increase of their ethnic group. Why isn’t that racist?

Who is Jose Angel Gutierrez ? He’s technically an American citizen, born in Crystal City, Texas in 1944—an example of the great National Question truth that, just because the cat has kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.

He is activist and lawyer, has served as county judge in Texas, and is an author who has penned such classics as A Chicano Manual On How To Handle Gringos. Since his youth, he has been active in the Chicano movement, and was one of the founders of MAYO, the Mexican American Youth Organization.

Texas Democratic Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez made some interesting comments about MAYO, entered in the Congressional Record, April 3rd, 1969:

"MAYO styles itself the embodiment of good and the Anglo-American as the incarnation of evil. That is not merely ridiculous, it is drawing fire from the deepest wellsprings of hate. The San Antonio leader of MAYO, Jose Angel Gutierrez, may think himself something of a hero, but he is, in fact, only a benighted soul if he believes that in the espousal of hatred he will find love. He is simply deluded if he believes that the wearing of fatigues . . . makes his followers revolutionaries . . . One cannot fan the flames of bigotry one moment and expect them to disappear the next.”  (Nativist and Racist Movements in the U.S. and their Aftermath, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, Henry A. Rhodes)

Back then, Gutierrez said

"We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him."

Later, Gutierrez told The San Antonio Express and News (April 11th, 1969) that the term “Gringo” referred to a bigoted and racist individual or institution. And “kill” just meant the elimination of the political, economic and social foundation of “the Gringo.”

Oh, well—that’s OK then!

Bottom line - Gutierrez wants gringos out of Texas.

Here are excerpts from an interview in 2000:

Q: “If the main goal (of the old Chicano movement) then was to reclaim Aztlan and control all the institutions of civil society, what is the main goal now?”

GUTIERREZ’ answer: “I think it is still the same thing. You hear the Hispanic Republicans talk about the same thing. … this idea has even been co-opted by the Republicans. ….The Hispanic Democrats and Mexican-American Democrats and Tejano Democrats, synonymous in Texas, they are doing the same thing….. ”

Q: “How are Mexican immigrants of today different from Mexican immigrants of decades ago?”

GUTIERREZ:” They are different in one salient aspect…they are keeping their Mexicanness. ..The Mexicanos that are coming today, even though they are political refugees and migrants returning to their homeland, are keeping their Mexicanness ... They are recreating Mexico here. I think they are doing it because of the sheer numbers. …”

(Fort Worth Star Telegram, October 18th, 2000)

Quite so. Isn’t that just what we’ve been saying here at VDARE.com? The interview continues:

Q: What is irredentism [ethnic nationalism], and what evidence do you see that it is happening?

Gutierrez:” The evidence is their display of their Mexicanness. …These folks now are engaged in active political activity in the U.S. which is unprecedented. They are truly binational citizens. It's not uncommon to see undocumented Mexicans protesting in front of INS in downtown Dallas. ….They have also now gotten dual citizenship. … [The] Chicano generation…only wanted to carve out half of [19th-century Mexico]…. These folks want it all. They want to recreate all of Mexico and join all of Mexico into one. And they are going to do that, even if it's just demographically… They are going to have political sovereignty over the Southwest and many parts of the Midwest. ”

Jose Angel Gutierrez is not a madman. Gutierrez is a man who has dedicated his life to a cause.

And he now senses triumph is at hand.

He’s been doing this in George W. Bush’s Texas, at a university for which Bush had ultimate responsibility. (UT is a state university, its Board of Regents is appointed by the Governor.)

We ask, not for the first time: What is Bush thinking?

American citizen Allan Wall lives and works legally in Mexico, where he holds an FM-2 residency and work permit, but serves six weeks a year with the Texas Army National Guard, in a unit composed almost entirely of Americans of Mexican ancestry. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his FRONTPAGEMAG.COM articles are archived here; his website is here. Readers can contact Allan Wall at allan39@prodigy.net.mx.