space + time = will

The challenge of past generations to this structure of force now over us, called colonialism was uttered when as Fanon wrote concerning those past struggles “they fought as well they could ... and if the echoes of their struggle have not resounded in the international arena … this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time.” This war between the descendents of European colonizers, their lackey’s and the indigenous inhabitants of this land is ongoing and in the end we will prevail. The only question that remains is whether our world will be sick and twisted copy of the European legacy that has dragged and mutilated our planet to the brink of extinction or a nation built on the principles of sustaining life.

Franz Fanon, the intellectual ambassador of African anti-colonization has shown through his work the necessity of opposing our oppressors to whatever extent we deem necessary in order to end the colonial project. However, he warns repeatedly against eliminating the colonizer simply to replace them or recreate their structure by our inaction, “If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America in to a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better that the most gifted among us.”

Fanon understood the colonial dilemma facing so-called third world people then and now. He clearly saw and experienced how indigenous cultures under colonialism begin to dissipate as the assault by the colonial system is focused on every facet of who they are as a people. This attack on the fabric of our civilizations is what makes us become jealous puppets, dark shadows of our colonial masters, it is the cultural sickness that makes it possible for us to unwittingly duplicate their system of oppression. Again Fanon points out the dialectical nature of colonial oppression to those who will listen when he writes, “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip…by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed peoples and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” We must choose our own path by finding ways to restore a mental veiw of Xicanos as indigenous people in the Americas. Once the battle for this land is joined and it was joined full scale the day our first ancestors were slaughtered by European invaders there is no turning back, “when a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes” writes Fanon. This struggle is or becomes the main vehicle for developing the necessary power/force to challenge the power of the colonial state.
In his reading of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “Critique of Violence” Algerian born French philosopher Jacques Derrida asserts every society is initiated by the use of force. A supposition that can be easily supported with the creation of colonial nations; this force (Gewalt) , which upholds the law of society and establishes “the foundation … in a situation that one can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law; it always does so in violence.” It is exactly this idea that colonized people must examine closely. If all society is founded in force or violence, and certainly we see the truth of that in situation of indigenous people in the Americas, then what role can there possibly be for nonviolence to play in founding a new society, even if that non-violence is based in a determined struggle? How does a combination of these diametrically opposed philosophies contribute to the political power of indigenous peoples in the Americas?

What then is the source for creating this society creating force? We begin a discourse, search for truth in our choices and allow that truth to create an oppositional force to colonialism within the framework of our colonized minds. In the past this has created what some call revolutionary violence. However, it was revolutionary or transformative only to the extent it swept away the old oppressive system. Can the type of force (Gewalt), which Derrida and Benjamin define as “the dominance of legal power, the authorizing or authorized authority: the force of law” be exerted by nonviolent means? Derrida goes on to explain there are two different outcomes with the use of this type of force (Gewalt) which he calls a “distinction between the two kinds of violence of law, in relation to law: the founding violence, the one that institutes and posits law and the violence that preserves, the one that maintains, confirms, insures the permanence and enforceability of law.” Can indigenous people use a version of nonviolence as political defiance? Can non-violence rise to the level of “founding violence [Force/Gewalt], the one that institutes and posits law”?

We must strive for a transformative force that extends beyond anger and works itself into the fabric of national proposals. The idea we can make our lives and the lives of our people better by simply overthrowing our colonizers in some type of final cataclysmic conflict has had its day. Fanon tells us “history teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight along lines of nationalism,” This is an unconcluded struggle whose ending must be written by those within the Xicano movement.

It is vital to remember that we should strive to be according to Emiliano Zapata’s Plan de Ayala “partisans of principles rather than men." For to long our community has existed as personalists – we worship the leader, the strong man, the hero. Instead of accepting the responsibility for our own free choice we fall trap to the messianic ideal a person can deliver us from our bondage as a people. We fail to realize that way of thinking is bondage itself. To the extent it is possible we must all accept the charge of messianic deliverer. And by doing so accept the necessity of choice of deciding for us the ultimate course to nationhood and liberation. How this can be accomplished is actually the question we must find ways to as separate movements working toward common goals to articulate.

The idea of free choice within our indigenous politics is found within the practice of collective action, collective decision-making and building a popular front as an umbrella for an anti-colonialist movement. The biggest obstacle in the way of an even marginally successful Xicano nationalist movement with a growing indigenous philosophy has an unclear, romanticized vision of where and how this type of struggle begins. Taiaiake Alfred in his book “Wasase – indigenous pathways of action and freedom” tells us that options like armed struggle through Guerilla warfare are impractical, “it is clear that guerrilla and terrorist strategies are futile … violent revolt is simply not an intelligent and realistic approach to confronting the injustice we face,” While Alfred’s words are important, it is also important to understand a variety of organizational methodologies that may at one time or another be appropriate for the people to try. The challenge is whether as a people or nation we have the ability to enact these different methods, even in learning about guerilla warfare as an extreme example we come to understand that it is much more guns and fighting.

For Xicanos examining the words of revolutionary guerilla fighter Mao Tse Tung along with the modern analysis of an liberation theorist like Alfred and Adams is important, it is Mao who states simply but eloquently, “without a political goal guerrilla warfare must fail” for Xicanos engaged in indigenous liberation politics this one statement should shine a bright light on the necessity of political partying building organization. The nature of guerrilla warfare or what Mao calls revolutionary war is a “protracted one” the goal of the revolutionary is not to produce a quick military decision but rather “how to avoid a military decision … give way before the determined advance of the enemy, and, like the sea, close in again as the enemy passes,” according to Mao in the beginning of a revolution there are no pitched battles – there is merely a struggle for the minds and allegiance of the people through political education.

Because of the impoverished nature of Chinese society (and maybe to some extent Chinese culture itself) Mao choose to develop his revolutionary theory focusing on the three intangible aspects of warfare: space, time and will, “the basic premise of this theory is that political mobilization may be substituted for industrial mobilization” according to Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President John F. Kennedy, in his influential essay on the military theories of Mao Tse Tung .

Today, within this slowly emerging indigenous Xicano movement we suffer from a sense of unrealistic impatience about our roles and the activities we should be undertaking at this point in our liberation struggle. An important lesson from Katzenbach’s analysis of Mao’s guerrilla theory that places our own movement with in a proper lens of what constitutes appropriate action at the beginning of a revolution is about timing,

Mao’s military problem was how to organize space so that it could be made to yield time. His political problem was how to organized time so that could be made to yield will, that quality which makes willingness to sacrifice the order of the day … Mao’s real military problem was not that of getting the war over with, the question to which Western military thinkers have directed the greater part of their attention, but that of keeping it going.

Space + time = will is the equation Mao used to explain his theories of protracted warfare, and one that may well serve the needs of indigenous liberation movements today. For indigenous fighters in the America’s today even a basic understanding of Mao’s military theory tell us that while we consider ourselves at war, we have not lost, “only those willing to admit defeat can be defeat.” And while it may seem to some that war can only be conducted in a specific way it is evident through reading not only Mao, but other revolutionary theorists that war is at its very basic level an attack on the force of law Benjamin and Derrida spoke of earlier. It is an attempt to reconstitute that society, or as Derrida points out “war is in fact … a violence that serves to found law.”

Authoritarian measures instituted by the colonial system i.e. courts, police, social workers perpetuate the misery around us. They have as their basis our mental relationship with the colonized mindset and the perpetuation of colonialism within our personal and public affairs. We respond as a colonized people to this type of oppressive authority as a people because it is all we have ever known and we cannot conceive of a different system because we have an incomplete understanding of our role as indigenous people in the Americas. Albert Memmi a Tunisian philosopher who wrote extensively about the conditions of both the colonized and the colonizer said, “regardless of how soon or how violently the colonized rejects his situation, he will one day begin to overthrow his unliveable existence with the whole force of his oppressed personality.” (Memmi 62-63) The greatest danger our movement faces today is falling prey to the seductive force and philosophy of defeatist assimilation whether it is overt or not.

Our current structure within the Xicano movement is conveniently set up, running and allegedly functioning all around us. We unwittingly structure many of the changes we try to institute within the context of the current system of exploitation. This colonial mindset is so ingrained in our national psyche at this point the only hope toward any significant change in the way we see the world and deal with each other would come only after it was clearly articulate how a recovery of indigenous identity and nationalism would work and then begin to order the very identity and nation we have proposed. Law and our understanding of that law and colonialism as a system must be fundamentally altered to grasp the importance and necessity of understanding the role that violence plays in founding law.

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot be citizens of the United States and continue to talk about Aztlan as if it were a real entity. If we are to be good Americans than we must halt this talk of stolen land, oppression and colonization because “History shows that serious potential for conflicts exists when people in one country begin referring to territory in a neighboring country in proprietary terms and to assert special rights and claims to that territory.” (Huntington. 4)

The decision we have before us is one of great historical importance. If we are to choose the path of nation building and pay more than lip service to the creation of a state for Xicanos and other indigenous people on this continent then it is imperative that we begin studying the methods of achieving that end.

WASASE – The Warrior Dance

“Bringing it all together, being indigenous means thinking, speaking and acting with conscious intent of regenerating one’s indigeneity. Each indigenous nation has its own way of articulating and asserting self-determination and freedom…as indigenous peoples, the way to recovering freedom and power and happiness is clear: it is time for each one of us to make the commitment to transcend colonialism as a people, and for us tot work together as peoples to become forces for Indigenous truth against the lie of colonialism” - Taiaiake Alfred.

The Americas are the last and greatest stronghold of European colonialism in the world. The colonial system, especially in North America, has assumed a position of unquestionable legitimacy within the mythology of mankind as a historical homeland for white Europeans. A complete historical revision by white nationalists and the disintegrated condition of indigenous culture, history and resistance both on a personal and national level has allowed a version of history glorifying the colonizer to be taught and presented as canon to generation after generation of invaders. While each successive generation of indigenous people have come more and more as Fanon pointed out and as indigenous people have come to understand about their nation and its situation under this system, “you will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes.”

Where does the construction of this authentic indigenous identity here in the Americas begin? An important point in all of this is to reconsider Fanon’s statement concerning behavior of colonialism toward indigenous cultures “colonialism did not dream of wasting its time in denying the existence of one national culture after another. Therefore the reply of the colonized people will be straight away continental in breadth.” This is historical process of continental solidarity is an important one to keep in mind. With the destruction of our ancient civilizations many aspects (i.e. Education, religion, family structure) that would have been important to our development both as a nation and as individuals were lost. By including into our own Xicano liberation movement the ideas, theories and beliefs of a pan indigenous effort of “resurgence” Xicanos can begin experience how their own liberation movement can become a part of the greater pan indigenous movement in the Americas through the understanding that “indigenousness is reconstructed, reshaped and actively lived as resurgence against the … processes of annihilation that are inherent to colonialism.”

This indigenous reconstruction and resurgence of will begin with “people transcending colonialism on an individual basis.” It means a fundamental shift in understanding the reality of our situation and rejecting the language and attitudes of oppression and colonization used to support the hegemony of European superiority. It is the internalization of that language of oppression through education and mass media on our part that creates and solidifies in our minds and society in general very specific personality stereotypes that work against indigenous people organizing for liberation.

Creating space for the development of an indigenous identity is paramount to the success of this liberation movement. Alfred writes about “zones of refuge” which in may ways are reminiscent of Mao’s base camps present in liberated zones. Perhaps the basic difference being for most of us there are no formally declared hostilities. He sees these zones as “powerful conceptualizations of a strategic and cultural objective that remains consistent with traditional goals,” of indigenous communities. How we begin to organize around these “zones of refuge and other breaks from colonial rule that creates spaces for freedom” finds a theoretical partner is the idea of low intensity organizing. One-way of thinking about this is to theorize organizing opportunities within the United States as potential revolutionary situations. If this is done correctly then the question of how problems should be addressed can be resolved using revolutionary methodology. Low Intensity Organizing (LIO) is non-traditional approach to solving or reforming issues within the community based on theories of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) which gained prominence in U.S. military thought during the 1980s.

In practice Low Intensity Organizing would follow the same guidelines as LIC the emphasis being on: political considerations with the stress on ideology and ideals including propaganda and psychological operations; non-organizational and organizational mechanisms are brought into play; “conflict is viewed as a long-term endeavor and therefore strategy and tactics must be flexible and adaptive.” This model adapted by the U.S. government was derived from the theories of revolutionary war discussed earlier and is completely opposite of prevailing methods of organizing within community and labor organizing. In particular, communities, regardless of race or class, working for change have been derailed over and over again by reformist issue and needs base organizing. The following is a beginning discussion of how Low Intensity Organizing might be theorized, “into the category of indirect strategy” and then implemented as “a total strategy in the indirect mode” that views conflict “as having a dual nature” and understands strategy is like music that “can be played in two keys. One is direct strategy and the other is indirect strategy.” LIO is the second and organizes people for change through indirect resistance. Some initial thoughts on how LIO could be discussed are as follows.

LIO is educational: The primary goal of low intensity organizing is to politically educate the people. Since it has been shown that no substantial change or action can be supported to its conclusion without the understanding and support of the community this is the first step. Education and an understanding of their/our personal relationship to the greater structure are paramount. LIO builds structure through political education: Only after the people and organizers have become educated can the physical structures we need to create as a distinct people emerge. Until we work to build these institutions through political education we will be locked into the dominant reactionary activist/protestor paradigm constantly playing out the role of the squeaky wheel. LIO is total resistance: Every facet of the community must be mobilized or attempted to mobilize. LIO maintains: a constant presence and teaches resistance to accepted paradigms, creates new norms, and free spaces for the participant. LIO questions everything beginning with our personal and group relationship to the greater structure.

This is the beginning of an urban insurgency – not one with guns but an educational and organizing insurgency where colonial paradigm is exposed and challenged outside reformist liberal frameworks on a daily basis. In building this popular will to resist insurgents should understand concerning their efforts to educate the people that “revolutionary propaganda must be essentially true in order to be believed… If it is not believed, people cannot be induced to act on it, and there will be no revolution.”

As a nation we are untried. We are unformed and unorganized. We do not yet know the lengths we will go to be free. I have to wonder if we really have the courage to fight this fight to take up the flag against a nation of tested mettle. Xicanos are scared. Within the Xicano movement we expect this unrealistic level of unwavering commitment to everything we propose to believe in and use anything less as an excuse to not participate or bash others if they fall short of the mark we set. The problem is - like most people who profess their undying devotion – far to often we fall short of the mark we set ourselves. Maybe it's not for us, we say. Maybe we're not talented enough or eloquent enough to make a real contribution. Maybe my perceived failure means I don't believe as much as you do.

These are the self-recriminations of 500 years of colonial distortions. When we talk about resistance and what shape or form that resistance will take, we often have a hard time expressing our growing opposition consciousness to our oppression in concrete terms. So in addition to understanding the macro concerns of how we organize for liberation it is important to be clear on the micro or personal level. The concept of warrior is one we all understand although for many of us there may be some unease or discomfort in using this term. But when it is understood in the light of a growing Xicano indigenous liberation movement then we begin to see where we could possibly fit.

Alfred calls the reinvention of this fighting spirit “Wasase – our warriors dance” he clearly outlines the discourse of this awakening.

“Wasase is spiritual revolution and contention. It is not a path of violence. And yet, this commitment to non-violence is not pacifism either. This is an important point to make clear: I believe there is a need for morally grounded defiance and non-violent agitation combined with the development of a collective capacity for self-defense, so as to generate within the Settler society a reason and incentive to negotiate constructively in the interest of achieving a respectful coexistence.”

Anti Colonialism and Indigenous Freedom

In the opening of his treatise “Discourse on Colonialism” Amie Cesaire wrote concerning this attitude on the part of the colonizer “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.” Although it may not seem the case nations are not judged great solely on their ability to conquer other nations by force of might. The truly great nation will be like the truly great people of this world and conquer with ideas, with truth and the power of that truth. The United States has fallen very short of that reality especially in its dealings with the indigenous inhabitants of this land.

As indigenous people we have languished as colonial subjects in the shadow of the greatest military power the world has ever known for the past 500 years. By all accounts it appears we are permanent guests on our own land a nation that exists now as a pseudo-mother colony centered on Anglo-Saxon values, culture and history translated first through military conquest, then through the force of law and finally the ongoing educational subjugation of indigenous people. The concern for Xicano studies scholars both in and out of the academy must re-center on providing a real philosophical and theoretical framework for an ongoing discussion of national liberation. In doing so it is important, to consider at all times the words of Frantz Fanon in imagining an organized pan-African and in our case a pan-indigenous response to colonialism in the Americas when he wrote, “Colonialism did not dream of wasting its time in denying the existence of one national culture after another. Therefore the reply of the colonized people will be straight away continental in its breadth” (Fanon, 212).

There are powerful arguments for joining our oppressors, taking our place next to the colonizer of our land and marching out to conquer the rest of this world. Indeed, many of our indigenous cousins have chosen that course and in viewing the success some have achieved as collaborators to the U.S. colonial system in creating a safe space for themselves others might logically question the wisdom of continued resistance. Also, these are not easy questions; in terms of any type of resistance we must be able to determine through that resistance and defiance whether or not it is possible or even desirable to restore authenticity to indigenous people? Likewise, what does it mean to be authentic as indigenous people and when we speak of authenticity, we must ask ourselves, how can this state be accomplished if not through the restoration of some long gone culture? Is that our goal?

Canadian Metis author/scholar Howard Adams writes on this saying “Red nationalism revives those native cultural traditions that give stability and security to the nation and discards those that oppress the people … since the cultural awakening is only one stage of liberation, steps must be taken to ensure that the national consciousness will develop political aspects as well.” How then can this conversation about nationalism and indigenous authenticity establish new forms of culture and resistance to Anglo-American hegemony in the Americas if we as a people will not loosen our death grip on ever fossilizing customs?

It is inevitable many individuals who we would like to count as allies in this struggle will take a discussion about nationalism and immediately dismiss it as paternalistic, homophobic and closed minded. Their experience with nationalism and so-called nationalists might give them the right to take that stance. However, just because we have allowed these types of people to dominate the nationalist discussion and capture the vocabulary of that ideology does not mean that these qualities are inherent in the concept of nationalism or that using nationalism as an ideology and organizing tool will result in these divisions. 

Many of the foundational anti-colonialist scholars and soldiers saw the nation and before the nation the ideal of the nation as paramount to the solidification of a liberation movement for them the “living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people” this helps us to understand radical and revolutionary nationalism as tool of liberation for colonized people can be the means of exploding awareness that is “activated through a deepening of social and political consciousness.”

There are many who will think this ridiculous. They believe the idea of Xicanos being able to exert collectively the necessary force to form a sovereign, indigenous nation within the boundaries of the Continental United State is a pipe dream. There are others though who will read this and believe it is a dream that someday must be a reality. The academy and traditional Chicano Studies programs and scholarship in particular are not talking or writing a lot about physical or political liberation. 

In fact as Adams (himself having a PhD from Berkeyley) argues “Higher education cannot be considered as a solution … it firmly entrenches white supremacist attitudes and the white ideal in the minds of native students.” However, many “organic intellectuals” in the Chicano/Xicano community, as well as a small but growing body of scholars within the field continue to attack the issue of physical colonization in the Americas. Part of this paper will be to examine and define an emerging Xicano liberation ideology, which could push traditional Chicano Studies pedagogy toward its logical next step in the evolution of Indigenismo and the concept of Aztlan as a physical place.

Across the country there are individuals who consider themselves revolutionaries, persons of influence within the currently very fractured Xicano liberation movement. As a result of these fractures and the inability of Xicano Liberation groups to build a broad based movement (also known in Maoist/Marxist terminology as a popular front ) in competition with the many different versions of what “Xicano Liberation Movement” exactly means continue to complicate matters. While this diversity of opinion is good in terms of it providing a variety of ideological foundations from which to chose their comes a moment in any struggle when the over arching principles of that struggle must be agreed upon in order for the movement to go forward.

Xicano academics write and theorize constantly about being a colonized people and the effects of colonization through hybridity or mestizaje. But we never discuss in a meaningful way the physical dismantling of the colonized mentality . We talk, debate and speak of our oppression and displacement in historical terms and academic fact. Never in terms of it being the living and ongoing system of economic exploitation so entrenched in our national psyche, a system the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre defined by writing “we must be clear about what we mean. It [colonialism] is not an abstract mechanism. The [colonial] system exists, it functions; the infernal cycle of colonialism is a reality.” Now we debate not only the existence of colonization in the Americas but the sanity of withholding total collusion from our subjugators and in many circumstances those who argue against it are ridiculed and labeled unrealistic.

A logical discussion of a Xicano national identity has value within the academy and certainly outside of it. The current and ongoing discussion of Chicano identity has a merit within the confines of today’s academic multiculturalism that is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to maintain control over a faltering fatherland. There are many who will say it is lunacy to write and talk about Xicanos forming their own nation. You will find them to be mostly Xicanos. White America does not think Aztlan is a pipe dream. Any more than they consider the United States, a country formed after a revolution to throw off their colonial master, to be a pipe dream. 

The words of Samuel P. Huntington chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies sums up the centuries old and current position of white European domination, in protecting the Anglo European hegemony he has so valiantly defended over the course of his career when he writes concerning the fusion of a primarily Mexican (Mesoamerican) culture into the mainstream of the modern United States, 

“There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society if they dream in English.” 

This is a dramatic statement. It draws boundaries and set limits on who can belong (or not belong) to American society and illustrates how colonized people are constantly under attack and forced to defend their oppression (which is the nature of colonialism) by insisting on their right to participate fully in the system that oppresses them. 

Fanon warns us as a result of these attacks that instead of working for national liberation “for a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses” it is part and parcel of the current professionalization/image struggle so many of us engage in although “because native people did not create these images, and they should not be concerned with trying to improve them … society would simply create new racist images for us to work at and we would be continuously involved in image betterment while remaining colonized.” 

Huntington is wrong. 

Chicano/Mexicanos as indigenous people are a part of the fabric of this society. It would not be the place it is if not for the blood of our ancestors spilled building it. There is a debt to be paid and Huntington’s true worry is that someone close has the bill. 

“We must contend, and we must confront,” writes Taiaiake Alfred an Onkwehonwe scholar from the University of Victoria on the necessity of being prepared to take action “we must be prepared to shoulder the burden of conflict.” 

Although Alfred is writing about his own Onkwehonwe nation the lessons and admonishments to be prepared are applicable to the Xicano struggle for indigenous within the US where questions around land, indigenous identity continue to grow as they are debated by an ever increasing group of people – both pro and con.