Los Muertos de Hambre The War on Chicana/o Studies Unmasking the Illusion of Inclusion

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

Muertos de hambre is a derogatory phrase often used by Mexicans to refer to people who are predators, i.e., human vultures, vendidos. They are so starved for attention or recognition that they pounce on scraps of garbage discarded by their colonial masters.

The history of Chicana/o Studies is replete with examples of myths such as that they are failing because of a lack of enrollment. The truth is that they fail because they are denied a place on the Monopoly Board (General Education, electives and the like) that runs the university and rewards departments.

The CSUN Chicana/o Studies Department has a unique problem, it has been too successful. It offers 175 plus sections per semester, and campus wide departments are salivating at the prospect of picking off pieces of the program. The sad thing is that without the Mexican student population the university would be half its size. 

The university is a plantation that is run by white overseers that are getting increasingly defensive about their illegitimacy. Take the College of Social and Behavioral Science. Like most colleges, it has avoided diversifying its faculty. Although there are approximately 12,000 Latinos on campus, out of 11 tenure track professors, Anthropology has 0 Mexican Americans; Geography (12-0); History (19-0); Pan African Studies (13-1); Political Science (17-2); Psychology (29-1); Social Work (16-0); Sociology 23-1); and Urban Studies & Planning (7-0).

Chicana/o Studies has challenged this inequity. It has confronted that there are few courses on the Mexican experience. In 1969, San Fernando State offered one course on Mexico that was taught by Dr. Julian Nava.

The professors, the overseers of the plantation, are nervous because the City of Los Angeles has changed, and over 50 percent are Latinos, 80 percent of whom are of Mexican extraction. 

The white colonists are getting increasingly defensive about their privilege. Recently one of the departments discussed its hiring priorities. A Mexican American professor raised the racial disparity between the number of Mexican American students and its faculty. This evoked angry responses.

Faculty members said they were uncomfortable talking about race; that the department should not hire “unqualified” applicants; that they do not see color; that race has no bearing. Studies show that the race and class backgrounds of the professors determine the questions that students ask and research outcome.

Mexicans north from Mexico have always been under the illusion that the Mexican government and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) care about them and would protect their interests. They naively believed that they were part of the Mexican family.

This illusion was recently shattered by UNAM’s lack of respect for Mexican Americans at CSUN. It entered into an agreement to house a research center there. The project was clandestine. Over the past year, David Maciel who has abandoned more programs than any academician I know started to bring in speakers from UNAM. Recently dismissed from UCLA, it was his way to wangle a part time position.

Maciel and the CSUN administration slapped CHS in the face, and did not inform it about the center until it was a done deal. The slight was outrageous. Chicana/o Studies has 90 percent of the Mexicanists and Latin Americanists on campus. For over 40 years, it has had premier cultural groups, and championed Mexican immigrants with or without papers.

A meeting was held on November 12th involving UNAM’s criollo elite administrators and the CSUN faculty. Basically, they told us that we could join or not join –take it or leave it. They avoided the question as to why they showed disrespect for Mexicans on campus. Their attitude was one of porque nos da la chingada gana. Clearly it is a matter of class, they consider the Mexican population of 36 million as pochos, and prefer catering to gringos. They avoid contact with Mexicans who are not of their social class.

As for the white faculty present, it was pathetic. Not one has been involved with Mexican immigrants. One said that he was interested in Mexico because his wife had taken a class at UNAM. A Central American professor whose specialty is literature (a post-modernist) said she was a Mexicanist because Central Americans passed through Mexico en route to the U.S.

It is evident that these muertos de hambre saw only the color green. Frantz Fanon makes it clear that colonization is possible only with the complicity of members of the colonized.

In this case, it was two Central American Studies professors -- Douglas Carranza and Beatriz Cortez who are angry because I mentioned the role students and professors in the founding of CAS.

However, the colonizers and their collaborators have an obsession to rewrite history and mask their privilege. For the record, the CAS founders included Alberto García, a half dozen Central American women students, and Roberto Lovato who along with CAUSA and Dr. Carlos Cordova of San Francisco State developed the curriculum.

Additionally, Lovato and the students pressed the California legislature for funding to establish a Central American Studies Center. Cortez and Carranza came in well after the fact. Again part of being collaborators is the rewriting of history, and to create a counter narrative to establish legitimacy.

Los muertos de hambre are delusional, and somehow they have come to believe that CHS is taking courses from them. They also want to divert attention away from the fact that after a dozen years it still has only two professors, having bullied every Central American candidate out of the department.

These muertos de hambre have invented their own reality, wanting to erase the fact that CHS gave them four positions to start CAS.

We are also at odds with the Provost who says that we are obstructionists for not joining the process, which invitation came only after it was a done deal. His attitude is much that of the UNAM representatives.

If you allow someone to take your dignity from you, you are reduced to a serf. Thus, you cannot allow the colonizers to distort reality and erase you. As for the collaborators they must change history so as not to be seen as collaborators and opportunists. 

As our Latino student population mushrooms, the resistance to Mexican American hires will increase. Life for los muertos de hambre will become more profitable as white professors will enter into alliances with them to limit the number of minority faculty. The subversion of Chicana/o Studies will be possible only with the support of collaborators.

I have always respected and considered Central Americans to be family. However, I realize like Mexicans they also have muertos de hambre among them.

As political people we must respect the tensions within our countries of origin, i.e., teacher strikes, Zapatista-like movements, Mexico’s violation of Article 27 of the Constitution, and the giving away of Mexico’s land and resources.

What hurts is that my illusions of jointly building a unity of progressives of the two Middle Americas have been shattered, although hope remains. 

The fact is the Mexican government and UNAM have never had an interest in our community. They have not cared about Mexican immigrants whose rights Chicana/o organizations championed.

Los muertos de hambre only see us as a piggy bank. Even with the bad economy we send $22 billion annually to the homeland. 

Dr. Ernesto Galarza in Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970) wrote that it was in error to assume Mexicans did not organize – they did but they were subverted by the spiders in the house and los muertos de hambre.

Fanon and Cabral - Xicano Resistance Literature

 

         

   Examining the theoretical foundation of literature written by Chicana/o community intellectuals could lead to an understanding of why Chicana/o resistance literature in the past and present situates itself within the overall struggle of third world liberation movements across the globe. Frantz Fanon, the Martinique born anti colonial writer, psychologist and liberation theorist outlines the stages of literary development within an emerging national culture after centuries of military and economic domination. Writing resistance to colonial oppression for Fanon is inextricably linked with physical resistance, which is inextricably linked with the material conditions of the oppressed. Fanon writes that when the native knows “he is not an animal”[i] (it is at this moment of understanding or epiphany resistance is born, that “he realizes his humanity [and] begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory”[ii] Fanon continues later by giving intellectual body and substance to this process of struggle sharpening tools both physical and rhetorically when he writes concerning the national struggle,

In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying powers. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite number in the mother country…In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is … sometimes this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humor and by allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and difficulty … Finally, in the third phase, which is called the fighting phases, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature.[iii]

Fanon describes the suspicion this allegiance to a long conqueror culture arouses within the “occupying power, which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit,”[iv] in other words the seed of national liberation. The same attitudes are prominent in Anglo and Chicana/o relations today as charges of slow assimilation are levied against third even fourth generation Mexican Americans.[v] Over 40 years after Fanon observations during the Algerian/Franco conflict, Samuel P. Huntington[vi], past chairman of the Havard Academy of International and Area Studies and author of the 2004 Foreign Policy article “The Hispanic Challenge”, documents U.S. Anglo recognition of this lingering memory of U.S. historical thievery when he compares the Southwest of the United States to other irredentist[vii] movements across the globe writing “History shows that serious potential for conflict 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.”[viii]

            The downward spiral toward the complete elimination of a people’s original culture is inevitable in a colonial setting. All around us we see the impact of 500 years of genocide and cultural devastation. Fanon is clear on the status of culture among oppressed colonized peoples. His words set the stage for long-term political action on the part of the native against the hegemony of colonial domination

The native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its splendor, is not necessarily that of his own country… For colonialism, this vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God.[ix]

            Fanon, who trained as a psychologist in France[x], understood and documented the mental dilemmas facing colonized Third World people during their occupation. Many scholars and liberationist since the publishing of his work to the present regards his critique of the mental and physical circumstances endured by the colonized under an occupying colonial government to be as critical and pertinent today as then. Fanon removes the onus of maintaining personal legitimacy through culture off the colonized by demonstrating how the slowly and inevitably declining indigenous culture is inescapably replaced by a colonial culture, century after century, until it becomes obvious the original “national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in a systematic fashion”[xi] so much so, Fanon writes, that in the end before the emergence of the national liberation movement all that is left for the natives is  “simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shriveled up, inert and empty.”[xii]

            Amilicar Cabral[xiii] the Papua New Guinea liberationist as the keynote speaker for the Eduardo Mondlane Speech at Syracuse University on October 14, 1970 in a speech titled “National Liberation and Culture” said in part, “the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, it is a return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which they have been subjected” (Cabral, p. 7). Like all soldiers/scholars of third world national liberation struggles Cabral understood the actual return to history (cultural reawakening through a national liberation struggle) is subjective in that each national liberation struggle along with the strategies to victory are by necessity unique to the country where the struggle originates. This does not mean however, that lessons cannot be learned or shouldn’t be taken from other national liberation struggles.  

            By examining the histories of colonial struggles around the world we see that material conditions play a major role in both the decisions of the oppressed and the reaction of the oppressor in this return to history. The material, social and cultural conditions created by colonialism allow limited avenues of response to the oppressed. In terms of how this return to history is accomplished it is vital to understand that every revolutionary situation is different because according to Mao “war in any country is waged in the special environment of that country and it has special circumstances and characteristics.”[xiv] It stands to reason though any “return to history” is prefigured by a departure from history – for purposes of our discussion we will call this departure “colonialism” and focus on the process of return – known as the national liberation struggle.

            The history of the Chicana/o has been for the past 162 years the history of the United States, plenty of time to experience the inability of liberal democracy in the U.S. to fulfill its promise of citizenship guaranteed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The failure to included Chicana/os in full citizenship rhetorically and in political practice along with increasingly stark power differentials in terms of socio-economic status within a colonial framework are vital in placing Chicana/o resistance literature as a first step toward Cabral’s “return to history.”

            It is vital to understand that for Cabral the national liberation struggle, which at is base is a cultureal/material production and is inextricably linked with a “return to history” are consequences of each other. In the case of Chicana/os the history being created is an Indigenist history. Indigenist history is defined as an evolving liberation history, the making of a set of events that is unfolding; history that is happening as an emerging vision written by an emerging people. Ward Churchill helps us to frame the Indigenist outlook when he writes about his definition of the word indigenist,

By this, I mean that I am one that not only takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority of my political life, but who draws upon the traditions – the bodies of knowledge and corresponding codes of values – evolved over many thousands of years by native peoples the world over.[xv]

            It is also important to understand that the process of national liberation, the physical and intellectual freeing of a people from colonial domination, is by necessity a long one shrouded many times in secrecy. For any cultural movement when this return to history begins is difficult to pinpoint and perhaps unnecessary since it evident through an examination of national liberation struggles there are usually multiple players working independent of each other for long periods of time. This is only one reason why the examination of resistance literature is so vital. Action spring from dialogue; without true dialogue, education and organization there can be no struggle. Without struggle there is no national culture, struggle for the oppressed being the material production of history or as Cabral writes “because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production.”[xvi] The material foundation of struggle in terms of the production of culture and the will to resist is vital to understanding of how revolutionary culture is formed and revolutionary history is written.

            At what point does Chicana/o resistance literature abandon the imposed modernizing project of western civilization to return to its own process of collective history? Whose literature speaks to the future or to the past? Whose is obsessed with reexamining history or building toward a new history? It is important to understand that Cabals’ return to history is not a wish to return to the conditions that existed before the European arrived. Cabral’s and Fanon’s desire is that as a distinct people the colonized will emerge from a culturally obscure position to a position of authority on their land by reclaiming and rebuilding a national culture apart from the colonizer.

---

[i] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 43

[ii] Fanon, p. 43

[iii] Fanon, p. 222-223

[iv] Fanon,   p. 237

[v] Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge” p.  6-8

[vi] (deceased)

[vii] The Encarata World English Dictionary defines the word irredentist as “a member of a group of people who support the return to their country of territories that used to belong to it but are now under foreign rule.”

“Harry Beran has argued that the consent model leaves ample room for a right to secede from those states to which no consent was given. The idea here is that if each individual enjoys complete dominion regarding herself, then only her consent is sufficient to determine her membership in a political union. Beran writes, “Liberal democratic theory is committed to the permissibility of secession quite independently of its desirability in order to increase the possibility of consent-based political authority. The claim is this: if persons have a right to personal and political self-determination, then secession must be permitted if it is effectively desired by a territorially concentrated group and if it is morally and practically possible.” Thus Beran concludes that the consent theory of political legitimacy entails that individuals have a moral right to emigrate and change their nationality and that “any territorially concentrated group within a state should be permitted to secede if it wants to and it is morally and practically possible”

[viii] Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge” p. 5

[ix] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 211

[x] Gibson, Nigel. Ed. (1999) “Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue” Humanity Books, Amherst, NY. P. 60-68

[xi] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 237

[xii] Ibid. p. 238

[xiii] Cabral was the Secretary General of the Partido Africana do Independencia de Guiné e Cabo Verde. He was assassinated January 20, 1973.

[xiv] Mao Tse Tung “Laws of war”

[xv] Churchill “Struggle for the Land” p. 403

[xvi] (Cabral, p. 5).  This point is particularly salient for Chicana/os in terms of production since Chicana/os do not have widespread ownership of the means of material production. They do have, however, and are engaged in the widespread production of culture. Meanwhile, it's becoming clear to me that that one of the most complex and compelling axes you want to grind is to defend cultural nationalism against that which has supplanted it: mestizaje (we're all mixed and therefore, finally, all the same), and multiculturalism (we agree that we're all different and that we all like each other's differences).

Fascism Anyone?

 http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm

Fascism Anyone?

Laurence W. Britt

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist¹ regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later proto-fascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and proto-fascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. 

Maybe, maybe not.

Note

1. Defined as a “political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism”—Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

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