Portal:Mexico/Featured article/March 2006
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The Mexican Movement and AXJ is an activist group, based in Los Angeles, California, describing itself as an indigenous rights educational organization. They are active in the Southern Californian protest scene and have a strong internet presence. They also host weekly teach-ins at East Los Angeles College and have delivered lectures to university crowds across the nation. Their position is to support only the indigenous peoples of the New World, and they recognize none of the current governments of the Americas, calling them all "colonial" and "European-imposed". Their style is confrontational and they have had confrontations with the Minuteman Project, Save Our State, and Disney.[citation needed]
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[edit] Name and origin
The Mexica Movement was founded in the 1993 as the Chicano Mexicano Mexica Empowerment Committee (CMMEC) by the poet and writer Olin Tezcatlipoca, who changed his name from Leo Guerra.[1] The group's name is derived from the Nahuatl word Mexica (/meˈʃika/), the name the Aztecs used for themselves. The group has a collective leadership structure, with a few members forming the core of the group's intelligentsia in Los Angeles. The AXJ Movement was founded in 1999 as a divorced and separated parents movement defending children worldwide but has slowly become an international civil rights watchdog organization.[2]
They assert that Mexicans, Central Americans, Canadian First Nations, and Native Americans in the U.S. are all one people of shared bloodlines, history, and colonial oppression under European-descent occupiers on the North American continent. They reject all borders imposed by white people as being false borders. They refer to the continent "Anahuac", a Nahuatl-language name.
They promote the reassessment of white ancestry among Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and Central Americans within a framework of "forced DNA rape" resulting from European colonization beginning in 1492 with Columbus. They advocate the "re-indigenization" of peoples of Mexican and Central American descent. The group states that Europeans have engaged in a 500 year-long campaign to "de-Indianize" all indigenous people of the continent.
The Mexica Movement argues that holding onto a non-indigenous identity enslaves Mexican Americans and other Latin Americans to European descendants who currently control the Western Hemisphere. They, therefore, disavow the labels "Hispanic" and "Latino," arguing that they unjustly emphasize the European aspect the racial heritage of the indigenous and mestizo people of North America. They disavow the name "La Raza" as a glorification of mestizaje, which they claim came about only as the result of rape. They reject the term "Mexican-American" as a mark of assimilation and the term "Chicano" on the grounds that its development was based on an incomplete knowledge of history and language, and that the aims of the Chicano Movement were too narrow. They also reject "American Indian" and "Native American" as inaccurate terms coined by Europeans. Instead, they favor the term "Nican Tlaca". Nican tlaca is the plural of the Nahuatl Nican tlacatl, literally meaning "here-person" in the sense of "local person". It was originally used in the 15th century in documents written in Classical Nahuatl, often as a translation of the Spanish word "Indio", or "Indian". The use of the word faded, however, and by the 16th century, the word "macehualtin", the plural of "macehualli", meaning "person" or "commoner" had all but completely replaced it.
[edit] Issues
[edit] Land ownership
The Mexica Movement asserts that the entire continent of North America belongs collectively to indigenous people (Mexicans, Central Americans, Native Americans, and Canadian First Nations); and that European-descent people are in fact illegal aliens who have been trespassing on Indigenous lands for over 500 years.
[edit] Identity
Central to their message is the rejection of the terms Hispanic and Latino as labels for people of Mexican, Central American descent. The movement asserts that these terms are Eurocentric and "kill Indigenous identity." As such, they assert, these labels are an extension of a 500 year-long genocide and ethnocide against Indigenous people and their identity. The group asserts that only labels which emphasize Indigenous ancestry are appropriate, such as the name Nican Tlaca. The organization asserts that both mixed-bloods and full-bloods are indigenous people, with European blood merely being a "colonial scar."
[edit] Language
The Movement advocates the use of Nahuatl and rejects the English and Spanish languages save as a means to educate the public and to attract new members. They recommend that their members adopt Nahuatl names and also the Nahuatl term "Anahuac" to refer to North America.
[edit] Immigration
The Mexica Movement claims there is no illegal immigration from Mexico because the American continents actually belong to the indigenous people of the Americas as a whole. The organization has protested H.R. 4437 which calls for stricter immigration policies on America's southern border with Mexico. They accuse Sensenbrenner and the supporters of the bill of being racists and Nazi-like in their behavior.
They deride the "border security" Minuteman Project and advocates of "interior enforcement" such as Save Our State (SOS). The organization claims indigenous Americans who support SOS and the Minutemen are "vendidos" (sell-outs) who hate their own people[3]. The organization claims white Americans who support anti-"illegal immigration" groups are racists, themselves being the descendants of illegal immigrant-occupiers. The organization claims the Asian Americans who support the SOS Minutemen do it to gain support from white Americans to become "real Americans"[4] and ingratiate themselves into the good graces of European-descent Americans.
The group adamantly rejects the notion that European-descent people possess the legitimate authority to define Mexicans and Central Americans as non-indigenous people (mixed-blood and full-blood) on "North America." The example they often cite is that the Aborigines of Australia are never considered "illegals" on any part of the Australian continent, "no matter where they may migrate to, from Perth to Sydney. The same goes for us on our continent."[citation needed]
Another parallel the organization uses is that Native Americans from Seattle, Washington can travel to Miami, Florida and never be considered "illegal aliens," even though their particular tribal ethnicity is not rooted near the area of Florida.
