Republicans have raised concerns that Health and Human Services nominee Xavier Becerra will continue to be the culture warrior he was as California’s attorney general. It turns out Becerra’s past was more radical than most people know.
Becerra, by his own admission, was a member of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan through Stanford’s chapter. Becerra joined the chapter just years after it had been founded at Stanford University. Aztlan, according to the 1969 “El Plan de Aztlan,” is the separatist idea of a Chicano nation, which includes the southwestern United States.
The document, featured on the group’s website, expresses support for reclaiming U.S. territory from the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.” The plan also boasts the phrase “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada,” which translates to “For the race, everything. Outside the race, nothing.”
Becerra couldn’t bring himself to criticize the organization or its slogan in a 2003 appearance on Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes, after then-California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante came under fire for once being a member of the group.
When Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote about MEChA, he called it “the high school and college club for Mexican American students that scares the bejesus out of everyone else,” and added, “Frankly, I don’t blame everyone else.”
Arellano, though, argued that, ultimately, “MEChA is harmless.”
He wrote, “Sure, the organization’s founding documents, the Plan de Santa Barbara and the Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, call for a Chicano homeland. But few members take these hilariously dated relics of the 1960s seriously, if they even bother to read them. Little of the modern-day MEChA remains separatist, other than the occasional Che-spouting junior and a few cute mestizas with Aztec names like Citlali who sport Frida ponytails, black-frame glasses and Chuck Taylor high-tops.”
But Arellano is 20 years Becerra’s junior. Becerra’s time in MEChA was far closer to the organization’s 1960s radical separatist roots. He should be asked about them.
