Basta! This Land is YOUR Land, Hermanos y Hermanas
The barbarism of the North American conquest was exemplified by scalping and mutilation of Indigenes.
I had Alexis Lisandro Guizar-Diaz, M.S. on my studio recorder today, but it airs Nov. 20 on KYAQ. He’s the Electoral Field Director PCUN.
April 1985 PCUN is founded as Oregon’s union for farmworkers and treeplanters. WVIP continues its service and immigration work through PCUN’s Service Center for Farmworkers.
1986 The Immigration Reform and Control Act is signed into law, allowing all those who had been living undocumented in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982 or who had worked in agriculture for ninety days between May 1, 1985 and May 1, 1986, to apply for residency.
I met Alexis in Salem at a Chicano-Latinix arts event:
We talked in a wide-ranging manner about settler colonialism, the attack on immigrants, his own doubts about a PhD program at Portland State University. He’s the son of undocumented immigrants, and his first point of college was around becoming a lawyer, an immigration lawyer, but he’s into ecology of economy and urban planning on a meta level.
While talking with him, I sent him a few pieces of mine:
Love Thy Neighbor — One Woman’s Fight for Her Husband
Makwirituni Erakuni – “I’d Like to Introduce You to My family”
An American story of working undocumented
Twenty Years ago, over at Dissident Voice:
This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens
“We are all illegal aliens.”
It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.
That was in the 1980s.
You know, when Reagan was running amuck ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.
We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.
We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.
We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.
But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.
Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.
We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.
Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.
We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.
But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.
Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.
Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.
Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.
But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.
Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.
The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”
But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.
These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.
Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.
But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.
This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.
It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.
Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.
And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.
The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.
Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”
Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of doublethink.
And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.
I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gunships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.
Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.
And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.
Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.
Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.
*****
Listen to Alexis, man, because he is spot on, one of the good guys who should be in high office changing the smear of the Democrats and Republicans, both parties of KKK and lynching cunts and dirty slavers.
In May, President Donald Trump announced that he would not recognize Indigenous People’s Day and would bring Columbus Day “back from the ashes.”
A few months later, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that 20 U.S. soldiers who took part in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in December 1890 will keep the Medals of Honor they were awarded. Hegseth said that the soldiers “deserved those medals.”
Indian killers or Slave killers or BIPOC killers, this is the regime, and every fucking MAGA cunt now needs to be mowed down, really.
Kirk, or Kirker, take your pick: James Kirker, who was a homicidal racist and prolific Indian killer.
Along with slavery, the massacre of the Native-American population has by now been well documented. It has been made even more clear in a number of new historical studies that take on a subversive air under the Trump-led order.
One of these studies, by William S. Kiser, Chair of the History Department at Texas A&M-San Antonio, methodically details how white soldiers serving with colonial militias and state police agencies like the Texas Rangers were paid bounties for Native-American scalps and other body parts, which they often took as trophies.
Kiser’s book was published this year in the prestigious Lamar Series in Western History with Yale University Press and is entitled The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America.
Kiser estimates—conservatively—that between ten and twenty thousand Native Americans were scalped over a 250-year period from the mid-1600s to the late 1800s
[Texas Rangers with three “bandits” that they killed on the Mexican border.]
WHAT IS PCUN?
PCUN values the ability for workers to take action against exploitation and all of its effects, and continues to build an agenda that strengthens workers rights by creating safer workplaces, advocating for fair wages, and pushing for enough economic security to care for our families. We also value dignity, and respect for all workers, and the “SÃ se puede ” spirit of Dolores Huerta, and Cesar Chavez. PCUN was founded by farmworkers, and today that legacy continues.
PCUN is focused on building a stronger voice for all Latinx working families in Oregon, from farmworkers to young folks, so that we can collectively improve their well-being and increase prosperity for all.
The growing power of the Latinx workforce, electorate, and population is integral to both our state’s and the nation’s economy and the future of our civic engagement systems, but because of long-standing inequities, Latinx working families are more often marginalized than they are empowered.
If we empower and lift up Latinx working families, they will have a stronger voice in the decisions that affect them, and their well being will increase significantly.
NOW, and . . . LISTEN HERE.
THEN . . . John Coffee Hays, San Francisco’s first sheriff, had once led deadly Texas Ranger operations against the Comanches and Apaches and campaigns below the Mexican border. In his new job, he organized private volunteers to police California’s frontier that killed yet more Indians.
And back to NOW . . .
Another episode of what some would call anti Angloism, and what is actually known as FACT(S).
How do I, as a so-called white person, with a conscience and a heart, in possession of these FACTS, walk around this defiled land, and not go stark raving mad???
I try to live by the creed, how would I feel if “that” was done to me, mine, and/or my ancestors???
People either don’t know, or don’t wanna know.
Meanwhile, history is being erased and distorted to such a degree, that before long these FACTS will be lost to me, and mine.
2+2=5
