Ethnic Cleansing: Trump’s New Strategy by Ed Rincon

Check out Dr. Rincón's excellent blog, too.  It is titled, The Culture of Research.  -Angela

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Ethnic Cleansing: Trump’s New Strategy 

by Ed Rincon

Edward T. Rincón, Ph.D., President

Rincón & Associates LLC

If you were under the impression that ethnic cleansing takes place only in other countries with maniacal dictators, perhaps it is time to reflect on the recent behavior of President Trump in regards to recovery efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.  By some accounts, the disaster recovery in Puerto Rico was a clear example of the deliberate and prolonged neglect of a large segment of U.S. citizens.

An estimated 3,000 Puerto Rican residents died as a result of Hurricane Maria – not just from the immediate storm but also from the inadequate recovery efforts that allowed too many victims to suffer from the limited access to clean water, food, transportation and medical attention. The level of human misery in Puerto Rico, which continues to this day, was apparently of little consequence to President Trump who boasted that the recovery effort was one of the most successful in U.S. history.  Making matters worse, President Trump even now rejects the estimate of 3,000 deaths from Hurricane Maria, suggesting that the high death estimate was merely a political ploy by Democrats to “make me look bad.”   

Trump’s suggestion that the 3,000 deaths resulting from Hurricane Maria was a political ploy by Democrats is consistent with other conspiracy theories that point to his detachment from reality, including such things as:

·        Promotion of the birther theory regarding President Obama;

·        The claim that Muslims celebrated 9/11 on rooftops;

·        Suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination; and

·        Claiming that 3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election.

President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for Puerto Rico and its leadership, even delaying the waiver of the Jones Act to expedite the delivery of needed resources. Indeed, his disdain for other non-white and immigrant groups has been shown through statements and policies, including the separation of Latino children from their families;  legal action to end the DACA program;  travel restrictions based on religious beliefs;  and the consistent derogatory statements made in reference to Mexicans,  Haitians, black athletes, and war heroes like the late Senator McCain.  More recently, the Trump administration announced the transfer of $10 million from the FEMA budget to ICE  -- an action that further underscores the priority placed on the removal of unwanted groups. Perhaps it is time to ask: Is President Trump developing a program of ethnic cleansing? 

As defined by a United Nations Commission, ethnic cleansing is defined as follows:  

“….rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. “

Since he became president, Donald Trump has implemented a number of programs that could fall under this definition of ethnic cleansing,  including  arbitrary arrest and detention; confinement in ghetto areas (i.e., families in detention centers); forcible removal; displacement and deportation (i.e., even asylum seekers);  deliberate attacks or threats of attacks on civilians (i.e., especially protestors at campaign rallies); and robbery of personal property (that is, seizure of personal property from forcibly removed persons). 

Although Trump has yet to implement some of the most coercive practices that have been utilized globally by current and past dictators, following is a listing of the various practices that have been used to achieve the objectives of ethnic cleansing:

• Murder
• Torture
• Extrajudicial executions
• Rape and sexual assaults
• Severe physical injury to civilians
• Use of civilians as human shields
• Destruction of property
• Attacks on hospitals, medical personnel and locations with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem, among others.

Without intervention by legal advocates and human rights organizations, one wonders how many of these most coercive practices President Trump would implement given the opportunity and growing support by his conservative base.  Yet, the withholding and delay of needed emergency assistance and the resulting 3,000 deaths of Puerto Rican citizens presents tangible evidence that President Trump has added a new dimension to the ethnic cleansing formula. 

Apparently, it is not enough to separate families, deport asylum seekers, place immigrant children in detention centers, and publicly disparage immigrants and non-whites – it now appears acceptable to simply delay or withhold emergency assistance in order to punish or remove unwanted segments of the U.S. population.  To say the least, this is a disturbing development and made equally frightening by the many “pro-life” Republicans who choose to remain silent on this issue.

Censoring Mexican American Studies In Texas Schools is Not Only Ethnic Cleansing But Also Censorship and Muffling of The First And Fourteenth Amendments Phillip D. Ortego y Gasca

This is an April 17th piece by Don Felipe Ortego y Gasca that addresses the censoring of Mexican Americans Studies in schools, aptly referring it to as "ethnic cleansing."  Key quote:

What conclusion can be drawn from the xenophobic ethnic cleansing spreading across Arizona and Texas? The conclusion is that xenophobic whites in those states are out to get rid of “Mexicans”—whether they’re citizens or not? That may sound like a harsh judgment, but “Mexicans” are left with little room to maneuver in this ethnic cleansing. White Arizonans and Texans see the world through the prism of whiteness, a prism that wants to white-out all traces of their historically Mexican past and present.

Folks on the right and center have often viewed those of us on the left as exaggerating matters.  I would say that if anything, many of downplay the pain.  After all, it's not easy to go to the wound unless you have to. Plus, we risk people not believing us.  Or at worst, we get dismissed as whining.

I'm hoping that the current events of late involving family separations at the border, the move to de-naturalize citizens, the curtailing of Muslim's entry into the U.S., the upholding by the Supreme Court of state gerrymandering and the like, are making folks realize that they not only need to broaden their conceptual lenses to grasp our claim to institutionalized discrimination and oppression, but also to see how this has marked our history and experiences as members of minoritized communities in the U.S.

Racism and white nationalism are not a U.S. problem, but are, in fact, global ones.  Minoritized communities everywhere are targets of administrations that want to eviscerate their cultures and identities—if not to expunge them altogether.

Thanks to Dr. Roberto Calderón for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Historia Chicana

17 April 2018

&

From: Philip.Ortego@wnmu.edu [mailto:Philip.Ortego@wnmu.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 11:12 AM
To: Calderon, Roberto <Roberto.Calderon@unt.edu>
Subject: Mexican American Study Course

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D. (Renaissance Studies/Chicano Studies)

Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Public Policy)

Recipient: 2018 NACCS-Tejas Foco Estrella de Aztlan Lifetime Achievement Award

Recipient: 1997 Distinguished Faculty Award, Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, American and Mexican American

Texas State University System—Sul Ross

Alum: University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas, University of New Mexico

Western New Mexico University, Miller Library, 1000 College Ave, PO Box 680

Silver City, New Mexico 88062, Branches: Gallup, Deming, Lordsburg & Web

v   Veteran: Sgt. Marine Corps, WW II / Maj. (Res) USAF, Korean Conflict, Early Vietnam Era

v v v v v

CENSORING MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES IN TEXAS SCHOOLS IS NOT ONLY ETHNIC CLEANSING BUT ALSO CENSORSHIP AND MUFFLING OF THE FIRST AND FOURTEENTH AMENDMENTS

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

T

here’s a nativist streak in the American psyche that emerges periodically to unravel the constitutional gains of American society, moving the nation more to the right—in a sort of dance macabre of the American national zeitgeist; in other words: something akin to an American Nazi Party (with the word “Nazi” being short for “National”). What has kept this Nazi zeitgeist at bay has been the vigilance of Americans working to create “a more perfect union,” committed to the preservation and process of democracy as articulated in the American Constitution.  What is little cogitated is that democracy is a process not a product.

That process has long held at bay inclusion of the real story of the American people, including those of color, starting with the story of Native Americans, then African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Other non-color groups have been given short shrift in the American Story as well. The real story of who we are as a nation has yet to be told, perhaps because it’s still an unfolding story. There’s little doubt that the American story today is not the same story as told by the French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in his 3^rd Letter fro an American Farmer first published in 1782: he wrote, “they are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen.” He did not include Native Americans nor African Americans.

Censorship of the Mexican American story in American annals began long before 1848 when the United States dismembered Mexico as a booty of war (1846-1848), and per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 2, 1848 annexed more than half of Mexico in what is known as The Mexican Cession—a land mass more than the size of Spain, France and Italy combined (529,000 sq. miles) the third                                 

The Mexican Cession largest acquisition of territory in US history now constituting the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and pars of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. That land-grab fulfilled the American dream of a nation from sea to shining sea. The flies in the ointment were the Mexicans—viewed as that vermin spawned by the Spaniards and the mongrel horde of Indian women—Mestizos as they came to be called but identified in the 20^th century as La Raza Cosmica (the Cosmic People) by Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican educator.

Arizona tried muzzling Mexican American Studies but the state’s foundation for that action was declared unconstitutional by a Federal Judge in Arizona on August 23, 2017 because Arizona’s ban of Mexican American Studies violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the American Constitution.  The judge concluded that racism was the animus propelling the Arizona ban of Mexican American Studies. 

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry railed that if things continued as they were Texas would have no other option than to secede from the Union—just like it did when it decided to join the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Secession is a mighty big gamble. It didn’t work the first time for segregationists and it won’t work this time for racists. In Texas, the Textbook Massacre is actuated by the mentality found in Arizona—“we know what belongs in the textbooks our kids read,” say white Texans.  Never mind that the majority of kids in Texas schools are Latinos and that their history ought to be represented in those textbooks—but isn’t. What are we to do when the governor of Texas thumbs his nose at public opinion and retorts that Texans know better? Where does that leave Tejanos? And when the governor threatens to secede from the Union if he doesn’t get his way, does he really think that Tejanos (Texas Latinos) will follow him like lemmings into that abyss of raging hyperbole? Na, na, na, na, na!

Ortego, Texas Textbook Massacre

This insanity has been going on for more than 20 years. Thirteen years ago in 2005 I made a presentation to the Texas State Board of Education (same Board, different folks) on “History and its Lacunae,” cautioning the Board not to go down the road it has finally wrong-headedly gone down. I explained how appalled I was by “the historical record in the American history textbooks which I have reviewed for this presentation and which are being considered for state adoption and use in Texas public schools, for nowhere in these texts is the story of American Hispanics fully told, particularly the story of Mexican Americans.” The Board did not listen then but has relented now except on the title for the Mexican American Study course. In real hegemonic fashion the Board deigns to know what is best for its subjects.

The Mexican American Study course is not about States’ Rights in regulating education per the 10^th Amendment, it’s about the First Amendment: Censorship and Intellectual Freedom. White Texan Supremacists are trying to white-out (perhaps the better word is “whitewash”) anything that’s not white in the textbooks used in the Texas public schools. This sure smacks of censorship, especially in voiding the presence of Cesar Chavez in the social studies textbooks. Thurgood Marshall was also on the chopping block. 

Nevertheless, Val Benavides,  TFN Outreach and Field Director, posted:

Today we’re celebrating a historic vote at the State Board of Education: the creation of an elective course in Mexican American studies for Texas public schools. The board also voted to create a process for approving other ethnic studies courses in the future.

These courses will help students across the state learn that the story of Texas and our nation includes the experiences and contributions of Mexican Americans and other people from diverse backgrounds. For too long those stories have been excluded from our classrooms.

Let’s be clear: This victory came after years of tireless work by scholars and activists who educated the public and policymakers, rallied supporters, and testified and lobbied at the state board. They faced setbacks along the way, but they kept their eyes on the goal and demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to bring important change.

We at TFN have been proud to stand with and support these leaders and advocates. And we will work with them as the state board approves curriculum standards for Mexican American studies and other ethnic studies courses.

¡Sí se puede!

It appears, however, that the Texas School Board sees the handwriting on the wall and while not capitulating entirely on this issue at this time, they’ve reserved the right to designate the title of the course—Americans of Mexican Descent, a throwback to the designation for Mexican Americans used by the Library of Congress 50 years ago. Here again, the white majority telling us who we are. But Dennis Bixler-Marquez, Director of Chicano Studies at UT-El Paso sees a glimmer of an unintended outcome in the decision of the Texas Board of Education’s approval of the Mexican American Study elective course when he said that the MAS course was not only for Mexican Americans (El Paso Times, 4/15/18, Borderlands, 1B/2B) but for everybody. Indeed, all Texans, nay, all Americans should know the Mexican American story. We should all know each other’s story—in their aggregate is the American story: immigrants and indigenous.

Juan Tejeda has it right:

Mexican American Studies and the historic vote and controversial decision to change the name of the MAS course by the Texas State Board of Education in CBS Austin below. The TXSBOE will be taking their final vote on this issue today in Austin. We are not hyphenated Americans. We are Native Americans. Mexican American Studies is an established Field of Study in Texas as authorized by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Call it what it is: a Mexican American History course for high school students in Texas. This is an elective course. Students don't have to take it if they don't want to. Tanto political pedo just to approve one elective course in Mexican American Studies in the state's history. #ApproveMAS

The insanity of purported conservative content replacing time-tested content traditional in social studies textbooks belies not only logic but the factual. The situation over textbooks in Texas is nothing more than “moral casuistry” based on evisceration of what has emerged as the Chicano Canon viewed as antithetical to the orthodox canon of American hegemony.

O

ur concepts of race do not emerge from antiquity. They spring from the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Notions of race, predicated on a matrix of ancestry, ethnicity, religion, and cultural practices, reveal how deep-seated racial prejudice is. The Jefferson ideal of equality falls short in American discussions of race. Despite the ideal, Jefferson himself believed that the differences between the races were “fixed in nature” and therefore the equality set out in the Declaration of Independence did not apply to all.

At the core of American racial studies one finds the American School of Anthropology and its theory of polygeny—that a hierarchy of human races had separate creations. Like the Nazi school of human differences, the American anthropologist Samuel Morton developed a scheme of racial differences based on cranial capacity to prove his theory that “Caucasian and Mongolian races had the highest cranial capacity and therefore the highest levels of intelligence, while Africans had the lowest cranial capacity and thus the lower levels of intelligence” (Ibid.).

What are we to do when the governor of Texas like the governor of Arizona thumbs his/her nose at public opinion and retorts that the citizens of their states know what’s good for their states? Where does that leave Latinos? And when the governor of Texas threatens to secede from the Union if he doesn’t get his way, does he really think that Tejanos (Texas Latinos) will follow him like lemmings into that worm hole of raging hyperbole? 

What conclusion can be drawn from the xenophobic ethnic cleansing spreading across Arizona and Texas? The conclusion is that xenophobic whites in those states are out to get rid of “Mexicans”—whether they’re citizens or not? That may sound like a harsh judgment, but “Mexicans” are left with little room to maneuver in this ethnic cleansing. White Arizonans and Texans see the world through the prism of whiteness, a prism that wants to white-out all traces of their historically Mexican past and present.

Like Arizona, the history of white Texas is studded with anti-Mexican sentiments. Not surprisingly, Arizona statehood was delayed until 1912 by Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana until the territory of Arizona had a white population that outnumbered the “Mexican” population there. But the insistence on a Mexican American Study course is to keep national mnemonic seepage at bay—that is, historic amnesia. 

Oscar Martinez, the historian, explains:

The creation of the U.S. –Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century separated those Mexicans who lived north of the Rio Grande from the motherland, converting them into an ethnic minority in the United States. . . For Border Chicanos, the psychological consequences of continued separation from the U.S. mainstream and of mixed emotion toward Mexico will remain deep and acute.

--Martinez,“Border Chicanos” from Troublesome Border, University of Arizona Press, 1988. 

This is why Mexican American Studies.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Historia Chicana

Mexican American Studies

University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

CENSORING MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES IN TEXAS SCHOOLS IS NOT ONLY ETHNIC CLEANSING BUT ALSO CENSORSHIP AND MUFFLING OF THE FIRST AND FOURTEENTH AMENDMENTS by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

There’s a nativist streak in the American psyche that emerges periodically to unravel the constitutional gains of American society, moving the nation more to the right—in a sort of dance macabre of the American national zeitgeist; in other words: something akin to an American Nazi Party (with the word “Nazi” being short for “National”). What has kept this Nazi zeitgeist at bay has been the vigilance of Americans working to create “a more perfect union,” committed to the preservation and process of democracy as articulated in the American Constitution.  What is little cogitated is that democracy is a process not a product.

That process has long held at bay inclusion of the real story of the American people, including those of color, starting with the story of Native Americans, then African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Other non-color groups have been given short shrift in the American Story as well. The real story of who we are as a nation has yet to be told, perhaps because it’s still an unfolding story. There’s little doubt that the American story today is not the same story as told by the French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in his 3^rd Letter fro an American Farmer first published in 1782: he wrote, “they are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen.” He did not include Native Americans nor African Americans.

Censorship of the Mexican American story in American annals began long before 1848 when the United States dismembered Mexico as a booty of war (1846-1848), and per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 2, 1848 annexed more than half of Mexico in what is known as The Mexican Cession—a land mass more than the size of Spain, France and Italy combined (529,000 sq. miles) the third                                 The Mexican Cession          largest acquisition of territory in US history now constituting the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and pars of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. That land-grab fulfilled the American dream of a nation from sea to shining sea. The flies in the ointment were the Mexicans—viewed as that vermin spawned by the Spaniards and the mongrel horde of Indian women—Mestizos as they came to be called but identified in the 20^th century as La Raza Cosmica (the Cosmic People) by Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican educator.

Arizona tried muzzling Mexican American Studies but the state’s foundation for that action was declared unconstitutional by a Federal Judge in Arizona on August 23, 2017 because Arizona’s ban of Mexican American Studies violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the American Constitution.  The judge concluded that racism was the animus propelling the Arizona ban of Mexican American Studies. 

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry railed that if things continued as they were Texas would have no other option than to secede from the Union—just like it did when it decided to join the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Secession is a mighty big gamble. It didn’t work the first time for segregationists and it won’t work this time for racists. In Texas, the Textbook Massacre is actuated by the mentality found in Arizona—“we know what belongs in the textbooks our kids read,” say white Texans.  Never mind that the majority of kids in Texas schools are Latinos and that their history ought to be represented in those textbooks—but isn’t. What are we to do when the governor of Texas thumbs his nose at public opinion and retorts that Texans know better? Where does that leave Tejanos? And when the governor threatens to secede from the Union if he doesn’t get his way, does he really think that Tejanos (Texas Latinos) will follow him like lemmings into that abyss of raging hyperbole? Na, na, na, na, na!

Ortego, Texas Textbook Massacre

This insanity has been going on for more than 20 years. Thirteen years ago in 2005 I made a presentation to the Texas State Board of Education (same Board, different folks) on “History and its Lacunae,” cautioning the Board not to go down the road it has finally wrong-headedly gone down. I explained how appalled I was by “the historical record in the American history textbooks which I have reviewed for this presentation and which are being considered for state adoption and use in Texas public schools, for nowhere in these texts is the story of American Hispanics fully told, particularly the story of Mexican Americans.” The Board did not listen then but has relented now except on the title for the Mexican American Study course. In real hegemonic fashion the Board deigns to know what is best for its subjects.

The Mexican American Study course is not about States’ Rights in regulating education per the 10^th Amendment, it’s about the First Amendment: Censorship and Intellectual Freedom. White Texan Supremacists are trying to white-out (perhaps the better word is “whitewash”) anything that’s not white in the textbooks used in the Texas public schools. This sure smacks of censorship, especially in voiding the presence of Cesar Chavez in the social studies textbooks. Thurgood Marshall was also on the chopping block. 

Nevertheless, Val Benavides,  TFN Outreach and Field Director, posted:

Today we’re celebrating a historic vote at the State Board of Education: the creation of an elective course in Mexican American studies for Texas public schools. The board also voted to create a process for approving other ethnic studies courses in the future.

These courses will help students across the state learn that the story of Texas and our nation includes the experiences and contributions of Mexican Americans and other people from diverse backgrounds. For too long those stories have been excluded from our classrooms.

Let’s be clear: This victory came after years of tireless work by scholars and activists who educated the public and policymakers, rallied supporters, and testified and lobbied at the state board. They faced setbacks along the way, but they kept their eyes on the goal and demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to bring important change.

We at TFN have been proud to stand with and support these leaders and advocates. And we will work with them as the state board approves curriculum standards for Mexican American studies and other ethnic studies courses.

¡Sí se puede!

It appears, however, that the Texas School Board sees the handwriting on the wall and while not capitulating entirely on this issue at this time, they’ve reserved the right to designate the title of the course—Americans of Mexican Descent, a throwback to the designation for Mexican Americans used by the Library of Congress 50 years ago. Here again, the white majority telling us who we are. But Dennis Bixler-Marquez, Director of Chicano Studies at UT-El Paso sees a glimmer of an unintended outcome in the decision of the Texas Board of Education’s approval of the Mexican American Study elective course when he said that the MAS course was not only for Mexican Americans (El Paso Times, 4/15/18, Borderlands, 1B/2B) but for everybody. Indeed, all Texans, nay, all Americans should know the Mexican American story. We should all know each other’s story—in their aggregate is the American story: immigrants and indigenous.

Juan Tejeda has it right:

Mexican American Studies and the historic vote and controversial decision to change the name of the MAS course by the Texas State Board of Education in CBS Austin below. The TXSBOE will be taking their final vote on this issue today in Austin. We are not hyphenated Americans. We are Native Americans. Mexican American Studies is an established Field of Study in Texas as authorized by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Call it what it is: a Mexican American History course for high school students in Texas. This is an elective course. Students don't have to take it if they don't want to. Tanto political pedo just to approve one elective course in Mexican American Studies in the state's history. #ApproveMAS

The insanity of purported conservative content replacing time-tested content traditional in social studies textbooks belies not only logic but the factual. The situation over textbooks in Texas is nothing more than “moral casuistry” based on evisceration of what has emerged as the Chicano Canon viewed as antithetical to the orthodox canon of American hegemony.

O

ur concepts of race do not emerge from antiquity. They spring from the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Notions of race, predicated on a matrix of ancestry, ethnicity, religion, and cultural practices, reveal how deep-seated racial prejudice is. The Jefferson ideal of equality falls short in American discussions of race. Despite the ideal, Jefferson himself believed that the differences between the races were “fixed in nature” and therefore the equality set out in the Declaration of Independence did not apply to all.

At the core of American racial studies one finds the American School of Anthropology and its theory of polygeny—that a hierarchy of human races had separate creations. Like the Nazi school of human differences, the American anthropologist Samuel Morton developed a scheme of racial differences based on cranial capacity to prove his theory that “Caucasian and Mongolian races had the highest cranial capacity and therefore the highest levels of intelligence, while Africans had the lowest cranial capacity and thus the lower levels of intelligence” (Ibid.).

What are we to do when the governor of Texas like the governor of Arizona thumbs his/her nose at public opinion and retorts that the citizens of their states know what’s good for their states? Where does that leave Latinos? And when the governor of Texas threatens to secede from the Union if he doesn’t get his way, does he really think that Tejanos (Texas Latinos) will follow him like lemmings into that worm hole of raging hyperbole? 

What conclusion can be drawn from the xenophobic ethnic cleansing spreading across Arizona and Texas? The conclusion is that xenophobic whites in those states are out to get rid of “Mexicans”—whether they’re citizens or not? That may sound like a harsh judgment, but “Mexicans” are left with little room to maneuver in this ethnic cleansing. White Arizonans and Texans see the world through the prism of whiteness, a prism that wants to white-out all traces of their historically Mexican past and present.

Like Arizona, the history of white Texas is studded with anti-Mexican sentiments. Not surprisingly, Arizona statehood was delayed until 1912 by Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana until the territory of Arizona had a white population that outnumbered the “Mexican” population there. But the insistence on a Mexican American Study course is to keep national mnemonic seepage at bay—that is, historic amnesia. 

Oscar Martinez, the historian, explains:

The creation of the U.S. –Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century separated those Mexicans who lived north of the Rio Grande from the motherland, converting them into an ethnic minority in the United States. . . For Border Chicanos, the psychological consequences of continued separation from the U.S. mainstream and of mixed emotion toward Mexico will remain deep and acute.

--Martinez,“Border Chicanos” from Troublesome Border, University of Arizona Press, 1988. 

This is why Mexican American Studies.

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D. (Renaissance Studies/Chicano Studies)

Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Public Policy)

Recipient: 2018 NACCS-Tejas Foco Estrella de Aztlan Lifetime Achievement Award

Recipient: 1997 Distinguished Faculty Award, Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, American and Mexican American

Texas State University System—Sul Ross

Alum: University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas, University of New Mexico

m Western New Mexico University, Miller Library, 1000 College Ave, PO Box 680

Silver City, New Mexico 88062, Branches: Gallup, Deming, Lordsburg & Web

t    O: 575-538-6410, F: 575-538-6178, C: 575-956-5541, e-mail: Philip.Ortego@wnmu.edu

v   Veteran: Sgt. Marine Corps, WW II / Maj. (Res) USAF, Korean Conflict, Early Vietnam Era

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Historia Chicana

Mexican American Studies

University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

Trump's Latest Ethnic Cleansing Directive and Latino disenfranchisement

These directives by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) came out yesterday from the Trump administration and they are alarming. 

• February 20, 2017: Implementing the President's Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvement Policies
• February 20, 2017: Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest

Do read every word of this post in order to inform yourself of this ethnic cleansing campaign inscribed in policy and its concomitant call for border militarization resulting, as it were, in an ethno-nationalistic police state that is reminiscent of Nazi Germany (read this in-depth, chilling exposé by Sarah Posner in case you have any doubts).

Trump puts tougher immigration policy in motion: Thousands of new immigration officers could lead to a spike in deportations.  By Josh Dawsey and Ted Hesson 02/21/17

Mexican officials riled by Trump’s new deportation memos: The release of the documents comes on the eve of Tillerson and Kelly’s trip south of the border. By Nahal Toosi 02/21/17

This is fully about ethnic cleansing and as a consequence, Mexican American and Latino disenfranchisement.  It makes sense when we think of changing demographics and how whites are feeling de-centered in our country, insecure about their long-enjoyed privileges—that they either fail, or don't want, to see—particularly among elites who simply can't accept the browning of America that, by the way, even these directives cannot ultimately stop.

Do consider making a contribution to the institute's efforts here as this is utterly terrifying and terroristic.

Also, do reach out to your representatives to share with them your thoughts.   If you do not know who represents you, click here to find out and do reach out to them right away on the wrong-headedness of this direction in policy.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s
 

@SuVotoEsSuVoz

@LatinaLista

______________________________________________________________________________

William C. Velásquez Institute

For Immediate Release                                                        More Info: Patricia Gonzales
 210-240-9546
                                                                                                           
WCVI President Denounces Trump Administrations Directive on Deportations
Trump Policy Has Gone from Bad to Worse

(Los Angeles, Feb 21, 2017) The narrative that early Trump Administration executive orders were so controversial and amounted to such bad policy because the Trump team was in chaos has turned out to be utterly false.  After a month of self-organization, the "well written" Trump Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implementing memo spells out the worst-case scenario of mass deportations, criminalization, and border militarization.

Indeed WCVI accuses the Trump Administration of seeking to launch a sui generis ethnic cleansing campaign against undocumented immigrants, 85% of whom are from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Definition of ethnic cleansing:  the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity
-----------------------------------------------------

The DHS Memo broadly defines who should be deported, far more so than under Obama, and in practice would cover nearly all undocumented rather than the 1% with criminal records. It also enhances the existing DHS/ICE "deportation force" with 15,000 new personnel.

Under Trumps' plan, human and civil rights violations will impact tens if not hundreds of thousands of immigrants and citizens alike. Under Obama, 20,000 US citizens were mistakenly captured in raids, this kind of ethno-racial profiling will get worse with the new directives. 

The cost to taxpayers of hunting down the 11 million undocumented will be tens of billions of dollars. 

The annual economic impact of forcibly removing seven million employed undocumented immigrants from the economy will be hundreds of billions of dollars. Entire regional economic sectors like agriculture, hospitality, and construction, in California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, and Nevada will go into contraction.

Immigrant families will suffer mightily as parents will be criminalized for uniting with their children. Federally funded private immigrant prisons along the border will reap massive profits as they are expanded and filled to the gills with obligatory incarceration of captured immigrants.

The border will become a further militarized "no - mans - land" by adding 5,000 border guards and more than a thousand miles of wall to the already existing 20,000 guards and 700 miles of fencing at a cost of 20-40 billion taxpayer dollars. This at a time when all the data shows net zero or near net zero cross border migration since 2007:

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=71733761-2f3f-47c8-96fb-19f9fe5f6789&preview=true&m=1114208817960&id=preview

Coincidentally, unless a miracle happens, the Supreme Court will soon enable US border guards to shoot to kill Mexican immigrants on Mexican soil!

WCVI calls on "the resistance movement" to pressure Congress to deny appropriations to Trump's immigrant ethnic cleansing campaign and border militarization. Instead Congress should enact a common sense legalization program for law abiding undocumented persons and Trump should halt his ill advised cold war on Mexico.

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William C. Velasquez Institute, 320 El Paso, San Antonio, TX 78207

@SuVotoEsSuVoz

@LatinaLista