Hispanic Heritage Month officially ends this fall on October 15 after a month of events commemorating the contributions of people from this demographic. It all started in June of 1968 when Southern California Congressman George E. Brown nobly spearheaded a resolution to right the omission of the contributions of a significant part of his constituency, ethnic Mexicans. The decree garnered 19 western cosponsors for a week-long acknowledgment. Subsequently, the administrations of presidents Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan extended this fete to a month-long tribute as the electoral power of Spanish surnamed citizens swelled in our nation’s politics.
The yearly launch of this homage aligns with the independence anniversaries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica from the Spanish empire in 1821.
But I don’t pay much attention to Hispanic Heritage Month, even though I stand in solidarity with the people of continental America who continue a 500-year struggle against new forms of settler colonialism.
Why?
Because I and most ethnic Mexican compas, colleagues, and gente in communities of my ilk do not identify with Spain’s legacy of violence and exploitation in the Americas. Oh sure, I have known people, family even, who exalt their Iberian lineage at the expense of their indigenous ancestry.
Ethnic Mexicans (citizens and migrants, the documented and undocumented) are people with a long history in America. In addition, self-identified Chicanas/os like me are conscious of our culture being historically rooted in sexual violence that encompasses many ethnicities and races: indigenous first Americans of the Western Hemisphere, Iberians (a good number expelled Sephardic Jews), Africans, Asians, and a range of European nationalities.
The early twentieth-century Mexican philosopher-politician Jose Vasconcelos conferred upon his people the cognomen La Raza Cosmica. Many outsiders of my culture gauchely translate raza to mean race. Most Chicanas/os don’t as it suggests a yeasty cross-cultural community of working-class people.
Other ethnic Mexicans adopt the Chicano epithet similarly. I recall how my politically moderate dad referenced with a reflective pride feisty ethnic Mexican crowds at Oxnard’s placita as la chicanada, the hoi polloi of which we belong, as they enjoyed Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence fiestas or the city’s Salsa Festival.
As legendary journalist Ruben Salazar shrewdly stated in a February 6, 1970, Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?”: “A Chicano Is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself. He resents being told Columbus ‘discovered’ America when the Chicano’s ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’”
Conscious of this cultural labyrinth, I also reject the “Hispanic” label, fabricated by strangers, as it eradicates the historical presence of my people in the Southwest.
The attorney turned historian Carey McWilliams aptly coined fairy-tale functions like Hispanic Heritage Month a fantasy heritage by which early twentieth century Anglo American boosters glorified the Iberian as a hegemonic ploy in the form of Santa Barbara Fiesta Days, the Ramona Pageant, Columbus Day, and real estate promotion such as the multimillion-dollar development of Spanish Hills in the Ventura County city of Camarillo when it was the Mexican that settled California.
(Granted branding exclusive neighborhoods in historical fact did not promise retailers the attainment of their California dream of hand-over-fist profits as they understood that a Mexican Hills designation would not appeal to prospective deep-pockets buyers)
McWilliams also recognized the Spanish fantasy heritage as a lie that erased the reality that ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. were here before the Anglo. Hence, they are not foreigners. When he published ostensibly the first Chicano studies book in 1948, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People in the United States, he argued that our nation’s European origins was first conceived in the Spanish colony in New Mexico in 1598, not the English Jamestown nine years later.
So, when ethnic Mexicans trek north from Mexico today, they follow a centuries-long migrant stream predating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that concluded a war instigated by the U.S. to acquire what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California.
And from different parts of Latin America and Haiti, refugees often flee repressive authoritarian regimes backed by our government to cross a synthetic U.S.-Mexico border born in nativism and brutality, secured by guards on horseback, respectively, in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the Texas Rangers before the creation of the border patrol. Historian Monica Muñoz Martinez magisterially documents these truths in The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018).
During the Chicano Movement in Ventura County, intrepid activists such as Yvonne De Los Santos, Rachel Murguia Wong, and Roberto Flores teamed up with allies and peers in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to insist that an inclusive curriculum that centered the history and culture of people of color be adopted in schools to make such a heritage month unnecessary. To publicize this demand along with others to redress the exploitation of farmworkers, challenge police brutality, dismantle school segregation, and end the war in Vietnam, in which Mexican American troops experienced a casualty rate disproportionate to their numbers in the Southwest, Chicanas/os embarked upon the La Marcha de la Reconquista in the spring of 1971 from Calexico to Sacramento.
With self-determination, they journeyed northward six hundred miles from town to town not as Hispanics but as Chicanas and Chicanos. And that I honor.
Frank P. Barajas is a professor of United States history at California State University Channel Islands. He obtained a bachelor’s and Master’s degree in History at California State University, Fresno. And while teaching at Cypress College as a tenure-track professor, he earned his doctorate from the Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Barajas specializes in the history of Southern California. He has published peer-reviewed essays on agricultural labor in Ventura County, the Sleepy Lagoon Trial, Oxnard schools, and the 2004 implementation of a civil gang injunction in the City of Oxnard. In 2012 the University of Nebraska Press released his book titled Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961. And this past Summer Nebraska published his follow-up, Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Moviemiento Chicano in Ventura County,
California, 1945-1975.