Anti-Anglo Racist Tripe

{snip}

{snip} When you immerse yourself in racist hate literature, it creates a sensation akin to dipping your head in a bucket of garbage. It is cloying, smothering, fetid and unpleasant; you can’t wait to remove yourself from it. All of this came flooding back to me when I happened across a copy of “America Libre” by Raul Ramos y Sanchez.

On his website, the author claims he wrote the book “as a wake-up call to the dangers of extremism–on both sides of this explosive issue. Illegal immigration is a hotly debated topic. Yet it is only the tip of the iceberg.” The first portion of this statement is a blatant lie. “America Libre” is nothing less than a Chicano nationalist “Turner Diaries,” a racist, hate-filled screed that gins up anti-Anglo resentment by painting a fantasy landscape in which all Hispanics are rounded up and put in camps. Ramos’ heroes revolt, hoping to create a U.N.-recognized “Hispanic Republic of North America.”

{snip} Specifically, his book is concerned primarily with depicting, transparently, all non-Hispanics as racist, ignorant, incompetent fools driven only by hatred and given only to brutality. There are no complex characters; there are only Hispanics to varying degrees of purity {snip} and Anglos exhibiting varying degrees of racism. To the extent that military veteran and bodybuilder Mano at first loves America, then becomes only too eager to commit cold-blooded murder in seeking revenge for the injustices perpetrated against Hispanics, his character could be considered dynamic. He is, however, only a convenient water boy carrying the author’s racist hate.

The Anglos against whom Mano pits himself with only token reluctance are, almost to a man, racist monsters who spit words like “Beaner,” “Greaser” and “Pancho” with every breath. When they’re not attempting to rape Hispanic women or killing Mano’s children with their incompetence {snip}, they’re nervously firing into crowds of understandably angry protesters because they’re nothing but ill-trained glory hounds suffering delusions of action-hero greatness.

Two things disturb me about “America Libre.” The first is that this book won an International Latino Book Award when it is clearly only a mediocre novel in terms of its writing. (It was also one of USA Today’s picks for “Summer Reads” and was similarly lauded in Latina magazine.) The second is that Ramos’ depiction of evil, Hispanic-hating Anglos, only too eager to deny Social Security benefits to illegal aliens (when they’re not cruelly deporting them outright), is obviously what he truly thinks of non-Hispanics. “America Libre” exists for one reason only: to foment hatred and revolutionary sentiment among a Hispanic population that has already become volatile in the southwest United States.

This is most evident in that Ramos absolves from blame another of his protagonists, a wealthy instigator who pays gang members to stir up trouble to help along the inevitable revolution. (These gang members shoot down police officers.) By the novel’s end, protagonist Mano no longer considers himself an American. He is committed to the revolution and vows to go on fighting.

This is a thoroughly evil book. I do not understand how the Hachette Book Group justifies mass-producing this racist tripe. This is not literature; this is a La Raza fantasy of the “reconquista”–a Chicano nationalist movement that seeks to retake portions of the United States in the name of Hispanic racial and social justice. {snip}

{snip}