Mexico’s “Reconquista” — We Have Been Warned

Reconquista!: The Takeover Of America, California Coalition for Immigration Reform, 1997, 40 pp.

How do Hispanic activists see the future of the United States? Reconquista!: The Takeover Of America lets them speak for themselves. It contains pages of quotes from university professors, activists and elected officials that betray an openly racialist plan to “re-conquer” the Southwestern United States. These leaders understand that demography is destiny, and are eager to take power and land from “Anglos.” For anyone who doubts that Hispanics are saying these things, or who may simply want to hear the tone in which they discuss reconquista, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) offers an audio tape that includes every quotation in the booklet.

Here are excerpts from a few of the quotations.

Professor José Angel Gutierrez of the University of Texas, 1995:

We have an aging White America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population. You must believe that you are entitled to govern . . . Don’t you find it curious that in the midst of all this harassment and repression that there are those who are saying that they are concerned because we’re Latinizing Los Angeles? That there’s too many Mexicans here? That we’re the biggest national security threat to the United States? I love it! Se estan cagando cabrones de miedo! (They are sh****** in their pants with fear.) I love it!

Richard Alatorre, Los Angeles City Council, September, 1996:

[T]hey’re afraid that we’re going to take over the governmental institutions and other institution. They’re right, we will take them over, and we are not going to go away, we are here to stay . . .”

Art Torres, former California State Senator and current chairman of the California Democratic Party:

Remember, 187 is the last gasp of white America in California. Understand that. And people say to me on the Senate floor when I was in the Senate, ‘Why do you fight so hard for affirmative action programs?’ And I say ‘Because you’re going to need them [when whites become a minority].’ (laughter)

Gloria Molina, Los Angeles County Supervisor, June 1996:

[W]e are politicizing every single one of those new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country . . . And our vote is going to be important. But I gotta tell you that a lot of people are saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and vote because I want to pay them back.’

Antonio Villaraigosa, Majority Leader in the California State Assembly, June, 1997:

We know the sunny side of midnight has been the election of a Latino speaker [in the state house], was the election of Loretta Sanchez against an arch-conservative, reactionary, hate-mongering politician like Congressman Dornan.

Mike Hernandez, Los Angeles City Council, June 1996:

Somos Mexicanos (we are Mexicans)! Mexico, some of us say, is the country this land used to belong to! . . . We are the future, we will lead the Western hemisphere!

Fernando Guerra, Professor, Loyola Marymount, Jan. 1995:

[W]e need to avoid a white backlash by using codes understood by Latinos but not offensive or threatening to others.

Armando Navarro, Professor, University of California, Jan. 1995:

[T]ime is on our side, as one people as one nation within a nation as the community that we are, the Chicano/Latino community of this nation. What that means is a transfer of power. It means control.

Ruben Zacarias, Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District, June, 1997:

And I’ll tell you what we’ve done with the INS. Now we’re even doing the [citizenship] testing that usually people had to go to INS to take, and pretty soon, hopefully, we’ll do the final interviews in our schools. (laughter) Incidentally, I started this very quietly because there are those that if they knew that we were creating a whole new cadre of brand new citizens it would have a tremendous political impact.

Street activists use more colorful terms than elected officials and college professors. Here is Augustin Cebada, a leader of the Brown Berets, on July 4, 1996:

Go back to Boston! Go back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you, leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die. Even their own ethicists say that they should die, that they have a duty to die. We are the majority in L.A . . . Through love of having children we’re going to take over.

Anonymity permits the greatest candor. This is the beginning of a message left on the answering machine of an immigration reform organization in 1996:

I’m a Mexican-American, and you being a white bastard, you are a mother-f****** trespassing son-of-b****. And if you don’t watch yourself, like all other white mother-f****** here in Aztlan, you’re all going to be blown away, son-of-a-b****.

The only non-Hispanic quoted in Reconquista! is Albert Gore. He was the keynote speaker at the 1995 conference of the Southwest Voter Registration Project, which helped speed through one million new naturalizations in time for the 1996 elections. He said:

This President [Clinton] wants to put the “N’ back in INS . . . The President and I look forward to hearing your views on every single step we take to create a balanced immigration policy that makes the most of our diversity. We are all the descendants of immigrants, whether our forebears came on the Mayflower, or in steerage from Eastern Europe, or walked across an unmarked border in Texas or California.

For some reason, Mr. Gore is the only speaker who has anything to say about “diversity.”

This excellent little booklet contains photographs of many of the people it quotes, along with samples of the aggressive graphics that Hispanics often use in connection with their cause. The CCIR has done a first-rate job of gathering information that is almost never reported. This collection deserves the widest possible distribution.