Throwback Thursday: AZTLAN!

All right.

Well, uh, full disclosure, John R. Chavez was my dissertation advisor in graduate school, and, uh, his book was influential in my own work and my own study on Chicano Indigeneity.

And so his book, uh, was published in 1984 from the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

And as Curly just mentioned, it's called The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest.

And so what I'm about to read to you is a synthesized version of his introduction to sort of frame what we Chicanos, at least in the traditional Chicano sense, uh, have meant and continue to mean, those of us that still do this, uh, by Aztlán.

Okay? To the Anglo-American majority of the United States, the Southwest is vaguely identified as that group of states located at the corner of the country toward Mexico.

Before the war between the United States and Mexico, which ended in 1848, present-day California, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, more than half of Colorado, the southern and western portions of the state, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the southwestern corners of Wyoming and Kansas were all parts of Mexico's national territory.

Because of Mexico's prior possession of the Southwest, Chicanos consider themselves indigenous to the region.

Their claims are supported by the fact that their ancestors not only explored and settled parts of the Southwest as early as the 16th century, but thousands of years earlier permanently occupied the region or migrated through it on their way south.

The belief that the Southwest, especially the areas long settled by Mexicans, is the Chicano homeland, and the belief that Mexicans are indigenous to and dispossessed of the region are beliefs that have had a formative and continuing influence on the collective Chicano mind.

Within the individual Chicano mind, the image of the Southwest is, in the most literal sense, a picture of a particular barrio street, of a specific rural adobe, of a particular Brown child, or any number of other sensory perceptions that are peculiar to the Chicano Southwest.

At its most sophisticated, the collective Chicano image of the Southwest and other ideas concerning such matters as race and culture together form a guiding myth that has affected Chicano history from earliest times to the present.

Aspects of this myth can be traced from the chronicles of the Aztecs through the Spanish-language newspapers of the 1850s to the literature and social thought of Chicanos in the 1980s.

The Chicano myth, however, does bear important similarities to the Native American image of the United States.

Both Indians and Chicanos see themselves as indigenous to and dispossessed of their homelands, which in the Southwest means they claim the same territory.

Nevertheless, in the 20th century, these overlapping claims have caused little conflict, for Anglos have simply possessed the land.

Instead, these claims have led two minorities to recognize that they have common backgrounds.

In 1971, Armando Rendon, a Chicano journalist, acknowledged just that point.

We maintain that there exists blood and cultural bonds to the land of the Southwest.

We do not deny the Indian people's claims to the land.

We believe we have had at least a share in its perpetuation through the hands of those who originally worked the land and who have historical claims to it.

This issue of land and its relationship to the Chicano should be discussed with Indian tribesmen.

Chicanos have a blood relationship to our Indian forebears.

Descendants of early Spanish colonists who reject such an alliance with the Indian natives of the Americas also reject the most obvious claim to the retribution for the misdeeds committed by the Anglos who stole the land.

That knowledgeable Native Americans recognize such Chicano claims is evident from the following statement made in 1973 by Jack D. Forbes, a Native American scholar.