BY LAURA GARZA AND VERÓNICA POSES

EDINBURG, Texas - With fists clenched in the air the students stood chanting "Chicano Power!" after viewing one segment of a four-part TV series on the Chicano movement. They were among the 250 youth attending a nationwide conference of the Chicano student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), held here April 11-14 at the University of Texas-Pan American, in the Río Grande Valley.

The chanting expressed the eagerness of the youth who came to the conference to fight the attacks on affirmative action, on Mexicano and other immigrant workers, and on the right to learn and speak Spanish. It reflected the desire to build a social movement capable of winning the rights of the Chicano people as a nationality in the United States.

Students packed into cars and vans and drove here from cities throughout the Southwest, as well as a few other areas. Two dozen members of MEChA came from the chapter at the University of California in Los Angeles, 15 from Chaffey College, and others from UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, and San Diego, as well as other colleges in central California. Students also came from San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston, and Arlington, Texas, from Boulder, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona. Others traveled from campuses such as Yakima Valley Community College in Washington state.

Ernesto Mireles came in a group of eight from Michigan State University. The MEChA chapter there is fighting for Chicano studies courses and organized a protest of several hundred students to demand financial aid programs be saved. The chapter also led a January 17 protest by 400 people against the Michigan government's cuts in welfare programs.

At a workshop titled "Immigrants' Rights: Stopping the Abuse on La Raza," Roberto Martínez from the University of Arizona in Tucson explained the efforts he and others are involved in to defend Mexican workers and inform them of their rights. They sometimes monitor police radios and get out to nearby areas where the immigration cops - la migra - have been called in to arrest Mexican workers.

Protest for immigrant rights
Martínez also described plans for an April 20 immigrant rights event. That day, 100 people marched from Nogales, Arizona, to join another 100 on the Mexican side of the border to oppose the brutalization and scapegoating of immigrants.

Others in the conference workshop noted the growing militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, beefed-up presence of the border cops, and harassment of Mexican workers in the area. They noted that it is almost impossible to drive out of the Valley without passing a checkpoint, creating a virtual second border. In Brownsville, Texas, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents patrol the downtown area together with local police.

Participants reported that a representative of the South Texas Immigration Council (STIC) in Harlingen, Texas, filed a complaint against the INS when a client was hauled away as he tried to enter the offices of STIC, which provides legal aid to immigrants. A few weeks later the state pressed criminal charges against a STIC worker, Benigno Peña, for allegedly interfering with an immigration officer.

In another workshop MEChA activists discussed how to fight back against various "English only" measures. Workshop leader Raúl García reported that 21 states have passed legislation barring the use of languages other than English in government documents or offices.

MEChA members, professors, and others also led a wide variety of other workshops, including on Chicana feminism, the struggle to organize farm workers, environmental racism, gay rights, and the history of the Raza Unida Party (RUP) - a Chicano political party independent of the Democrats and Republicans that developed in certain regions during the 1970s. The struggles by peasants in Chiapas, Mexico, were also discussed.

Plans for upcoming actions
In workshops and general sessions, conference participants also discussed actions they are building such as protests of the Republican and Democratic conventions. An August 12 protest outside the Republican convention in San Diego will rally people in defense of immigrant workers and demand the reversal of "English only" laws and California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187. A National Raza Unity Convention will take place there the day before.

A nationwide protest is set for October 12 in Washington, D.C., to respond to anti-immigrant measures. Flyers for the action, organized by Coordinadora `96, demand: human and constitutional rights for all, defense of affirmative action, free public education for all through college, citizen police review boards, an increase in the minimum wage, immediate naturalization of all eligible people, and extension of the amnesty eligibility date for undocumented immigrants.

How to build a new Chicano rights movement was a topic of discussion throughout the conference in workshops and informal discussions. Speakers at the event included a number who had been active in the initial fights that forged the Chicano movement and helped form the Raza Unida Party. Among those listed on the conference program were two youth leaders from Cuba who had been invited to speak, Iroel Sánchez and Maika Guerrero. The U.S. State Department, however, denied them visas, and more than 50 MEChistas signed letters of protest against the undemocratic prohibition. Many also expressed interest in a trip to Cuba being organized by the National Network on Cuba in July.

Verónica Poses is a member of the Young Socialists in Miami.  
 
 
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