COMBAT AMERICANIZATION
Author note: This is part one of a multi part series where I confront what I believe not only holds back Chicano unity but Chicano liberation as a whole. We must of course understand that Capitalism is the primary contradiction but internal contradictions prevail as a cancerous tumor that can cause the downfall of a revolutionary movement.
The position that advanced Marxist Chicanos should hold, is for active ideological struggle. This is a tool for ensuring unity amongst Chicanos and upholding our interests in achieving national unity and with that national liberation. This tool or rather revolutionary weapon should be taken up by every single radical Chicano within the diaspora.
The phenomenon of Americanization is not accidental. It’s a deliberate and manufactured bourgeois strategy aimed at dissolving national identities within the United States and stripping their revolutionary potential. The primary focus of those enacting the phenomenon known as ‘Americanization’ is to further assimilate the nations trapped within the United States with Chicanos being a primary target of this strategy since the U.S. annexed half of Mexico. With the further development of the American national identity during World War II or what I will be referring to from now on as the Great Patriotic War, further deepened that contradiction. The contradiction between the Chicano Nation and the U.S. imperialist state. This further explains why Chicanos were targeted, after approximately 500,000 Chicanos went to fight a bourgeois war on behalf of the ruling class, many returned to be treated as second class citizens. Many Chicano families were denied housing, education, or human rights. The empire used oppressed nations when convenient, then renewed their oppression when the crisis ended. The attempt to Americanize Chicanos can be taken back even further to the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo where the treaty was almost instantly abandoned with the goal of further assimilation not coexistence.
Americanization intensified primarily throughout the 20th century. The prioritization of English-only schooling, segregation, the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930’s, and later operation wetback served to weaken Mexican influence and to weaken the Chicano identity while maintaining the southwest as a colonized internal territory. The proletarianization of the Chicano people would help to strengthen the existence of the modern Chicano nation that had long been hidden in plain sight from the world. The Chicano nation concentrated in barrios, super-exploited as farm workers and laborers, and constantly subjected to political repression and police brutality.
the multi-national states that are based on the domination of one nation—more exactly, of the ruling class of that nation—over the other nations are the original home and chief arena of national oppression and of national movements.” (Stalin, The Immediate Task of the Party in the National Question, 1921)
Chicanos assimilating further to the American national identity, to their way of thinking, and to their bourgeois reactionary thought ultimately only serves the interests of the ruling class, it completely destroys national consciousness, erases the indigenous-Mexican character of the Chicano Nation, and attempts to further transform Chicanos into a docile, American, ‘White’ section of the U.S. working class. The overall struggle against Americanization, against Hispanism, and against Liberalism therefore is not only a cultural but a political struggle. It is a struggle against bourgeois influence, for the ideological independence of the Chicano people free from all outside influences.
For these reasons, Chicanos must take up an ideological struggle as a matter of national survival. It’s only through revolutionary consciousness and prioritizing class struggle can Chicanos forge unity, reclaim our historical continuity, and prepare ourselves for true liberation. The development of a disciplined, ideologically grounded Chicano vanguard is no longer an option or idea. It’s foundational to the revolutionary movement to come.
An argument I’ve heard about Chicano youth is that they’re not connected with their Mexican-Indigenous culture, that they’re too busy participating in lumpen-proletariat activities or they’re further assimilating themselves to the American nation identity, with some pursuing bourgeois interests, political and state apparatus positions being the most prevalent. The idea that joining the bourgeois states culture and attempting to committee ethnic and cultural suicide in order to separate yourself from not only your heritage, your culture, and overall the broader community, is due to Americanization, more specifically it’s a trait of the average American liberal identity that has creeped its cancerous tendencies towards every single ethnic nationality in america. This stunts the potential of any national liberation movement.
Chicano youth, especially those disconnected from their Mexican-Indigenous roots, eventually become easy targets for the bourgeoisie’s Americanization. The American national identity sells itself as ‘success’, respectability, but these require sacrifices. The absolute abandonment of national identity, culture, lineage, and ultimately political consciousness.
The overall outcome is predictable:
The depoliticization of the youth disconnected from their history. A petty bourgeois layer loyal to the U.S. imperial state or loyal to its national identity that some patriotic ‘communists’ within the United States have attempted to separate the two, ultimately serving the ruling class in their efforts at national erasure this line of thinking within the Chicano liberation movement must be extinguished that all cost by all means necessary. Another outcome is a community fractured by American class and cultural standards. and a nation whose revolutionary potential is stunted before it can develop.
But this is not the end of the contradiction. It’s part of the first stage.
COMBAT AMERICANIZATION
¡VIVA LA LIBERACIÓN CHICANA!
