Tournament: UNLV | Round: 6 | Opponent: Fresno St AL | Judge: Holland
I constantly remember the stories of my mother
Cruzo la frontera para apoyar a su familia
On a rainy night she crossed the Rio grand as she watched a nameless individual drown taken away by the rio.
I constantly remember the stories of my father
On a stormy night he was pulled over by the jakes
For no crime other than DWB A.k.a Driving while black
Camino desperada
At the age of 15, she was looking for home
She was looking for Aztlan but the only thing he found where bones
He was driving home. But blacks have no home here
He could drive to his little tenement but there is no home
The cops “found’ a few grams and he paid with several years
The bones of latin@s with the same purpose
The bones of the Latin@s que no encontraron su casa
They looked but where denied to their land and thus they died in the locations that their ancestors lived.
He was denied his freedom, denied his rights, and denied a home
He could only live inside the prison industrial complex
Its is the concentration camp from black bodies, a home for the homeless.
My madre tenia miedo que la migra la iba a violar
Tenia miedo porque su amigas tambien cruzaron pero tambien la migra violo
We will come home, we will reclaim aztlan
These forms of oppression are not encapsulated incidents. They don’t happen in some far away place. It happens here, on the border, in the prisons, in the hood, in this round, and on an epistemic plane. They are part of a broader systemic problem that can’t be understood without an investigation of the history of oppression. Only through historical analysis can we understand how oppression truly operates.
Anglo terrorism caused Mexico to fight for its land, which vilified Mexico and allowed America to commit imperialistic atrocities. The desire to expand slavery into new lands drove the whites to expel the natives. Native resistance to slavery enraged the anglos. Now the Alamo is a justification of the on going oppression of la Raza de bronze, anzaldua explains
In the 1800s, Anglos …has never been made. Anzaldúa 87 Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera.This is gendered modified
When discussing statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities,
We must analyze their historical context. I use Polk as the starting point because it’s what has shaped and molded the person that my people and I are.
I use the expansion of slavery as a starting point because it has molded my people.
Polk incited war without proclaiming war as a manipulation of war powers. Polk painted the native tejanos as the aggressors encroaching on land that was America’s via manifest destiny. It was this manifest destiny that gave gringos the rights over tejano land and the black body. The brown invader from the south with their violent nature is the same logic applied to the boarder today. The black body to be managed and controlled is still applied to the ghettos today. Zinn explains:
In the White House … tabled immediately by the House. Zinn, Howard. "We Take Nothing by Conquest Thank God." A people's history of the United States: 1492-present. New ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 147-152. Print.
It is only through this rupturing of white linear history that we can begin the process of liberation. It is history that structures our engagement with today. Present oppressions have only one place of origin, the past. We must reclaim history before we can lay the ground work for liberation.
Therefore:
In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud history but also critical of the brutal "gringo" invasion of our territories, we the oppressed, the dispossessed, the marginalized rally toward aztlan The sovereign state of the have- nots. We reclaim a space for ourselves absent the oppressor.
Somos libres y soberanos para determinar las tareas que son justamente llamados por nuestra casa, nuestra tierra, el sudor de nuestra frente, y nuestros corazones. Aztlán es de los que plantar las semillas, regar los campos y recoger las cosechas y no a los europeos extranjeros.
We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Peoplehood unites us, and love for our People makes us a people whose time has come and who struggle against the foreigner "gabacho" who exploits our riches and destroys our culture.
Con el corazón en nuestras manos y nuestras manos en el suelo, declaramos la independencia de nuestra nación mestiza. Somos un pueblo de bronce con una cultura de bronce. Antes de que el mundo, antes de toda América del Norte, antes de todo nuestro pueblo en el continente de bronce, que somos una nación, somos una unión de pueblos libres, somos Aztlán.
El Plan de Aztlan was adopted at the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, March 1969, http://clubs.asua.arizona.edu/~mecha/pages/PDFs/ElPlanDeAtzlan.pdf
The Role of the ballot is who best performs liberation in the round.
Thus we propose:
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán sets the theme that the oppressed must use their oppression as the key or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization.
Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, we can only conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.
Our struggle then must be for the control of our barrios, our streets, campos, hoods, pueblos, schools, lands, our economy, our culture, and our political life.
El Plan de Aztlan was adopted at the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, March 1969, http://clubs.asua.arizona.edu/~mecha/pages/PDFs/ElPlanDeAtzlan.pdf
Allowing Anglos to control representations of Mexicans as invaders, or blacks as devalued bodies, or Aztlan as Anglo land, or prisons as black homes, it enables a narrative to be created within the national memory in which opressed are considered enemies of the state. This creates a perpetual state of double consciousness and inflicts psychic violence among populations that can’t rise to the level of white superiority. We internalize the lies from these false representations but we also internalize the oppression. Furthermore,
que la violencia se deja llevar por dentro de nuestra conciencia colectividad, por lo que el Álamo es un momento de remordimiento Americana, y la crueldad mexicana.
This allows for the continued oppression of the oppressed as well as the double consciousness within the status quo that justifies psychic and physical violence.
The loss of our history and identity has allowed the gabacho to push its atrocities towards our bodies. The education and fracturing of white linear history proposed by Aztlan is the first step towards resistance. Immortal Technique explains:
Most of my Latino … can be destroyed
Immortal technique: the poverty of philosophy
It was polk’s war powers who stripped us from our land, history and identity. We want to reclaim and have an accounting of our social location to mobilize and prosper without an oppressor. Anzaldua describes:
You want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied to me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestizo – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture. Anzaldúa 87 Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera
The state has not and cannot solve for these oppressions. It has historically failed. It is a white apparatus that can only offer short term piece-meal solutions to satisfy non-white populations at the behest of whites. This machine penalizes us when we attempt to work within it and reorganizes and reconfigures oppression where any small successes are made. We are pushed to the outside, depoliticized, and marginalized. We have one option, burn it down. The state cannot co-exist with our liberation.
Yo soy Joaquín,
perdido en un mundo de confusión:
caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,
confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers have lost the economic battle
and won the struggle of cultural survival.
And now! I must choose between the paradox of
victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,
or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.
Yes, I have come a long way to nowhere,
unwillingly dragged by that monstrous, technical,
industrial giant called Progress and Anglo success....
I look at myself.
I watch my brothers.
I shed tears of sorrow. I sow seeds of hate.
I withdraw to the safety within the circle of life –
We start to MOVE.
The oppressed
The dispossessed
The marginalized
We SHALL ENDURE!
We WILL ENDURE!