But, as in Islam, a few indige-nazis are stains sullying a noble organization. I should know. I am a Mechista.
As both a member of the invading army and a proud son of Mexican-hating Orange County, I can testify that, without a doubt, MEChA is harmless.
Sure, the organization's founding documents, the Plan de Santa Barbara and the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, call for a Chicano homeland. But few members take these hilariously dated relics of the 1960s seriously, if they even bother to read them. Little of the modern-day MEChA remains separatist, other than the occasional Che-spouting junior and a few cute mestizas with Aztec names like Citlali who sport Frida ponytails, black-frame glasses and Chuck Taylor high-tops.
MEChA's primary objectives are not secessionist but educational (get as many Latino high schoolers into the universities as possible and help them stay there) and cultural. For many Mexican American students, MEChA is their family by proxy, a support network for those of us who were the first in our families to graduate from high school, let alone college.
The open-borders philosophy expressed by many Mechistas isn't born from an irredentist ideology but from their experience of having relatives divided by borders. All that raza clatter isn't racism, it's the traditional way immigrants climb the success ladder — through solidarity and education. The loaded term itself is better understood as representing the immediate community, not as a proclamation of Mexican superiority to all other races.
