Immigration: A Nation of Colonists – and Race Laws

By Juan Santos

You hear it everywhere. Even from Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the vicious anti-migrant legislation that has polarized the US.

“We are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” he says.

And like almost everyone else, he’s got it wrong.

The original Europeans in what is now the US were not immigrants, but colonists. And the US is not a nation of immigrants - it is a white colonial settler state, like South Africa under Apartheid, the former Rhodesia, Australia and Israel.

And like those states the US has always operated on a sometimes hidden, sometimes overt system of Apartheid.

Like those places, the US is a nation of colonists – and race laws.

It is a place where white colonists arrived, seized the land, and dispossessed, exterminated or attempted to exclude the original “non-white” peoples – all of them.

They did so at the point of a gun - by open terror and genocide, which was the precursor and the necessary pre-condition of European “immigration.” And, of course, they didn’t only use guns and overt terror. Where “necessary,” they operated by “law.”

Let me prove the point. It’s simple. We all know the facts.

In the US, Native Americans were dispossessed, subjected to mass murder, and locked on separate, Apartheid-style “reservations.” So it stands today.

Africans were enslaved, and once “freed,” they were subjected first to Jim Crow, then, when that proved no longer advisable, Jim Crow was transformed into the mass terror of mass incarceration and permanent Apartheid-style ghetto-ization. So it stands today.

The Indian nation of Mexico was conquered in a racist war of aggression by the US in 1848. The only debate in the days of “Manifest Destiny” was not whether to seize Mexican / Indian land, only how much of it to seize, and what to do to keep the Mexicans out of what had been stolen.

Two choices were before them. These were the terms of the debate: take the whole nation and lock the people on reservations, or take as much land – with as few Mexicans – as possible. Thus the border was established through a race war, through brute and overtly racist violence. The border is an Apartheid Wall. So it stands today.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States.

The Act claimed that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory” of the US – the same racist rhetoric used today against other Brown people. Like HR4377, the current notorious immigration bill, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it illegal for “any Chinese laborer to come, or… to remain within the United States.” So it stands today. Only the immediate target of the law has changed.

Every group the US has sought to eliminate or exclude has been a people of color.

The logic is simple.

Allow entry or citizenship for those who can be “assimilated” into the colonists’ culture – those who can become loyal colonists themselves – and exclude the “Other” - those who are the targets of colonialism – those whose land, cultures, bodies and souls must be sacrificed for the colonists to remain dominant and for their system to function.

Immigration law has always been race law in the US.

As far back as 1790 the Federal government ruled that the right to become a naturalized citizen was reserved to "free white persons."

So it remained until 1952. Until then the Supreme Court repeatedly determined exactly which migrants might be considered “free” and “white,” as applicants of various ethnic backgrounds sought to become citizens.

Today, “The Nation of Immigrants” theme is struck to avoid the historical and cultural truth. Europeans – who could be assimilated to colonial culture – were allowed entrance en masse.

But there was a “stark division,” as Haney Lopez reminds us, based on skin color.

“This stark division necessarily also carried important connotations regarding, for example, agency, moral authority, intelligence, and belonging,” he writes. “To be unfit for naturalization--that is, to be non-White--implied a certain degeneracy of intellect, morals, self-restraint, and political values; to be suited for citizenship--to be White--suggested moral maturity, self assurance, personal independence, and political sophistication.”

In other words, those “unfit” for citizenship were the colonized. The description Lopez offers for the “unfit” matches precisely the characteristics ascribed to colonized peoples by European imperialists and settlers for hundreds of years.

It also matches the racist stereotypes offered today of immigrants from areas south of the US border with Mexico, who Congressman Sensenbrenner has referred to as degenerate “alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

But the racial subtext around immigration is not a subtext. It is the text itself.

Before Europe could “immigrate,” someone else had to be removed. Before there was land to settle it must be stolen. Before anyone could be “free and white” someone else had to be “non-white” – and enslaved. Before “Americans” could become “Americans,” “Latin Americans” – who are overwhelmingly Original Americans – had to become something else – “Latinos,” “Hispanic,” the not-Native – the Alien.

The Illegal Alien.

In a stunning bit of triple think the Natives, who knew no borders, became “Aliens,” while Europeans became “Americans,” and “Americans” became “Natives,” while the Original Americans became “foreign” infiltrators and lawbreakers bent on who-knows-what brand of “terrorism” against “innocent” colonists, or if you prefer, “Americans.”

Or “Settlers.”

Or is it “Afrikaaners.”

Take your pick.

The Six Nations Confederation - the Iroquois, or Hau De No Sau Nee - wrote in their classic Basic Call to Consciousness that colonialism means “to be controlled from afar,” that “colonialism is the process by which we are systematically confused,” and that confusion is “an agent of control.”

Like this.

“We are a nation of immigrants, and laws.”

But sometimes someone slips, forgets the double talk, and makes the agenda clear. They don’t mean for us to overhear, but they can’t help themselves.

In his mercilessly racist article Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?, Lawrence Auster slips. He writes, “…throughout its history the United States has been a member of Western civilization—in religion overwhelmingly Christian… in race… overwhelmingly white, in language English. Why shouldn’t those little historical facts be at least as important in determining our immigration policy as the pseudo-fact that we’re all ‘descended from immigrants?’” (FrontPagemagazine.com).

Auster, and David Horowitz’ Front Page Magazine, want one thing; they know what it is, and they’re willing to tell you. They want a white nation. They slipped.

The many who write diatribes and hate mail on the theme of “What part of ILLEGAL don’t you UNDERSTAND?!” also slip.

We understand “illegal” perfectly well.

Conquest of territory in wars of aggression is illegal under international law. The US occupation of most Native land and all of the occupied sections of Mexico is illegal. The presence of the conquering people, the usurpation of the land itself is illegal. The colonists themselves are illegal aliens.

But, for the Right, it’s not really about some imaginary adherence to a just, neutral system of “law.”

It’s about race law and white privilege.

And race law, codified on paper or not, is deeply codified in white people’s expectations about their place in society, and some of them are getting dangerously edgy about having “their” land – their turf – stepped on by Brown people.

On the web site of the anti-Mexican hate group Save Our State, a correspondent calling themselves “USA Today” writes:

“To be honest we are heading for a Balkinization and a racial cleansing

I know its not politicly correct to say so but I think lots of folks see it coming and I'll bet the vast majority of Americans would have no problem with genocide as a last resort to save this country , Usually when you back somebody into a corner they will defend themselves by any means ........get it ?

Does this sound like something you would hear the nazis say? sure it is but I spend lots of time scanning the forums and blogs and its coming from normal , everyday people that are just about fed up with the whole mess.

I know a large number of Germans didn't agree with hitler but they didn't exactly act against him either.

Just keep pushing and pretty soon you'll find the American people in a corner.

On that day, Beware.”

People who think like this are the social, cultural and political base of politicians like Jim Sensenbrenner.

They are classic colonists, with the colonizer’s outlook. For them, mere “immigration” is impossible. Their “forefathers” conquered the land, so those coming here must be out to “re-conquer” the land – to take it back from them.

These are the true inheritors of the American Dream, a dream which, for the colonized, has been nothing but a nightmare.

They intend to defend that nightmare – no matter what it takes.

That’s what “immigration reform” and “immigration control” are really all about.

Colonialism.

And the race laws that defend it.

In the Spirit of the Ancestors:

Reconciling Post Tribal Stress Disorder

by Patrisia Gonzales

Patzin (Nahuatl for Venerable Medicine):

a monthly feature on indigenous medicine

Column of the Americas May 1, 2006

I once heard an Ojibwa woman tell a group of Chicanos working on indigenous liberation that our ancestors did what they had to, to survive.

Our indigenous ancestors survived by passing as Mexicans or mestizos, or being defined away as mestizos by governments. And many married mestizos. As a result, the Mexican community is a pan indigenous community comprised of native peoples of both Mexico and North America.

Indigeneity became private and individualized in families. They survived by hiding the indigenous knowledge so deeply that some of us could no longer recognize it. Some were taught to forget and to fear and disconnect from our place in the natural world and the power of nature within our own hands. There was no need for the Inquisition once forced conversion could be regulated by the community itself.

Choctaw scholar Karina Walters says that part of historical trauma was established through forced conversion and separating people away from their original instructions, the ancestral agreements and covenants about how to treat each other and how to honor their responsibilities to the natural world.

I believe that among those defined as mestizos many suffer from PTSD or Post Tribal Stress Disorder. I use this term to refer to the suffering and afflictions that result from de-Indianization. Invariably, there is someone who remembers in their family that they are Indian. Or they will recount how one of their grandparents told them to never forget, "we are Indian." But like historical trauma, not all suffer the soul wound of de-Indianization.

Part of their historical trauma is the void where there should be remembrance of the names of our ancestors and nations. They are the other disappeared of the Americas, by the processes of social control.

Some argue that mestizos are like a brown clay pot, emptied of a native spirit that was claimed by impositions. Others argue mestizos indigenized Spanish culture and that it is, in fact, only a shallow topsoil that covers indigenous Mexico, which is indigenous in the spaces also claimed as mestizo or urban. We are another kind of Indian that does not fit into the current boxes on identity.

Many scholars concur that Mesoamerica's indigenous legacy remains in traditional agriculture and Mexican traditional medicine - and protective factors against disconnection. Zapata asserted that the land belongs to those who work it -- Mexicans still work the land and have relationships with this natural world. But many are taught to deny their Indianness, to even hate it. A Kickapoo elder once recounted to me how a group of Mexican kids in Coahuilla, Mexico, got mad when he proclaimed to them, "you're Indian."

Those people identified as mestizo, Hispanic, or Latino suffer from a particular kind of historical trauma. They are told that they are both the oppressed and the oppressor. Many Mexicans are largely Indian by heritage and do not descend from Spanish colonialists, and when they do, it may be through rape or forced marriage, such as with one of my Kickapoo grandmothers. It is hard to determine who is the we/they, who of the relatives were/are the mestizos who benefited from controlling the Indian. The Mexican (read Bolivian, Ecuadorian etc.) community has been in a constant process of de-Indianization and each family has its own particular relationship to that process.

In my work, I identify some symptoms of PTSD:

1.Anehlos -- a feeling of longing and that something is missing.

2. Cracked mirror --a feeling that something wants to break through, or break open and that your sight is refracted from cracks in perception, with some parts distorted and others clear.

3. Rejection -- feeling rejected by Latinos and mestizos as being too Indian and by some Native Americans as almost or maybe Indian, but then again not really (while others welcome you as cousins, brothers or sisters.)

4. Loss-mourning the loss of ancestors, nations and the spiritual teachings that were wrested away and in which you had no say or control.

Fortunately, there are numerous native elders working with, or in, these communities as people resist de-Indianization, particularly the more recent indigenous migrants from the southern hemisphere. Some people argue that mestizos and Latinos should accept their historical conditions, that they have no right to renew or strengthen their indigeneity. Yet, that goes against the spirit of self-determination. If we could hear them speak in the spirit world, would they not ask for their children to return? to fight? to renew knowledge in the spirit of their ancestors? To do otherwise, is to accept colonization, something no community, native or not, can justify as an acceptable human
condition. To proclaim their Indianness, someone once said, is the biggest paradigm shift since the Spanish debated whether Indians had souls.

2006 Column of the Americas

XColumn@gmail.com - 608-238-3161 or Column of the Americas, PO BOX 5093
Madison WI 53705.

Our bilingual columns are posted at:

http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/

We are spirit: The Word of John Trudell

"We are a spirit, we are a natural part of the earth, and all of our ancestors, all of our relations who have gone to the spirit world, they are here with us. That's power. They will help us. They will help us to see if we are willing to look. We are not separated from them because there's no place to go -- we stay here. This is our place: the earth. This is our mother: we will not go away from our mother.

"And no matter what they ever do to us, no matter how they ever strike at us, we must never become reactionary. The one thing that has always bothered me about revolution, every time I have seen the revolutionary, is they have reacted out of hatred for the oppressor. We must do this for the love of our people.

No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense."

POWER

"We must not become confused and deceived by their illusions. There is no such thing as military power; there is only military terrorism. There is no such thing as economic power; there is only economic exploitation. That is all that it is. They try to program our minds and fool us with these illusions so that we will believe that they hold the power in their hands but they do not.

All they know is how to act in a repressive, brutal way...Power...we are a natural part of the earth. We are an extension of the earth, we are not separate from it. We are a part of it. The earth is our mother. The earth is a spirit and we are an extension of that spirit. We are spirit. We are power. They want us to believe that we have to believe in them and depend upon them and we have to consume these consumer identities and these religious identities and these political identities and these racial identities. They want to separate us from our power. They want to separate us from who we are.

GENOCIDE

"Genocide is just an intellectual way of saying: murder, because we live in a so-called civilized industrialized world, and because this world is allegedly civilized and allegedly has laws, they can't go out and call an act of murder "murder" anymore, so they call it genocide to throw another illusion in our eyes."

RESISTANCE

"We want to be free of a value system that is being imposed on us. We do not want to participate in that value system. We don't want to change that value system. We want to remove it from our lives forever.

"We must never underestimate our enemy. Our enemy is committed against us twenty-four hours a day. They use one hundred percent of their effort to maintain their materialistic status quo. One hundred percent of their effort goes into deceiving us and manipulating us against each other. We have to devote our lives, we have to make our commitment, we have to follow a way of life that says we are going to resist that forever ... a resistance: something that we can pass on as strength to the coming generations."

"A resistance where organizational egos don't get in the way. A resistance where individual egos do not get in the way. A resistance where the infiltrators and the provocateurs and the liars and the betrayers and the traitors, they do not get in the way ... a resistance of consciousness. This is our obligation to the earth. And only by fulfilling our obligation to the earth can we fulfill our obligations to the people.

"We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off."

Tierra y Vida

Indigenous spiritual elders and priests tell us that we live in the most dangerous of times. These are the times the Hopi Elders have called the Time of Purification. These are the days approaching that most famous period of the Mayan calendar called 2012, and another less often discussed prophecy the Mayan priests call Year Zero. We are urgently called, by figures like Chief Arvol Looking Horse, to take responsibility for the fate of Mother Earth, for our precious animal brothers and sisters, the fish, the birds, butterflies, trees, and all living beings.

With the Mayan and Mexica codices in hand, the Hopi Elders warned us in the 1990s of their grave concerns about martial law and the potential for mass starvation.

Western scientists like James Lovelock, who originated the Gaia Theory – the scientific theory that Mother Earth acts as a living conscious being, warns in his latest book that we have passed the point of no return on global warming, the point at which it runs away uncontrollably, with unimaginable, devastating consequences.

Other scientists point to the rate of mass extinction. Species are becoming extinct at a rate 120,000 times the norm. 250 million years ago roughly 90% of all living creatures died. Only one large land animal remained. Scientists call it "the Great Dying.” It was caused by global warming.

NASA says “Trees, plants, lizards, proto-mammals, insects, fish, mollusks, and microbes -- all were nearly wiped out. Roughly 9 in 10 marine species and 7 in 10 land species vanished. Life on our planet almost came to an end.”

Futurists warn that we are at the verge of an event they call "The Singularity,” a point at which the exponential increase in the rate of technological change becomes so rapid that is completely beyond the capacity of the ruling elites to predict or control the direction of social change or its environmental and human impacts.

As you read this, industrial society is depleting oil at such a rate that soon over half of it will be gone. What will be left will be harder to discover and harder to pump, and increasingly scarce. Prices are predicted to skyrocket until economies - even whole societies - collapse. War over the remaining pockets of oil has already begun in Iraq .

Pentagon planners say in the future it will be joined by wars over rapidly diminishing sources of clean water and over land that will still be able to grow crops in the wake of the devastating impacts of industrial agriculture and skyrocketing populations as the carrying capacity of Earth is exceeded and mass starvation becomes the norm.

These wars will be fought with weapons of mass destruction and will require the imposition of draconian systems of social control. In the US , such forces are in motion, pushing for the concentration of power in the hands of the US president, pushing for theocracy, and for mass deportations of Mexicans, Central Americans and other people of indigenous descent.

The Hopi Elders say we live in a condition called Koyannisqatsi – “Life out of Balance, a way of life that calls for another way of living.”

Hopi Elder Dan Katchongva said, “We have teachings and prophecies informing us that we must be alert for the signs and omens which will come about to give us courage and strength to stand on our beliefs. Blood will flow. Our hair and our clothing will be scattered upon the earth. Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind. There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds. All of this has been planned from the beginning of creation.”

Chief Arvol Looking Horse has told us,

“This new millennium will usher in an age of harmony or it will bring the end of life as we know it. Starvation, war and toxic waste have been the hallmark of the Great Myth of Progress and Development that ruled the last millennium.

To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the
responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction.

We have come to a time and place of great urgency.

The fate of future generations rests in our hands.

We must understand the two ways we are free to follow, as we choose the positive way or the negative way… the spiritual way or the material way.

It's our own choice--each of ours and all of ours.

You yourself are the one who must decide.

You alone-and only you--can make this crucial choice.

Whatever you decide is what you'll be, to walk in honor or to dishonor your relatives.

You can't escape the consequences of your own decision.

On your decision depends the fate of the entire World. You must decide. You can't avoid it.

Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind.

Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

Know that you yourself are essential to this World.

Believe that!

Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You yourself are desperately needed to save the soul of this World.

“Did you think you were put here for something less? In a Sacred Hoop of Life, where there is no beginning and no ending!”

For these reasons the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Circle has founded a project called Tierra y Vida, Land and Life, or Techqua Ikachi in the Hopi language, and in Nahuatl - Tlalli auh Yolitzli.

The Aztlan Mexica Nation, in founding Tierra y Vida, acknowledges the depth of the crisis we face, and seeks to fully understand its nature, integrate its meaning, and find the means to act - to help preserve and restore the Sacred Balance of Life - and to help soften the blows for all living beings. We will prepare for what is to come, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

As the Confederation of Indigenous Elders and Priests of the Americas , led by Mayan Elder Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, tells us:

"The time of warning, passive resistance and conformity is already past. All of us are now confronted with an enormous challenge: Survival.”


For more information write Tierra_y_Vida@Mexica.net