By Frank del Olmo, Los Angeles Times - Commentary
Frank del Olmo is associate editor of The Times
Sunday, September 7, 2003

It shouldn't surprise anyone who reads this column that I was
active in the again-controversial Latino student group MEChA
during my college days.

MEChA is an esoteric Spanish acronym that translates as Chicano
Student Movement of Aztlan. That final word refers to an ancient
legend that places an Aztec homeland somewhere in the north. A
few Mexican Americans use the word to refer to the U.S. Southwest,
and extremists on both ends of the political spectrum interpret
that as a desire by Chicanos to reclaim that region — somehow,
someday — for Mexico.

But such a far-out idea was never on my agenda in the 1960s,
when I was one of the few Mexican Americans at UCLA or, later,
at Cal State Northridge. I just wanted to help get more Latinos
into college.

Thankfully, MEChA was successful in reaching its goals by
focusing on such practical matters.

So successful that thousands of young Latinos in college have
created about 300 MEChA chapters, and similar groups, aimed at
Latino students on campuses from San Diego to Boston. And most
of them are even more benign in their aspirations and activities
than the Mechistas I went to college with.

But that has not stopped some folks from trying to equate MEChA
with hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Some of these claims
are based on genuine confusion, such as attributing offensive
political slogans once used by other Chicano groups ("For the
race, everything. Outside the race, nothing") to MEChA.

Of course, the rhetoric some then-Mechistas used was overblown.
But they were immature activists who — ignorant of a long history
of Mexican American activism — really thought they were the
community's political vanguard.

That is why Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante should not renounce his
affiliation with the MEChA chapter at Fresno State in the 1970s,
when Bustamante was a student there. A rival candidate in the
campaign leading up to the Oct. 7 recall election, Sen. Tom
McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), made that demand recently,
repeating the canard that MEChA is a racist militant group.

But if the normally diligent senator had done better homework
he'd have found that MEChA is no more militant and racist than
the Young Republicans clubs on many campuses.

Bustamante is not the first Latino politician to be attacked for
his MEChA ties. A few supporters of Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn
attacked City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa for the same thing
during a tight race for the top job in City Hall three years ago,
although Hahn did not join in.

And it's a safe bet other Latino politicians will face similar
attacks as they run for higher office.

Despite the bigoted undertones of these attacks, I find them
humorous. They simply don't jibe with the mundane reality of the
largely social organization I belonged to.

There is no national MEChA organization, just clubs on campuses
where students want to organize. I never filled out any
application to join or paid dues. I just showed up at
occasional meetings (and more often at off-campus parties) and
helped at fund-raising events or tutored fellow students. Not
very radical.

Which is not to say that some MEChA members were not involved
in radical politics. This was the '60s, after all, and some
Mechistas also belonged to genuinely militant groups like the
Brown Berets, a small Chicano group that aped the militancy of
the Black Panther Party. But the overwhelming majority of
Mechistas I knew, as is the case today, were hard-working kids
of blue-collar backgrounds. And because they were usually the
first in their families to attend college, they were not about
to undermine their futures by getting into radical politics.

In fact, one of my most vivid memories of college is of a large
antiwar protest on the CSUN campus where I and a handful of
other senior MEChA members moved through the crowd looking for
younger Latinos or Latinas, urging them to leave. We didn't want
them to jeopardize their slots in college or any scholarships by
getting arrested. And most of them complied.

As this anecdote may reveal, I was a pretty conservative Mechista.
I even opposed changing the name of what once was called United
Mexican American Students, or UMAS, to MEChA in 1969 but lost out
to majority opinion. But so did a loudmouthed transfer student
from UC Berkeley, who wanted to change the name to Partido
Popular Estudiantil (the Students' Peoples Party). I knew that
leftist proposal would lose after I got a big laugh by pointing
out that UMAS would be mocked if it started referring to itself
as PPE — deliberately pronouncing the acronym.

When adults who should know better try to demonize a legitimate
student group — and the idealistic young people who join it —
they're just PPEing in the wind, too.
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