Q: In what ways did the concept of Aztlán inspire the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960's? And related to that, does Aztlán have a similar affect on the youth of today?

A: The term "Aztlán" certainly had incredible cohesive force for us in the sixties and the seventies, when [we] were in our teens and twenties. This was a concept that spread like a wild fire. We have journals named after this, there are manifestos that were inspired by this concept. Because after being told for generations that we did not belong in the United States of America, this concept was empowering us by telling that we not only belong here, we have been her for untold centuries. But [it occurred] in conjunction with other kinds of political activity. There were important elders coming from Mexico to the Southwest, teaching us. Many of us had suffered a disconnection from our tribal roots, and Aztlán had the immediate connection to tribal groups in Mexico City, to the Mexica people, through Andres Segura, a very important elder who worked with Chicanos for almost thirty years. We had that kind of mentorship through another elder, Domingo Martinez Paredes, in terms of our education about Mayan roots. It wasn’t Aztlán and only Aztlán, but it did have a very important symbolic and cultural space. A lot of the movement congealed around that term.
Now-a-days, I think, the term is not as important. I think it is because the symbolism of it has become more widespread. As we move into the next millennium, there is a more generalized knowledge of our identity as indigenous peoples of the Americas. We have other terms [now instead of just one], such as Chicana Nation or Chicano Nation. There are various terms and various forms of expressing that sense of being from the Americas, of belonging here, no matter how much we suffer at the border. The border is very recent. We did not cross the border, the border crossed us.


Q: Do the maps mean that the Mexican-origin people own Aztlán?

A: I don’t think that the concept of Aztlán or the existence of the maps indicate that we own the land. I think it gives us a sense of presence here. I think part of that sense of presence means respecting all of the different tribal peoples that exist throughout the Southwest and Mexico. Our knowledge of what it means to be indigenous also mandates that we respect the origin myths, the symbolic stories of every single tribe in the Southwest with regard to where they came from. So this concept of Aztlán is a symbolic homeland. It has a geographical reality, but I don’t think it should be used as an imperial term that dominates over all of the tribal peoples of the Southwest. I don’t think that’s the intention. The intention was simply to lift ourselves--Chicanas and Chicanos--out of this sense of homelessness. Aztlán as a concept served for us to reaffirm our historical presence, and [our] mythical presence, on the land. So I don’t think it means ownership of the Southwest. Ultimately, we know within the indigenous cultures that nobody owns the land. The land is of everybody. But we do know that we are part of the original peoples of the land have been here for some seventy thousand years. And that’s a kind of cultural ownership, if you will, but has nothing to do with land titles or real estate.


Q: What about people who cross the border the from Mexico, people who in the United State are referred to as "illegal aliens"?

A: The Americas have always been a place of migration, and currently the migration is happening, predominantly, northward. This is, in part, due to the economics of Mexico and Central America and the politics that are created there by the United States of America. So people are [becoming] economic and political refugees, which is a reverse migration from Aztlán. Many politicians are making political careers out of scapegoating immigrants, people like Pete Wilson and Pat Buchanan. There is a real fear among the population concerning the browning of the United States of America. If we look at the realities of this migration though, we soon find that these immigrants are sustaining the economy. They're paying taxes to the IRS and not receiving anything back. They pay taxes every time they buy gasoline, and that tax money does not return to them.
So this movement northward right now is a very tragic movement as well, because most of the people who are apprehended at the border and detained are also tortured. They are beaten, sometimes near death, or they are sometimes shot to death. We know of such cases. Women are raped. And this is a tremendous indignity that indigenous peoples are suffering currently at the border. And I think that the concept of Aztlán perhaps does not mean a great deal to the peoples that are working class. I think in some measure this term has gained currency among the intellectual elite, but I also think that the people that are crossing the border in different ways, without using the term Aztlán, also have a knowledge of being native peoples of the Americas. And that's manifest in the daily vocabulary when they refer to their country or their place of origin. They refer to mi tierra, my land. You’re from the land.
But then the cultural space of Aztlán is manifest, for example, in [many] popular songs that the working poor sing. A lot of the markers of this indigenous ancestral homeland, of the markers of the land, are present in those songs, and so people, when they sing these songs, are continually marking places such as Aztlán that we have found on maps. Where people also map that place in their songs, they map it through reference to indigenous plants, to places in the indigenous geography.
So indigenous peoples of the Americas are coming over the border, and it's a crisis of human rights. The Chicano civil rights movement created some rights for Chicanas and Chicanos for indigenous peoples in this country, but I still think we have a long way to go with regard to the human rights abuses that are happening to indigenous peoples who are trying to cross the border, northward.