Suspect Evidentiary Standards

...A more modest proposal, put forward by a Berkeley professor of ethnic studies, called for them to demand "ethnic regional autonomy...

...According to the movement manifesto, "The Spiritual Plan of Aztlan," these "gringo-occupied" northern lands were to be "reclaimed" by descendants of their original inhabitants...

...that a Latino school dropout rate three times the national average is entirely the fault of racist school boards, teachers and principals...

...Haney Lopez' evidentiary standards, though, are suspect...

...Haney Lopez uses the grand jury example to show that Chicanos constitute a race...

...Although its origins are obscure, it is widely thought to derive from the word Mexicano, abbreviated in the Nahuatl dialect of the state of Morelos as Shikano, from which it was slang-hardened into Chicano and used by established Hispanics as a derisive nickname for poorer arrivals...

...Two of its principal leaders, he concedes, are reported to have committed major acts of violence...

...Emulating the advocates of black power, they stressed racial pride, championed "bronze power," and made a virtue of being mestizos, the racial mixture Anglos denigrated as mongrel...

...Reviewed by Sanford Lakoff Professor emeritus of political science, University of California, San Diego...

...no more comprise a single nationality or ethnicity than do those of "Asian" or "Caucasian" descent...

...Because Anglos view Mexicans as a race, and a decidedly inferior one, he further maintains, they deny them equal treatment and impute to them traits associated with belonging to an inferior race...

...In response to this treatment the activists became aware, also as a matter of common sense, that theirs is indeed a race apart...

...Until then the term Chicano was hardly a badge of pride...

...In Los Angeles, the movement crystallized around confrontations that led to two criminal cases this book examines...

...Not according to proponents of tighter border control, who warn that Mexican immigrants, given their present rate of arrival, cannot be assimilated and will demand separate nationhood, rather like the black nationalists of the 1960s who offered to settle for Mississippi in lieu of cash reparations...

...The author also neglects to mention that the militants sometimes provoked the police by using confrontational tactics...

...In an Epilogue, Haney Lopez says he would like to live in a future time when race no longer matters, but that alas we are trapped by a history in which it determines attitudes and behavior...

...They have little in common, except for having originated in parts of the hemisphere where Spanish is the predominant tongue and Roman Catholicism the predominant faith...

...Even though many are noncitizens ineligible to vote, their first political effects are evident in the fact that the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the State Assembly, four members of Congress from Los Angeles County, the LA County Supervisor, and assorted other politicos are of Mexican ancestry...

...True, in modern history race has served as a socially constructed category, but why anyone aware of its pernicious effects in this country and Europe would want to perpetuate it is hard to fathom...

...the group as a whole cannot be characterized in terms of race...

...David Sanchez, the head of the Brown Berets, was dismissed from his post for allegedly killing another member, committing rape, and stealing money from the organization...

...And not—at the other extreme—according to Ian F. Haney Lopez, a professor at Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School, who thinks they constitute a race apart in a country where race is a "natural" and "intractable" condition and racism is "routine...

...The practice was sustained on appeal, but Acosta made his point...

...If race has any scientific validity—and biologists disagree whether it does—it is as a marker of a distinctive gene pool, such as those formed by geographic barriers separating the continents...

...Fueled by high birth rates and what is nowadays delicately called "unauthorized" immigration, those who identify themselves as Latino account for 30 per cent of California's population...

...In addition, he fails to cite the infamous headline in a campus Chicano newspaper depicting the murder of a border policeman as the "Death of a Migra Pig...

...They called themselves Chicanos to distinguish themselves from their "Mexican American" assimilationist elders, and spun a grandiose myth of origin and mission around the name...

...Chavez set a far better course than the separatist would-be revolutionaries Haney Lopez has chosen to lionize...

...They are more like a peppery olla podrida—a Spanish stew consisting of many separate ingredients—than a sweetly homogenized caramel-topped flan...

...Immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, etc...

...In fact, despite the persistence of de facto segregation in housing and the public schools—due in large part to continuing high rates of immigration—fewer and fewer Latinos suppose that this country is irremediably racist or that displays of racial pride will make up for educational disadvantages...

...In the process, they "articulated a new racial identity for themselves" by calling themselves "Chicanos" and recognizing that race "determined individual identity, gender relations, and group destiny...

...But whether they should be considered a single group is open to question...

...He relies almost entirely on statements by those with whom he sympathizes and makes no effort to appreciate the difficulties faced by teachers and policemen in the barrios...

...Haney Lopez' heroes are the Latinos who led struggles in the 1960s and '70s for better schools and against police brutality, and for the restoration of Spanish land grants alleged to have been swindled in violation of the treaty that ended the war with Mexico...

...Nevertheless, the Superior Court judges ignored the lists and "routinely nominated their friends and neighbors...

...In the 1960s young activists turned the pejorative into an honorific...

...The Cuban Americans of Miami's Little Havana see themselves as a community of exiles a mere 90 miles from the mother country, which the majority wish fervently to reclaim...

...author, "Democracy: History, Theory, Practice" The number of Latinos in the United States grew by 50 per cent during the 1990s and is now estimated at 37 million, or 12.5 per cent of the population, supposedly making them the country's largest minority...

...He holds up to ridicule charges that the movement was Communist-inspired, but ignores myriad references in the Chicano press to such Stalinoid shibboleths as "proletarian internationalism" and "Yankee imperialism and fascism," along with praise for Mao, Castro, and the "exemplary revolutionary spirit" of "Che" Guevara, who became a movement icon...

...In one of them, Oscar Acosta, an aggressive and flamboyant lawyer, defended leaders of the newly formed "Brown Berets" by challenging the validity of the grand jury indictments...

...To activists, of course, the idea that Chicanos are a race and racism is endemic...

...What happened in that period was certainly new...

...In 2000 California was declared a "minority majority state" when the Latino surge, coupled with the influx of Asians, pushed the combined total of minorities over the 50 per cent mark...

...Acosta demonstrated convincingly that the jury selection process was discriminatory...

...Does all this mean the fabled American melting pot is doing its usual trick of turning all sorts of greenhorns into newborn Yankees—or at least Yanquis...

...Under the rules, jurors were supposed to be chosen from lists of qualified citizens prepared by commissioners "representing a cross-section of the community...

...By contrast, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez remains a hero for Latinos and many others because, like Martin Luther King Jr., he challenged America to live up to its ideals, preaching nonviolence and refusing to limit his organizing efforts to Mexicans...

...He acknowledges some, but hardly enough, of the actions and rhetoric that have tarnished the movement's reputation as a campaign for justice...

...As to whether it makes any sense to think of Mexican Americans as a race, it is worth noting that in the very first issue of Aztlan, the principal movement journal, one contributor observed more sensibly that since most Mexicans are of mixed Spanish, Indian and Negro descent and "a large portion are not physically distinct from the majority American population...

...Acosta himself admitted to helping plant a courthouse bomb that killed a bystander, and was unapologetic about doing so...

...Unlike most Europeans who preceded them, however, many retain strong ties to their countries of origin, even beyond the first generation...

...Nor, if skin color is the criterion, are they of one race: On the last census form about half declared themselves "white," while the remainder checked the box marked "other...

...He reasons that race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one, and that other Americans consider Mexican Americans a race as a matter of "common sense"—meaning a deeply held mind-set...

...As the UFW's Delano Plan put it, "all men are brothers, sons of the same God...

...In the West and Southwest, Mexican migrants make up the bulk of Latinos...

...that police crackdowns on gang violence do no more than "target urban minority youth"—all that is not common sense but a stock in trade, the stuff careers are made of in university programs of Chicano Studies...

...The demand for bronze power has gone the way of the cry for black power...

...Chicanos were said to be descendants of the Aztecs who had gone south from their homeland, Aztlan —now the states of the American Southwest—to create a great civilization centered in the region that became Mexico City...

...Some Mexican Americans move back and forth across the border, continuing an old pattern, and are now allowed to cast absentee ballots in Mexican elections...