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A Program of Real Existence: “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” and the Poetics of Liberation10/16/2020
A PROGRAM OF REAL EXISTENCE: “EL PLAN ESPIRITUAL DE AZTLÁN” AND THE POETICS OF LIBERATION Many Chicanx studies programs, departments, and centers celebrated in 2019 the vital document that articulated a program for “Chicano studies” in Santa Bárbara, California—the germinal Plan de Santa Bárbara of 1969. Yet, months before the convening for this plan of higher education, a timely manifesto that spoke of nationalism, self-determination, and Indigenous struggle for the land was invoked in Denver, Colorado—that being “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” at the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. A controversial document that circulated throughout the Southwest and beyond, “El Plan” forwarded a cultural nationalism whose politics advocated autonomy, love, and self-organization. Ringing the rhetoric of national liberation, “El Plan” called onto “La Raza” in the United States to build power from below and to insurgently take power from above to declare an autonomous world from US-based capital accumulation and imperialism. With its limits as an iteration for Chicanismo and carnalismo, “El Plan” fortified a new world-making project premised on the spiritual and material symbol of Aztlán—vaguely referenced as the lost Mexican territories to the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. In 2019, I was part of an effort to commemorate the Plan de Santa Bárbara at UC Los Angeles with a student organization, whereas the Chicanx studies department and El Movimiento Chicanx de Aztlán had no plan to do so. An accomplice of the autonomous Eagle and the Condor Liberation Front, many members and I agreed that we had the capacity to commemorate fifty years of Chicanx studies. Our intentions as an intertribal ensemble of Indigenous students were to center and praise the Indigenous perspectives from within and influenced by the Plan de Santa Bárbara and Chicanx studies. Resonating with the indigenist manifesto of “El Plan,” we sought to frame this organized event turned symposium in the spirit of intergenerational dialogue. Our steering committee for this tribute called onto many friends near and far, decided on panels, keynotes, and participation and opening prayer from Tongva elder Gloria Arellanes, who was a previous Brown Beret in El Movimiento. Her story and commitment to Chicanx and Indigenous people were big hearted as she shared to youth, young people, and elders alike her journey as a Tongva woman in urban Los Angeles. The reality of El Espíritu del Plan de San Barbara hosted by the Eagle and the Condor Liberation Front was a feat of love. We commenced with opening songs from Grupo In Lak’ech—a Xicana drum and singing group. This led to a first panel with Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America, which led to a Danza with the youth leaders. What followed was a panel on Indigenista directions in Chicanx studies with many established scholars in the discipline, a powerful keynote from Chicano scholar Reynaldo F. Macías on la perspective chicana, a panel with many emerging and situated scholars and educators in Chicanx studies, and closing with teachings from Xicana artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez. A long and tedious day, many of us left rejuvenated. I turn us to the celebrations of the Plan de Santa Bárbara to segue into the silences of returning to “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” by its presence within our event. Dr. Roberto D. Hernández, who was part of our Indigenista directions panel of the above symposium, presented his work on discussing the impasses of the articulations of Aztlán and the debates within El Movimiento Chicanx de Aztlán, whose student analyses of the specter of Aztlán limited and reduced it to a question of national territorial boundaries. Profe Roberto drew us into “El Plan” in its poetic form of Alurista’s preamble, whose original poem is a site of controversy in the literary study of Chicano indigenism and asks us to be attentive to the line of a “union of free pueblos.” Profe Roberto orients us to a poetic revision on the part of Alurista who re-wrote “El Plan” as “The Red Spirit of Aztlan: A Plan of National Liberation” in his 1972 book Nationchild. This new rendition cast Aztlán as deeper than territory and as belonging to cosmovision. Dr. Jennie M. Luna, in the same panel, on the other hand, presented us with an Indigenous interpretation of Aztlán as altepetl, meaning a convergence of life that encounters a body (bowl) of water, a mountain, and a pueblo. Proje Jennie stressed Aztlán as a geomorphological feature rather than a name given by Nahuatl-speaking pueblos. This position gave us the language and perspective that Aztlán is not mapped but is an embodied place by people themselves to generate life. Together with Profe Roberto, these interpretations of Aztlán disentangle it from the grammars of cartography and historical materialism. “El Plan” in its poetic form tells a story of presence, movement, and the lived experience of working the land for empire. The program that follows it, an understudied text, underscores seven points of organizational goals: unity, economy, education, institutions, self-defense, culture, and political liberation. Trailing these goals is a list of actions to make this program into reality: a dissemination and consciousness mobilization for an autonomous nation-building project. There are many places to assume critique of this program, from its constricted nationalism to its aspirations for political control that is vague and not grounded. However, the spirit of this program and its poetics of liberation inspired and conspired against US empire—a feat in Chicanx politics that has lost its energy. This was, in the prophetic words of Corky Gonzales, a program for real existence. There have been many challenges. Aztlán, being central, has been misappropriated to fit nation-state flags of the US Southwest, mourning of lost Mexican territories that reify the modern/colonial logic of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo cartography. We cannot deny Aztlán as an Indigenous story of migration, connection, and relationality between many Uto-Nahuan speaking peoples who predate the Mexica Triple Alliance of Anahuac—a story that associates many different pueblos. Yet, the hesitancy I make is the reification of national liberation purported by the Third World struggle that takes as its political vehicle a claim to the territory. It would be clearer and more accurate for these irredentist actors to claim the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as their heritage and right to the land rather than invoking Aztlán. Yet, that right to the land is a Spanish covenant, between the colonialist decrees and land-possessing families. It is not Mexican. México “possessed” those territories from 1821 to 1848, twenty-seven years of political control and secularization. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was an agreement between a settler capitalist State and a neocolonial nation-building project reordering itself after independence. I for one refuse governance as the marker for my political aspirations. I refuse “loss” of a national territory whose very same ties to a “nation” continues to oppress and subjugate pueblos. If “Chicano” was a self-naming for liberatory movements against US settler-colonial governance, so too must a refusal betray the nation-state of México. A program for real existence, then, would untangle Aztlán as national liberation into a political movement for a union of free pueblos—in other words, a federation of autonomous geographies (via Profe Roberto’s allusion) without a State. Real existence necessitates the undoing of colonial-capitalist knowledge of ourselves. It means a process of becoming that defies the modern/colonial world. In our negation as Mexican, as citizen-subjects fixed in the national grammar of the nation-building project of México that assimilates all pueblos, Chicanxs redirected an opening of being in the world that produced another kind of life. This existence counters the logic of modernity and it is uncomfortable. For many, this position on Aztlán is palatable, or it is an offense to the “real material struggle for liberation.” For others, it is still not enough: Aztlán “erases” Indigenous people of the US Southwest. The premise that an Indigenous relation and ancestral notion of place erases a people reinscribes the modern/colonial logic of the “original” possession of territory and the utilization of language as claims to land. To say the Earth itself is property has more to do with people (as human cultures and societies) than it does with the land itself freed from the logics of property. We must challenge ourselves from reifying Westernized relations to land, via property, toward another kind of relationality that doesn’t rely on temporal associations to land based on possession. Whereas working the land is a political strategy on the part of Indigenous communities to defend their territory for land and life, it is understood that this is a means to an end (as a worker/class struggle inscripted onto Indigenous struggle), that our relationships to land are deeper than Westernized ideas of property and capital accumulation. Indigenous relations to land are central to the struggle for decolonization; and it is the relationship itself that is vital in our political imaginaries that have to consider the afterlives of 1492 that include Black life and descendants of proletarianization (i.e., Indigenous people rendered landless through structures of casta, reducciones, and ecomiendas). Indigenous relations to land are deeper than possession, it is a situated place of origin, creation, and cosmovision—not necessarily tied to only one people, but many times diverse and multiple peoples (e.g., Chicomoztoc) who are mobile and not fixed to a place. Commodification and territorialization of the commons is a colonial technology. What haunts Chicanx decolonial imaginaries is Aztlán. Aztlán in turn haunts American Indians, and conveniently also Anglo and white US citizens. This in of itself is not a hegemonic social problem but a generative discursive space to think together and plan together. From the vanguard communists, Marxist-Leninists, and Third Worldists to the indigenistas, Zapatistas, and anarchists in Chicanx spaces, Aztlán means very different things if not something as a thing of the past. The former holds onto Aztlán as a concrete political objective to secure liberation while the latter has employed it differentially, yet, not as “stolen land” in the Mexican context. The entire continent is hostage to occupying forces of nation-state units that are tied economically to the Western world-system. The scope of Chicanx liberation must exceed the Anglophonic world. I come to the end of this rumination on “El Plan” to say that this legacy is a serious matter for not only Chicanx studies but those whose subjectivity is unapologetically Chicanx. Profe Macías in our keynote posed his big three questions of Chicanx studies to a full room of students, elders, youth, and educators: 1. Who are we? 2. What are our conditions in the world? And 3. What are we to do to transform it? The first question is perhaps the most existentialist question posed to Chicanx studies, a question that is challenged in contemporary discourse and in academic scholarship. Chicanx existence for many is problematic, an impasse, contradiction, failure, violence, and a series of other negations. I think back to that conference in Denver where an intergenerational space took place. A conference that enunciated their love for the people, their struggle for liberation, and their vision for a union of free pueblos.
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