“There are few things lamer than Chicano yaktivists whining about negative coverage that shed light on sordid truths. It happened earlier this year when the Los Angeles Times published an epic four-part series on the once-proud United Farm Workers, an organization that went from the moral center of the post-King American civil rights movement into a group that places founder Cesar Chavez on corn flakes boxes. Rather than admit they’ve strayed from their path, the UFW responded with lawsuit threats, retraction demands, “community meetings” with Times editors and other such bitchiness. End result: a couple of corrections on the Times’ behalf, but nothing crucial to reporter Miriam Pawell’s thesis, and the UFW came off as whiners
Flash forward to this Thursday, when former Times writer Daniel Hernandez made a name for himself with new employer LA Weekly (our mother publication) with a depressing account of what’s going on in the current Chicano cause celebre: helping out the immigrants who’ve transformed a dirt lot in South Central LA into the largest urban farm in the US de A. Turns out that some farmers have issues with lead organizers Rufina Juarez and Tezomoc, and Hernandez goes about detailing some of the strife.
Enter the Chicano All-Stars.”
A little Mexico detour, because I’m wondering: Do news media outlets refer to the NAACP as “The Colored People” or the AJC as “The Jewish Committee”? No, they don’t. Yet while covering this month’s NCLR conference in San Diego many outlets including the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and other generally reputable sources like RealClearPolitics felt it okay to refer to NCLR as “La Raza.” This means that the mainstream press has adopted the semantics tricks of the right-wing propaganda machine to conflate together two very different things: NCLR — the largest and most middle-of-the-road, big-money-backed, non-partisan Hispanic (their word) advocacy organization in the United States, and the codeword for reconquista hallucinations advocated only by an extremely small, extremely fringe, and extremely irrelevant batch of Chicano nationalists.”*
