Roger Houston: Open Letter to the Reconquistadors

The members of Aztlan have been foaming at the mouth with vitriolic hatred for Americans who, they claim, stole their land and enslaved their people.

This may come as an unpleasant surprise to the historically challenged members of La Raza: America did not steal your land.

The Mexicans, lumping themselves in with "Native Americans" (because the Indian Nations seem to win sympathy points more often and more easily than Mexicans), need a little primer on why the Gringo has finally hit the compassion wall. This should not suggest that huera/huero kids in public schools don't need a little crash course in events as well, since many of them are capable only of regurgitating, with unearned guilt, the "We stole the land from the Indians" mantra, and have no idea the unfounded crimes to which they are mindlessly confessing.

So let's get down to it, shall we?

Who the hell am I?
Though I look to be of European descent, am not a hyphenated American. I have never owned a slave. I do not know, nor do I want to know, anyone who has ever owned a slave. My ancestors, I am told, lived along the northern part of the Black Sea. Fleeing the invading Muslim hordes, they swept through Spain and up to Ireland to become what is referred to as the "Black Irish". Basically, they fled the slav/slave takers and invaded another, more hospitable land, before immigrating (legally) to the most hospitable land of all.

But I am not Black Irish. I am not Irish-American. I am American. Native born; indigenous, if you will. Both sets of grandparents emigrated (legally) from Ireland early in this century, long after the last American slaves were freed, and before there was welfare to lure the lazy. Every member of my family has entered the Armed Forces - even my mother served as a Naval nurse. We invested in this country, and because we invested with suffering and pain and death, we love it and wish to see its ideals survive into perpetuity.

So who the hell are you, La Raza?
Well, depending on the archaeologist, the peoples that came to inhabit the Northern Latitudes of North America were opportunists who chased large Ice Age game over the ice shelf which covered the Bering Sea. These peoples' arrival heralded mass extinctions, as cliff driving came into vogue. The once thriving bison, mammoth, cammelids, proto-horses, and just about anything with a saber tooth vanished from the fossil record shortly after the arrival of these eco-terrorists. Not that I blame them. I can't imagine living outside without a lot of fire, or a lot of Gortex™. In extreme cold, expeditious cliff driving makes sense, much faster than a slow, stalking hunt.

The "great horse cultures" would have to wait until Spain arrived in 1492, as the clever indians of the plains managed to run their proto-horses off cliffs. For the record, no one blames the indians for failing to master even rudimentary wheel construction, either. There was no incentive, what with indian women to pull bundles through the snow on poles and everything. And the totem pole carvers - they would have to wait until the evil invading Europeans brought with them metallurgical technology and helped the indians transition from a shell based cutting format to a metal based edge technology. They learned fast, too, and practiced on their competitor's scalps in violent, asymmetrical raids.

But these are not the ancestors of La Raza.

La Raza's ancestors may have been an extremely clever people who made their ways from south east asia, and again, in another few waves, from Polynesia and Micronesia. An invasion of sea-farers! Just like those damned, unwashed masses of Irish immigrants seeking better lives. La Raza did not spring forth from the earth - they migrated.

And they all lived happily ever after... building step pyramids, killing off the Anasazi, conducting heart-ripping ritual sacrifice on grande scale, living among rotting bodies of their family members (because that's what you do in an ancestor worshipping religion), deformation binding and hacking holes in each others skulls, playing killer pyramid basketball games (literally - the losing team died), waging constant wars with neighboring tribes, then neighboring cities, then neighboring nations, until pretty much just the Incan, Aztec and Mayan nations are left, leaving other indigenous peoples to scatter and hide from their slave takers...

...until a man from the Old World arrived in 1492 (284 years prior to the United States' birthday). The persistent man from Genoa finally talked the Good Queen, Isabel of Castile, and her husband, the man Machiavelli considered to be the cleverest monarch of the age, the Good King of Aragon, Fernando (Ferdinand) into funding a voyage, not just of exploration, but of necessity.

Why necessity? Well, Spain was not Spain as it is today. It had only recently been united by the marriage of Isabel and Fernando, and the constant warring of the princes in southern Europe, brought to an end by Fernando's machinations, not to mention Isabel's conglomerate of armies had successfully purged the Muslim invaders from Grenada. The subsequent pogroms of the Jews, Muslims, and their proponents, and the horrible Inquisition which followed, was born of the desire to free a once Christian land of their Muslim invaders; all the result of the "Golden Age of Al-Andalus".

Christians had had enough of dressing as underling subjects to their Muslim overlords; not allowed to ride horses, but only donkeys; crossing the street to let Muslims pass; had seen their cathedrals seized and made into mosques; were disallowed to repair their smaller churches, and prohibited from building new ones; forbidden in building churches higher than the mosques which had sprung up; not to mention the unrelenting dhimmi tax - which is essentially protection money paid to Muslims, for the crime of not being Muslim.

Enough had been enough. Isabel freed her people with an extremely costly war against the Sons of Allah. The lands which traded with Castile and Aragon were having their sea trade routes choked off by Muslim pirates from the Barbary Coasts. The Silk Roads, the land routes which depended on crossing through Constantinople, were under attack by, you guessed it, Muslims. The growing desperation to find new trade routes to the east, around the Muslim hordes, was what fueled Columbus to attempt a short cut there.

By 1536, the routes had been cut with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, but the discovery of the new land held great promise to war-weary Spain. Spain needed gold. So Spain, together with Portugal, proceeded to carve up South America, with Papal blessing.

The blessings of the heart-ripping savages they encountered, the ones that died like flies, and gave Columbus and his men the gift of syphilis to bring back to Europe, their blessings did not matter. They did not convert well, they died from the smallpox gift the Europeans brought with them, and they did not make very good workers/subjects/slaves. In short, to a Spaniard, they were, well... savages.

While we are on the subject of smallpox, let's clear up a little myth, shall we?

The only record of smallpox being deliberately used as a bio weapon against American Indians by Americans... What? No evidence at all? That's right. In 1763 (prior to the birth of America), during Pontiac's rebellion, A British officer, Jeffrey Amherst, fighting for a newly formed Canada, wrote in a letter to his commander at Ft. Pitt, the suggestion that Britain use smallpox blankets for use against the Indians. It is unclear whether his advice was heeded. And mind you, germ theory had not developed into what it was today. The concept of virus was an unknown thing. There was cause and effect only. Canada is a nation today because American troops, decimated by smallpox themselves, lost almost half the Continental Army in one winter, and failed to follow through on their attack on Quebec City. The first inoculation, developed by Jenner, was not used until 1800 in the United States, by the way, and quite the contrary to Ward Churchill's assertions that the American government used smallpox to deliberately infect Native Americans, the U.S. government had implemented a program of smallpox vaccination for American Indians at the time of the Churchill's alleged Mandan incident. In fact, according to Historian Guenter Lewy,

Vaccination for Native Americans had been suggested in 1801 by President Thomas Jefferson, who sent smallpox vaccine on the Lewis and Clark expedition for distribution to western tribes (the vaccine was spoiled in transit). An official U.S. vaccination program was first funded in 1832, with an act passed "for the purpose of arresting the progress of smallpox among the several tribes by vaccination." One study concludes that in some areas of the United States, American Indians were eventually more thoroughly vaccinated against smallpox than their white neighbors.

So, La Raza, your people, the ones that immigrated here from abroad and were conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese, the ones that interbred and took Spanish or Portuguese last names -- your people capitulated. You lost a war, and with it, any claim to the territory you run around calling "Aztlan" today, all the while waving a Mexican flag. Perfect logic for savages.

Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain invaded North America, and together with the Dutch, brought over 95% of the slaves that would be imported to America, (purchased from Muslim slave traders), and declared property in their new territories. Nobody remembers this part of the history book, though, since it was never made into a mini-series like Roots, which seems to be what most people think about when slavery is discussed.

Two hundred and eighty four years after the initial invasion, an upstart group of British colonists declared their independence from the British Empire. This little group of colonists purchased large tracts of land from the original invading nations. It fought to free itself from wars. And frankly, Americans were more suited to make better use of the land than the "indigenous peoples".

This upstart nation, which had inherited its slave based economy in the South, fought long and bloody war with its own conscience and decided to abolish slavery, whatever the consequence to the fields of the Southern States. There have been no American slaves since the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, La Raza. Sorry.

Why not sue Spain or Portugal for your stolen land? It is no more ridiculous to demand it from them than it is to demand it from the United States. We bought it from your conquerors, fought for it with a brand new Mexico, and won. Too bad for you, that means... You're Mexican! and we aren't. End of story. That is who you are.

Enough with your claim that I (a European) took your land. I am not a European. I am American, and the truth is you could be, too, if you weren't so lazy that paper work and waiting periods daunted you. That is unless you cling to the Nation of Mexico. Mexico is such a great place, it's hemorrhaging people north! Yet you come and dance on domes you did not build and wave the Mexican flag?!? "We want a better life here!" you say in a very demanding tone. OK. Do the paper work, get in line, and say thank you like everybody else who wanted a better life here. Invest yourselves into this country, or continue with these acts of war.

So La Raza, go ahead, wave another g*ddamned Mexican flag in my face and tell me I stole your land. I've never even been to Mexico. †

Comments

There is no need to spend so much time substantiating your argument with facts. This one's easy: La Raza is not here to recover ANYthing, they're here to exploit EVERYthing. Not only is there is no identity at issue (save the one they've earned- a mass of invaders who have the cajones to feel sorry for themselves because they don't feel welcomed and embraced by the land which their defacing with graffiti and crippling with their infinite societal drains,) but they have no land to reclaim, and they know it. They're forced to use "Aztlan" as a convenient banner for their movement, since they can't claim that they deserve to be here, or guarantee any degree of contribution to justify their presence. After all, if they were truly concerned about keeping what is theirs, why, then, are they not being directed by their champions and leaders to the southern borders of their own country, where the same same cultural encroachment and parasitic dissolution which the proud Aztlan are perpetrating against America is currently digesting everything they thought was theirs . . ?

Maybe it just doesn't seem real to La Raza. Maybe that's because the invaders of Mexico are armed with a more similar appearance and a common language, which together beget a more rapid and effective assimilation (which begets a more rapid and effective digestion of their host's resources.) Maybe the Aztlan are in their waning years. If they spend too much time beating their heads against America's walls they're liable to look back and see that the spot they left open has backfilled only to leave them welcome nowhere and wishing their battle-cries actually meant something.

Posted by: Captain Fantastic | April 08, 2006 at 10:24 AM

La Raza's stupid...they don't even know the history that they're using to complain about. They complain about Texas being "stolen" from them, well, BULL! The Hispanics who lived here weren't pushed out, hell, they fought for independence right along with whitey. Why else are the names Badillo, Esparza, Fuentes, Padilla, Nava, and Losoya among the dead defenders of the Alamo!?

La Raza is full of unappreciative, ignorant bastards.

Posted by: seguin | April 10, 2006 at 11:13 AM