More than 3,500 years ago, our ancestors laid the foundations for the creation of three of the world’s most important civilizations—the Inca, the Maya and Mexika/Tolteka. Some 1500 to 2000 years before Christ was born, the so-called Olmeka peoples on the Gulf of Mexico region developed one of the first “cradles” of civilization in the Americas.

The Spanish did not advance the culture there—it enslaved most of the inhabitants while forcing the rest to become Christians and subordinates to Spanish rule and power. In turn, the wealth of most of the Americas—including from massive deposits of gold and silver mines—were transferred to Europe, creating one of the vast sources of primitive accumulation that allowed Europe to develop the incipient capitalist economy into a world-wide phenomena and an age of conquest that became unprecedented in the world.

European countries, led by Spain, Portugal, and England, but also including France, Belgium, the Dutch, and Germany, eventually controlled most of the Americas and Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, India, South Asia, Pacific Asia, and parts of China over a period of several hundred years. While most of North America (present-day Canada and the United States) ended up in the hands of England and France, the majority areas of the continent were in Spanish and Portuguese control. These conquerors also participated in the most insidious slave system in the world, eventually evolving to millions of kidnapped Africans for 450 years until slavery was abolished in the 1800s.

But England (and the Anglo-American rulers in the United States after English rule was removed) ended up killing or separating the native population while also settling their lands with large number of English, Irish, Scottish and other European peoples. In Mexico the remaining native populations were kept as slaves and peons to the relatively smaller European populace. While the official story is that Spanish and Indians intermarried to create a “new” race, the fact is there weren’t enough Spanish settlers to go around. The Spanish numbers only reached a height of 150,000 during the early years of conquest in the 16th Century (African slaves reached a height of 300,000, twice the Spanish numbers). After the Spanish were deposed in the early 1800s, they only came to Mexico in small numbers if at all. By then, 60 percent of the Mexican population was estimated to be indigenous peoples. By the 1910 Mexican Revolution that number supposedly went down to 40 percent. Today, some 10 percent of the Mexican people are “officially” indigenous. The rest of Mexico’s population is supposedly 80 percent mestizo (mixed indigenous, Spanish and/or African) while 10 percent is European (out of close to 100 million people).

The question arises: How did this mestizaje process occur when the Spanish settlers were relatively small in number (although they held the power, land and wealth) and after the Mexican Independence from Spain in the early 1800s, they stopped coming to any meaningful extent? The fact is most Mexicans—and thereby Xicanos—are of indigenous stock and culture, despite having been brutally Hispanicized over 500 years. They have much more indigenous blood than most Native Americans (who presently number 3 million people in the U.S. with the majority being mostly of white extraction—you can get a tribal identity card with proof of one-eight native ancestry). As it is, Mexico has more traditional indigenous tribal people (estimated from 10 to 20 million people, speaking close to 60 languages) than any other country in the hemisphere (even though Guatemala and Bolivia have greater percentages of indigenous people within their countries, their numbers are actually smaller).

To put this another way, Mexico is the largest “Indian” reservation on the continent. Xicanos, as mostly indigenous peoples with origins in Mexico, became part of United States history after the Mexican-American War of 1845-48. That war was precipitated by the removal of Texas from Mexican lands through intrigue and bloodshed led by Southern slave holders to expand the slave territories (Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and others were hired from places like Tennessee to populate and incite rebellion in Texas). After Texas briefly declared itself a republic, it eventually joined the United States and became part of the slave-holding states and then the Confederacy.

In addition, Mexico had abolished slavery and would not turn over escaped slaves from the South. An estimated 10,000 slaves escaped this way—there was an “underground railroad” to south of the border as important as the one to the north.

To expand territory and to punish Mexico for refusing to turn over U.S. “property” in the form of human slaves, the United States invaded. By 1847, U.S. armed forced landed in Veracruz and marched into Mexico City, which soon fell in a bloody battle (the teen boy defenders of the military academy in the Castle of Chapultepec wrapped themselves in Mexican flags and flung themselves over the walls rather than surrender to U.S. forces). As the U.S. flag was hoisted over the castle walls, several members of the Irish San Patricio Brigade, consisting of Irish U.S. soldiers who joined the other side after realizing how wrong the United States was in waging this war, were hung facing the rising flag.

Congressional and media pressures to take over the whole country stopped when a civil war between the Mexican peasants, liberals and indigenous peoples against the defeated Mexican rulers forced the United States to get what it could before the Mexican people turned on and engulfed the U.S. invaders. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was drafted in 1948. This treaty supposedly guaranteed language and property rights to the former Mexican citizens but also United States control over what are now the states of California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico (some of this land included the Gadsden Purchase of $10 million, an extremely low price for tens of thousands of prime acreage). This was close to half of Mexico's territory.

The former Mexican citizens in these territories—many of whom were not officially conquered—became the first Xicanos. In California, while most Mexicans were poor Native and mixed-Native peoples, there were still large landholdings in the hands of the so-called Californios. Even though the Californios won most of their battles against the Anglo forces, their lands were brutally taken away during the 1849 Gold Rush and unscrupulous legal maneuvers, ceding most of it to the newly-arrived Anglo-American settlers.

During this period, the state’s native population (including the Modocs, Pomos, Chumash, and others) were greatly reduced by murder, bounties and vigilante terror; whole tribes disappeared.

The Anglo settlers soon outnumbered the Mexican and Native Californian populations (although the increase in population included Chinese laborers, Australian immigrants, Chilean miners and former African American slaves). Mexican resistance to the invaders lasted for several decades. Legends grew about resistance leaders like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez in California and Juan Cortina and Gregorio Cortez in Texas. Mexicans were lynched, and in some cases slaughtered, by vigilante groups and official law enforcers such as the Texas Rangers. In 1913 an estimated 3,000 Mexican lives were lost in the crushing of the so-called Plan de San Diego revolt in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, led by the Texas Rangers and involving lynchings and outright murder as reprisals. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Mexicans were placed into a social position tantamount to Blacks in the Deep South.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-21 led to the first big wave of migration from Mexico to the United States. The Revolution eventually resulted in a million people killed and a million refugees. Many of those refugees created their own barrios and colonias in the hills, ravines and gulleys of places like Los Angeles, Southern Arizona, New Mexico, and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (a significant number went to places like Kansas City, Nebraska, and Chicago). A similar outpouring of people corresponded to Mexico’s “Cristero” Revolt in 1924.

By the 1920s in Los Angeles, these barrios had names like Paredon Blanco (White Fence, for the white bluffs where the migrants built their makeshift homes), Maravilla (including the area known as El Hoyo, the “hole”), Chavez Ravine, and more. By the 1930s, Mexican youth trying to protect themselves, and rebelling against U.S. cultural dominance and their own parents, formed pachuco gangs, with origins in El Paso, Texas (known as El Chuco), where many of the migrants first came through.

In the 1940s, Anglo servicemen, policemen and citizens attacked these pachucos, including during the so-called Zootsuit Riots of 1943 and in the infamous Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial (where 22 Mexican youth were convicted and imprisoned for murder in a case that was later thrown out). Mexicans were labeled by the press and many politicians as the most violent criminal element in the city.

During the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the United States rounded up tens of thousands of Mexicans (including many U.S. born citizens), to deport them to Mexico in one of the first anti-Mexican repatriation acts. Other similar round-ups occurred during World War II and in the 1950s.

Despite this, Mexicans entered the armed forces in large numbers to fight against the Nazi and Japanese Imperial forces. They fought bravely, garnering more Congressional Medal of Honors than any other ethnic group. The barrios of Silvis, IL and LaVerne Street in East LA are known to have more soldiers per capita than any other U.S. community. Yet they returned to their barrios in places like Texas where Mexicans could not be buried alongside whites and there were still separate movie nights and swimming times for Mexicans in public theaters and swimming pools. Xicanos, although organizing since 1848, began to create a number of Mexican protection and mutual aid organizations such as the League of Latin American Citizens, the G.I. Forum, and others. By the mid-50s, they participated in struggles to integrate segregated schools, parks and other public places. While African Americans received greater attention due to their massive boycotts and marches during the same time, Mexican also chipped away at discriminatory practices throughout the U.S. Southwest.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights battles escalated. In California, Xicanos in the migrant camps and agricultural fields organized with the leadership of people such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta with the burgeoning United Farm Workers Union (it’s important to note that Filipino farm workers were leaders in these struggles as well) Organizational efforts, particularly in the urban areas, were also taking place throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and places like Chicago where Xicanos and Mexicanos lived in segregated dilapidated housing and were receiving inadequate schooling and job prospects. In 1968, after years of organizing, East Los Angeles—then as now, the largest community of Mexicans in the United States—made front-page headlines when thousands of high school and middle school students (supported by teachers, parents and others) walked out of their schools that at the time had the lowest reading and writing scores and the highest drop out rates in the country.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, East Los Angeles had nine major civil disturbances. The most significant was the Chicano Moratorium against the Viet Nam War on August 29, 1970 when some 30,000 people converged onto Laguna Park after marching for several miles to hear speeches, songs, and witness dances and performances before being attacked by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies.

In the ensuing melee, several people were killed, hundreds arrested, millions of dollars of property burned, and the leading Xicano voice in the mass media, Ruben Salazar, silenced when police killed him in the Silver Dollar Saloon on Whittier Boulevard.

Community efforts led to the creation of groups such as the Brown Berets, a para-military Xicano activist group; Catolicos Por La Raza; La Raza Unida Party; as well as the United Mexican American Students that laid the foundation for the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MeCha), which in 30 years would become the leading Xicano student activist organization on many U.S. high schools, colleges and university campuses.

Barrios all over the United States had their own battles, marches and struggles. In Denver, the Crusade for Justice forced many changes against the existing power structure; in Chicago, marches and takeovers brought better schools and housing concerns to the forefront; the UFW grew and also created such outlets like the Teatro Campesino, a people’s theater that led to the creation of similar teatros across the land. There were community centers, teen posts, youth conferences, education reform groups, and others being created to better the lot of Mexicans everywhere.

In East LA and other Xicano communities, murals exploded on the walls, songs and literature began to be produced and published in independent projects, and various media projects, including independent newspapers, radio, film, and TV concerns were created.

And just as the U.S. launched a war through Cointelpro against the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and other Independence for Puerto Rico groups, Xicano organizations were being infiltrated, spied on and disorganized, forcing the dismantling of groups like the Brown Berets (many Xicano leaders where jailed and killed during this period as was the case with African American, Native American and Puerto Rican defense organizations).

The 1970s saw the Nixon cuts, which eliminated government funds and support for community-based justice and anti-poverty efforts. In California, the Proposition 13 Tax Revolt also pulled badly-needed property taxes from social services, forcing the elimination of teen posts and housing and educational reform projects. At the same time, major industry in steel, auto, tires, meat packing, and textiles were closing down across America, adversely affecting the Mexican communities that were largely created to feed into those industries in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, the two largest industrial centers of the country. By the mid-1980s, whole communities were devastated with millions of jobs lost (this, of course, also impacted African Americans, Puerto Rican, Native American and working class whites).

During this period, the barrio gangs that had been created in the 1920s in places like LA were now major street organizations, becoming entrenched in the spiraling drug trade. The 1980s saw the greatest rise of new drug and drug warfare in U.S. history (during a time, ironically, in which the U.S. had declared a “War on Drugs”). New migrations from Central America, South Asia and other Asian countries, the Caribbean and East Europe fueled the tensions in the poorest urban cities. The older African American and Mexican neighborhoods were now competing with other groups for the few resources and jobs.

The drug trade became a major multi-billion dollar industry. The greatest rise in street gangs—again, centralized in Los Angeles and Chicago—corresponded to the losses in major industry as well as the influx of new drugs (crack, PCP, crystal meth, and more potent heroin). Xicano youth, again in the lowest echelons of educational opportunities and job prospects, became the single largest group in LA’s vast street gang culture. Although African American rivals Crips and Bloods received more media attention, the majority of those killed and doing the killings during the bloody 1980s and 1990s were Xicanos (some 10,000 LA youth were believed killed during one ten-year period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s).

A new stirring of Xicanos, mostly youth but also across the board, came about during California Governor Pete Wilson’s support of initiative efforts like Proposition 187 that denied vital social, educational and health services to undocumented immigrants in the state. Other laws like “three strikes and you’re out” and Proposition 21, which gave prosecutors the power to try youth as adults, also garnered more Xicano participation in politics and demonstrations. In April 1992, Los Angeles again exploded in the worse civil unrest of the 20th Century after police officers on trial for the beating of African American motorist Rodney King were acquitted. Initially starting in the predominant African American communities of South Central LA, the rioting spread to Mexican and Central American communities in Pico-Union, Koreatown, Hollywood and other sections. Whites and Asians also took part, becoming the first multi-ethnic civil disturbance. However Xicanos, along with Central Americans, became the largest group of those arrested, killed and of businesses burned.

Unfortunately, one result was the mass deportation of so-called gang youth from Mexico and Central America that ended up exporting LA gang cultures to Mexico and to poor and isolated countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala that didn’t have resources or a history to understand the drive-by shootings, wall graffiti and tattooed youth (by then Central American youth in LA had emulated the cholo gang style created by Xicanos). The ten years or so since the 1992 LA rebellion have not done much to alleviate the conditions that led to those disturbances—poverty, disenfranchisement and police abuse. Presently, California has the largest prison population of any state in the U.S. with 160,000 prisoners (the rise came about through new laws in the 1990s such as “three strikes and you’re out,” “gang enhancements,” “truth in sentencing,” gang injunctions and such that targeted poor urban communities). The largest group among them—close to 40 percent—is Xicanos (although Xicanos make up less than 25 percent of the state’s population). While African Americans have greater imprisonment, murder, and disease rates than Xicanos as a whole, Xicanos and Mexicanos continue to be the largest groups among the poor and working people of the state.

In fact Xicanos and Mexicanos have now spread throughout the country—with large numbers in low-paying jobs throughout the Northeast, Midwest, Northwest and Southern parts of the country. Xicano cultural creations such as lowrider cars, burritos, cholo style (begun in the 1960s and now incorporated into Hip Hop and Skateboard culture), and music (from Norteno, Tejano, Ranchera, Banda, Rok en Espanol, and the hybrid mix of Mexican and Jarocho sounds with U.S. rock sounds in groups like Quetzal, Ozomotli and Los Lobos) have entered the general U.S. cultural mainstream.

As seen in this short history, Xicanos have united, resisted and organized for more than 150 years to achieve a level of dignity, justice and equity in this country. More needs to be done. Major steps now include deeper clarity on the issues, more mature and sophisticated organizational work, a skilled and highly connected political base, and the increased education and training of Xicanos in all areas of business, media, culture, politics and law.

The existence of Xispas magazine is not against Xicanos working with or being part of efforts involving African Americans, Central Americans, Whites or Asians—indeed, our interests are in common, thereby demanding a united organized response across color lines. But we should not be lost in the shuffle—our numbers and our strategic importance cannot be dismissed or undermined. The point here is to ensure our interests, our roots, our needs and issues are at the forefront of any struggle for true justice and voice in this country. Xicanos are not going anywhere—if anyone belongs in this country, we do.