Mexicano and Latino Politics and the Quest for Self-Determination

Book excerpt: This book examines the current status of Mexicano and Latino politics in the United States. Political scientist and community activist Armando Navarro maintains that both represent a dysfunctional and failed mode of politics, attributable to their system maintenance and mainstream ideological orientation and approach. As colonial agents, they protect both a United States that is decaying and declining and the degenerative liberal capitalist system. Navarro argues that the United States is not a representative democracy; but in fact, is a “White Corpocratic Dictatorship” controlled by Capital, which is evolving into a Fascist State. The book provides an in-depth analysis and contention that Mexicanos and Latinos in Aztlán (Southwest) are an “occupied and internal colonized people.” It argues they are the “Palestinians and Kurds” of the United States. His supposition is sustained by the book’s profiles of Mexicano political history, demography, socioeconomics, electoral politics, immigration, and the Triad Crisis (e.g., Second Great Depression, Global Economic Crisis, and Global Capitalist Crisis). Each chapter provides the justification and case for Navarro’s two unique alternative change models, applicable to today’s bankrupt and failed Mexicano and Latino Politics in the twenty-first century. The preferred model is “Aztlán’s Politics of a Nation-Within-a-Nation (APNWN),” which is based on the models of the Mormon Nation of Utah and that of French Quebec. Navarro, therefore, calls for the reformation of the United States’ liberal capitalist system by way of social democracy for the empowerment of Mexicanos and Latinos. His second model is “Aztlán’s Politics of Separatism” (APS), which offers two strategic options, (1) Aztlán (Southwest) becoming a separate and sovereign nation-state or (2) its reannexation and re-integration with Mexico. Navarro outlines a “plan of action” for building a New Movement designed to attain APNWN or APS. In addition, several ominous forecasts are made, such as the United States being in a state of decline and no longer a hegemonic superpower due to the rise of a multi-polar world. Moreover, Navarro attributes the United States’ decline to the inherent contradictions of global capitalism. His sobering message is that if the current economic conditions are left unchanged, this will produce an “End of Times” scenario—the unleashing of the “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”