Land, Genocide, Memory and Denial: : The Battle of Baldwin Park

Land, Genocide, Memory and Denial: The Battle of Baldwin Park

by Juan Santos Wednesday, Jun. 22, 2005

Part One:

“This land was Mexican once, Indian always, and is, and will be again.”

- Gloria Anzaldua

Had she led the uprising in Warsaw against the Nazis, had this been Europe, had this not been an uprising of Native Americans against the Spanish, had she been a man, her name might be legendary.

"I hate the padres,” she said, “and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my ancestors and despoiling our tribal domains...."

Her name was Toipurinah. She led the uprising of the Tongva (Gabrieleno) people against Mission San Gabriel 220 years ago, on October 25th.

She was a medicine woman, 24 years of age. Her rebellion defeated, she was banished from her land forever.

There is a monument to her now, a reminder in stone of her spirit.

Called “Danzas Indigenas” it was designed by preeminent Chicana muralist Judy Baca.

Near a massive stone arch, the floor plan of the San Gabriel Mission is laid out on the Earth. Near what would have been the church altar a low rock prayer mound stands as a call to her and a resting place for her spirit. Tongva elders Vera and Antonio Rocha, now deceased, suggested the creation of the mound to Baca. They said “we could create a prayer mound and her spirit, which was separated from her land, could find peace.”

Toipurinah was 21 when Los Angeles was founded near the Tongva village of Yangna, nine years old when the Spanish invaders first arrived in the LA Basin and eleven when Mision San Gabriel was begun.

She saw 85% of her people die as a result of the Spanish invasion. Her son suffocated on his own blood from disease brought by the foreigners.

She grew into a powerful figure among her people, fluent in several local dialects, known throughout the villages for her medicine. When the invaders banned the sacred ceremonies of her people she knew the time had come to strike.

Uniting the chiefs of five villages behind her, they laid out a workable plan that, in the face of betrayal and exposure, was defeated. Toipurinah was captured, tried and exiled.

Records in Spain’s Casa del Indio show that Toipurinah was made the object of an Inquisition, and listed as a “she-devil” by the mission fathers.

Ultimately, among her people, almost no one survived. Between 95 and 98 percent of California's Indians were exterminated in little more than a century. Her people were enslaved, both in the missions, and later by the Anglos who followed. Indians forced into servitude in the missions received about 700 calories a day – roughly the same allotment of food as offered to the slaves of Buchenwald by the Nazi regime.

The 1835 census counted only 535 Tonva remaining of what had been a population of 10,000 when the Spanish arrived, and 1,500 at the time of Toipurinah’s rebellion. Only 300 Tongva people survive today.

When Anglos came, they publicly declared and executed campaigns of mass murder with the openly stated goal of the utter extermination of the Native population.

In American Holocaust David Stannard writes “By 1845 the Indian population of California was down to no more than a quarter of what it had been when the Franciscan missions were established in 1769. That is, it had declined by at least 75 percent during seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the course of just the next twenty-five years, under American rule, it would fall by another 80 percent. The gold rush brought to California a flood of American miners and ranchers who seemed to delight in killing Indians, miners and ranchers who rose to political power and prominence-and from those platforms not only legalized the enslavement of California Indians, but, as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public campaigns of genocide with the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian extermination.”

Afterward, Stannard writes, “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.”

Today, among the survivors, almost no one speaks the Tongva tongue fluently. The words of one of the last fluent Tongva speakers are inscribed on the Baldwin Park monument, a testament to the focus brought by Chicana artist Judy Baca, who understood that memory and will are essential to the survival of a culture under siege. “When the Indians died, the villages ended,” the Tongva woman said

This is Tongva land. Sunigna – the name for the area - is remembered in cut stone, accompanied by Tongva pictographs, on one side of the monument. Cut into the other side is the name in current usage. Baldwin Park. If the village died when the Indians died, then the remaining People may die when – and if - memory dies.

The monument, a mere mile from the place of the Tongva people’s enslavement at the San Gabriel Mission, a mere mile from the site of their uprising, holds another promise – that this land was Indian, is Indian, and will again be Indian.

To say that the land was also Mexican, as the monument does, is a distinction with little ultimate difference. As a rule the Mexican people are 80% Indian “blood,” – the name of the Mexican nation itself derives from the name the Azteca people called themselves – Mexica. Today’s Chican@s, like all Mexican people, are native people, with only the veneer of Europeanization, an enforced forgetting, between them and their sisters and brothers of the First Nations.

That enforced forgetting, often on pain of death, occurred in places like the San Gabriel Mission, where Indians were the first of California’s subjugated “farm workers.”

Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez make the point clearly:“Like us, other friends can trace some, but not all of their ancestry. The reason, in part, is the role the Catholic church and missions played during the colonial era in "reducing," or culturally obliterating the Indian. The objective was to create a "Christian," and that meant to spiritually and culturally stamp out the Indian.

“One result was that Indians and mestizos developed a hatred towards all things Indian--thus a hatred of themselves, which led to a denial of their ancestry. In this atmosphere, "Hispanicized Indians" became "mestizos" and mestizos became ‘Spanish.’”

Mayan and Mexica libraries burned. “Pagans” – non-Christian Indians - burned at the stake, whipped and tortured: disease, deliberate slaughter, enslavement, starvation, overwork and virtual entombment in the silver and gold mines reduced the numbers of Indians in what is now Mexico by over 90% within a century. Over 20 million native people died in Mexico alone, part of a continent-wide holocaust that claimed over 100 million lives.

The languages and cultures of many of the survivors were obliterated.

They lost their memory.

Baca said of the monument, "I wanted to put memory into a piece of the land once owned by the American Indian cultures—memory and willpower are what any culture, the ones living then and those living now, has to have to preserve itself."

Voices from the peoples who have lived in the area are inscribed in five tongues: those of the Tongva (Gabrielino,) Chumash and Luiseno nations, alongside Spanish and English.

None are forgotten.

Part 2:

Now It’s Ours:

Race Hatred, White Nationalism, and the Struggle for Aztlan

“AMERICANS ARE TIRED OF FEELING LIKE A FOREIGNER IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.” [sic]

– Joe Turner, “leader,” Save Our State

_________

“No other major nation has been built so purely on world genocide. Our whitelife has no history, no identity, no culture, no economy without genocide. Outside genocide we are a blank.

“Amerikkkans want to distance themselves from genocide. You know, it’s always something long ago (“you can’t change the past”), or far away (“There’s never been anything like the Jewish Holocaust.”) But genocide is running, right now. It’s not far away. See, we are the genocide. I mean that literally and precisely. Everything we are, our bodies, our careers, our plans for our children, has all been made of genocide.”

- Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children

_________

Joe Turner, age 27, is an angry young white man with a sneering manner. He wants to obliterate the monument in Baldwin Park that stands, in part, as a tribute to the Tongva Indians, the indigenous group that was forced into the San Gabriel Mission a mile away. It’s “seditious” he says, because of the inscription that reads “This land was Mexican once, Indian always, and is, and will be again.”

His group has issued a threat that “one way or another” the language “will be removed” by early July. He also wants to remove the native Mexicans it represents, and the threat to Anglo domination of the region their presence implies.

The City of Los Angeles is now 2/3 peoples of color, has elected a Chicano mayor, and demographic trends show that the nation as a whole will be half peoples of color by 2050, a fact that causes no small unease among white cultural conservatives across the country.

Turner led a protest against the monument in May in which his band of extremists was outnumbered by the Chicano community by a measure to ten to one. They were forced to leave when police claimed they could no longer guarantee the safety of the racist organization’s members.

His group plans a repeat performance in late June to “punish” the City of Baldwin Park for allowing the monument to remain. “We are angry! We are seething with anger and boiling with rage,” he writes.

“Make no mistake,” says Turner, leader of the anti-Mexican group Save Our State, “our opponents are savages.”

Although Turner claims his group isn’t racist, there can be no mistake about who Turner’s calling “savage.” His organization – “SOS” for short, is nothing other than a hate group, one that targets Chican@s, Mexicans and Central Americans. SOS routinely targets people of color, and has allies among neo-Nazi, “White Nationalist” and vigilante groups.

Its leader sees a coming race war, and at least one of its allies has advocated mass roundups of brown skinned people. It is part of a broader anti-Mexican movement that has been praised by California’s governor- who has also praised Adolph Hitler – and acts as a kind of vanguard, or shock troop, for a broader fascistic movement whose ultimate leadership controls the White House.

Americans, Turner says, “are tired of watching their great American culture disappear, only to watch it be replaced by other cultures that are inferior and contradictory to everything this country was built upon.” A headline on his website reads “Aren't you tired of watching your state turn into a third world cesspool right before your eyes?”

The “inferior culture” he’s referring to, of course, is Mexican and Chicano culture.

“I have talked about the perils of cultural relativism and stated that American culture is superior to other cultures. I make no bones about it,” he maintains. As if to emphasize the point, the organization’s website is riddled with racist images posted by his loyal adherents.

“A Day Without a Mexican is a Good Day Indeed” reads one caption, posted by “no peeky panish.” Then there’s the image of a burning Mexican flag, and a poster of a set of handguns that reads “Celebrate Diversity.”

A Confederate flag, America’s most enduring symbol of racism, is inscribed with the words “Now It’s Ours!” – or as Turner puts it, “This is our land. This is our fight. And we are willing to bleed to defend it.”

Like other groups on the extreme racist right, Turner’s SOS fears what they call a “reconquista,” that the presence of Mexican and Central American migrants foreshadows a day when the southwest will be reconquered by Mexicans and other Indians the way South Africa was retaken by its African majority.

Racist groups like SOS believe that Mexican and Central American migrants will unite with Chican@ radicals to create the nation of Aztlan in what is now the US Southwest.

As one SOS member put it, “This nation wasn't "stolen" it was conquered and it's about to be conquered all over again, it's really just a matter of who does the conquering this time.” One Turner supporter threatened on the LA Indymedia website that Mexicans would soon find themselves on reservations, Bantustan – style.

On the website of SOS and at the neo-Nazi “White Nationalist” Stormfront site, you’ll see migrants from Mexico referred to as “invaders.”

While their agendas are not identical in every respect, SOS and neo-Nazis groups have more than a little in common.

The National Vanguard, which has replaced the National Alliance as the US’s largest neo-Nazi group, joined SOS recently for an anti-immigrant rally in Victorville, just as they joined the Minutemen in their Mexican -hunting expedition in Arizona. SOS will be joined by the anti-Islamic hate group The United American Committee in the next Baldwin Park protest.

Stormfront.org posted messages praising the SOS protest against the monument in Baldwin Park. One member wrote: “perhaps some aspect of this current American resistance to the invasion of the U.S. doesn’t yet come in the form of an ideally or completely White Nationalist group, but for now, any way that this invasion can be repelled is fine with me. For this invasion could be a "world ender" for American White Nationals if it is not stopped.”

The racist website “White Revolution” echoes much of the SOS rhetoric, falsely claiming, “Hard-working Americans are losing their jobs to nonWhite illegals…”

It calls on its readers to join the right wing paramilitary group the Minutemen, whose leader, Jim Gilchrist, will also be joining SOS for the protest against the Baldwin Park monument on the 25th of June.

Gilchrist’s recent address to the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (which has protested side by side with White Revolution members) was the object of an intense and bloody protest in which a CCIR member ran down several protestors with his car. He was released without charges by the Orange County District Attorney, while a young woman who was hit by his car has been the object of ongoing police harassment.

Gilchrist is also a member of CCIR, an organization listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racist hate group.

SOS is not far behind.

Turner writes: Gone are the days when we allowed our opponents to define the terminology of the debate.” In an SOS email thread entitled “Racism Redefined,” SOS members show what he means:

One writes: “I say: "Racist and proud of it" when they hurl their slime at me.”

“Avatar” posts an image of a waving confederate flag and writes, “You call me racist as if it were a bad thing??”

SOS member “William”, the man who posted the image of the burning Mexican flag wrote: “…remember, the word "racist" is simply a Marxist term used by the Left and non-whites to intimidate & bully White people. That's all.” And, he said “ Ignore them. As I said, the term "racist" is simply a Marxist political tool. It means nothing. Whenever I hear some filthy Communist or liberal use the term "racist," I ask them to define it…”

Some SOSers deny their racism, while others try to rationalize, even celebrate it.

“OhighLass” writes “We are not about hating all Mexicans…I could pass for Hispanic. So, how do we differentiate? Tattoo "I" or "L" on our forheads [sic]?”

John Wagner writes “We do NOT want to call ourselves racist. It is not racist to protect our race, culture and civilization.”

And in a classic inversion “Joazinha” writes “Most SENSIBLE citizens are NOT against immigrants for BEING immigrants; we just don't like the RACIST variety.”

“Last Great Hope” says, “For what its worth, I don't want it to come to a friggin' race war. Too many innocents would be hurt. I won't attack people on the basis of their ethnicity. However, anyone trying to take my homeland from me is a target.”

But like many white racist groups on the extreme right, and like the Stormfront member who fears the worst for white America, Turner sees a race war coming. He writes, “Many suggest that violence is coming to California. Many suggest that a civil war of sorts may be on the horizon.”

In a straightforward expression of the Minutemen mentality, SOSer “DWB” writes, “It is the duty of every American to be prepared and to take the law into our own hands if the government goes against the will of the people, just like now. We need to shut down the boarder [sic] by force and then we need to weed out the bad seeds in the government and try them on treason, then execute the basteds [sic].

The geopolitics and world view implied in such a stand are made clear on the racist American Renaissance website, which has praised the SOS actions: “If Bolivia split up into two nations, one for the whites and one for the Indians, the new white nation would be promptly deluged with Indian and mestizo welfare parasites. So long as there is one white nation left on earth, it will beseiged by diversitoid parasites. Segregation into ethnic states may be no more practical than multicultural/multiethnic nations. There is, however a third option.”

That option is genocide.

While Turner disclaims any intentions of unleashing violence against indigenous peoples, recent events paint a different picture.

“Enough is enough,” he writes. “We have reached the point where we can no longer sit back and allow our government to aid and abet the illegal alien invasion. We must respond as our founding fathers would have responded. We must refresh the tree of liberty.”

The tree of liberty, according to tradition, is “refreshed” with blood. “Together,” Turner says, “we will drive a stake through the heart of the 'reconquista' movement.”

Fellow anti-migrant activist Andy Ramirez of “Friends of the Border Patrol” has denounced Turner, noting his call for SOS activists to bring baseball bats to demonstrations.

A local newspaper, the Daily Breeze, reported that prior to an anti-migrant demonstration in Redondo Beach Turner issued a call to his troops, "Bring your bats, fellas. If we are lucky, we are gonna need them. PING!

"You don't incite violence," Ramirez said, according to the Breeze. "It's racist crap. Emotions are hot to begin with. "What he says is insensitive, disrespectful and racist. It's neo-Nazi thuggery. What's next, the sheet and hood?"

The Breeze reports Turner claimed “he would be willing to resort to violence if anybody opposing the group showed up.

"I don't mind going toe-to-toe with people, but we're here for a peaceful demonstration," Turner said.

In the meantime, one SOS member- “oneinchgroup”- has promised online to arrive at Baldwin Park for the SOS demonstration on June 25th armed with a gun. The group is deeply upset that one of its members was struck with a plastic water bottle at their first foray in Baldwin Park, and, they claim, went to a hospital for observation, staying overnight.

Press and police reported no injuries, but the SOS website carries a banner proclaiming “Baldwin Park 1 Survivor – Remember the Water Bottle!” SOS members feel the first “Battle of Baldwin Park” was a sort of California Alamo for anti-Mexicans. Four SOS supporters asked the Baldwin Park City Council to offer a “reward” for the capture of the plastic bottle thrower.

When Hal Netkin, a member of the CCIR hate group, ran down six anti-racist protestors with his van, many SOS members saw it is tit for tat – as a fitting response to the attack of the plastic water bottle.

The orientation of these forces toward violence isn’t aimed just at Chican@ protestors, however.

City officials say they have received hundreds of racist hate mails, threats and harassment calls from SOS supporters. Artist Judy Baca has also been threatened.

The Minutemen’s Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to be deployed not only at the Mexican / US border, but has also urged Guard deployment for the upcoming demonstration in Baldwin Park.

Gilchrist’s partner and rival in the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, known among disaffected followers as “The Little Prince” and “The Little Hitler” makes the agenda clear, saying, "Oh, Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

And this, of course, is the bottom line – roundups of a scapegoated community under a government that is moving harder and faster toward the extreme Right, toward fascism itself.

Fittingly, these “Patriot” groups are pushing for a new state sponsored “California Border Patrol” under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They hope he’ll create it for them, and they may not be wrong. The Terminator, whose father Gustav joined Hitler’s SS just six months after the SS led the Kristallnacht pogroms against Germany’s Jews, went out of his way to endorse the Minutemen, calling them “exemplary citizens.” The governor has openly praised Adolph Hitler, saying "I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."

SOS, Stormfront, White Revolution, the National Vanguard and the Minutemen Project have lots of little men vying to be big, not least among them Joe Turner.

In the meantime, Turner is leading a series of demonstrations attacking Home Depot stores, which, he claims, provide a platform for the hiring of migrant day laborers. Simcox of the Minutemen describes such actions as “phase two” of the Minutemen media campaign – having “Minutemen protesters picketing employers who are hiring illegals [sic] and see if we can't make an effort, some impact there."

Part 3 The Migrants: Targets of Genocide

”One of the byproducts of fear is the constant need for scapegoats. The prospects of permanent war requires the stoking and exacerbation of those fears. Enter “illegal aliens” and we have a dangerous confluence. The future threat is not from bigots per se… but rather from the codification and expansion of illegal and subhuman categories.” –Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodríguez

“There is nothing in these lands we walk upon whose foundation is not indigenous. For society to continue to act otherwise is to continue the practice of cultural genocide.” - ibid

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the genocidal Guatemalan state, backed by the US, slaughtered more than two hundred thousand Mayan Indians, demonstrating in stark relief the connection between white nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, fascistic protestant fundamentalism, and political violence.

During the 14 month reign of Efrain Rios Montt, who counts among his closest “prayer friends” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the Guatemalan state annihilated some 600 Mayan villages and carried out other mass atrocities against Mayan communities they accused of sympathizing with leftist guerillas, including the rape of women and girls, and widespread torture.

From 1981 to 1983 alone, approximately 100,000 people, mostly Mayans, were killed or "disappeared" by the army and death squads. Between 500,000 and 1.5 million were displaced, fleeing to other regions within Guatemala or seeking safety in Mexico or the US.

Tens of thousands of Mayans, fled to Los Angeles. Millions of others from the region fled fascism, genocide and US imposed poverty.

Ronald Reagan's covert and dirty war against Nicaragua caused 14,000 casualties. He correctly, but inadvertently, called the US financed Contra death squads “the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers.”

As he prepared options to invade Nicaragua, his contingency plans included the roundup of 400,000 migrants from south of the US border, and their incarceration in “detention camps.” He feared revolution would spread from Nicaragua through Mexico to the US.

In El Salvador, populated largely by descendants of the Pipil Indians – a group related to the Mexica and Hopi peoples - right wing death squads funded by the US killed 30,000 people between 1979 and 1981 alone, as the migrations north to the US began in earnest throughout the region. Ultimately 70,000 died. This is the story of untold numbers of migrants from Mexico and Central America. They were driven here by US Sponsored terror and poverty enforced by US led capitalist institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary fund.

Rightist political factions in El Salvador and elsewhere viewed the death squads as legitimate "counterterrorists," in the face of a leftist insurgency, much as the Minutemen and SOS legitimize themselves through resort to fears of a Chican@ led “reconquista” of the US Southwest.

While developments toward a US-style Christian fascism may surprise the white left in the US, they come as no surprise to the migrant populations here, nor to the African and Chican@ communities which bear the weight of mass incarceration – the highest incarceration rates in the world – as they once bore the weight of white lynchings.

Nor can they be a surprise to the radical Native American population. The FBI – backed G.O.O.N. Squads (domestic death squads) on the Lakota reservation in the 1970s killed American Indian Movement supporters at a rate comparable to the death rate in fascist Chile following the Pincochet coup.

The movement toward fascism in the White House, the racist targeting of migrants, and the suppression of dissent have been elements of the far right’s agenda for decades now.

Once, the US focused on funding torture states and training their Inquisitors in places like the infamous School of the Americas. Today, the US itself is rapidly becoming what it once sponsored. What it practiced on the native peoples of Guatemala and elsewhere is now routine in the US prisons of Iraq and Guantanamo. The middleman has been eliminated.

The moral equivalent of the fascist Christian fanatic Rios Montt, who carried out the anti-Mayan genocide, is found in the Christian fascists who hold power in Washington today, and in their racist shock troops - like SOS and the Minutemen.

Even their target is the same.

Part 4

The Spirit of Toipurinah and the Spirit of the Land

“Up there they say that forgetting is defeat, and they want to wait for you

to forget and to fail and to be defeated.

They know up there, but they do not want to say it: there will be no more

forgetting, and defeat shall not be the crown for the color of the earth.

- Subcomandante Marco, Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional,

March 11, 2001 in the Zocalo of Mexico City

__________

“The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.

But in the Indian, the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefather’s bones."

- Luther Standing Bear (Lakota)

Hector Perez-Pacheco is the Speaker of the Aztlan Mexica Nation / Harmony Circle, an East LA group that has protected Native and Chican@ events in settings as diverse as the 25th anniversary of the Wounded Knee shootout on the Lakota Reservation, the struggle of the Dine (Navajo) traditionals at Big Mountain in Arizona, to the streets of LA during the mass demonstrations against the anti-migrant measure proposition 187 in the 1990s and the annual Gathering of Elders here in Los Angeles.

Distinctive in their red and black clothing, the principle purpose of the group is to guard the ceremonies of Native peoples and to preserve indigenous traditions, including the Mexica traditions of Mexico. The “Harmony Keepers” have been active in organizing the recent SOS/ Minutemen struggles. They do it, they say, “For the love of our people, not for hatred of our enemies.”

Perez-Pacheco understands the resonance of the Danzas Indigenas monument under attack in Baldwin park, and spoke to the meaning of the resistance to the SOS and Minutemen assault. He worked closely with Tongva elder Vera Rocha for years protecting sacred sites and ceremonies. The Tongva elder was also Baca’s principle advisor for “Danzas Indigenas.”

The purpose of the resistance, he says, is “Resurrecting the spirit of Toipurinah and what she stood for – to unite her people to fight the oppressive forces. Then it was the Spanish. In our time it’s the Minutemen and those who think like them.

“The monument says this land was once Indian, and that it will always be Indian. The monument has enraged the visitors to this land, because it reminds them it is not their land – this is the land of the nations of the brown people...

“They want us to forget that we have a responsibility to the land and to our traditions. It’s our duty as those who are carrying our traditions to instill our values and principles in our young people and our communities.”

Perez-Pacheco’s comments are in keeping with the understanding of traditional native elders like Hopi elder Martin Gashweseoma, keeper of the Hopi Fire Clan Tablets, who has spoken of the relationship of the original peoples to the land.

"Like the Hopi, original native peoples were placed across this continent, and given special instructions by a higher being. Each had special functions by which to hold life in balance, which they were still carrying out when the Europeans arrived. We know these foreigners once had similar spiritual means for promoting life, with which they were supposed to bless the native peoples. But they had apparently misused their power. Most of the native peoples were forcibly stripped of their culture, language and religious ceremonies, depriving them of their function as caretakers. Those that remain face imminent cultural extinction. Clearly these foreigners are not here to help, but to destroy everything the original people have left, and in doing so, destroy this world. The only hope for humanity lies in restoring true land title, which is inseparable from our function as caretakers of life."

In an interview for this article Judy Baca said, “The Hopi elders told me, ‘it’s simple Judy, the world is too male.’ It is out of balance.”

“It’s as if one could put one’s ear to the land and hear it speak. The power of the land is in these sites, where even the most disconnected and hardened people understand that the spirit of what occurred is embedded in a place… the monument is one mile from the site of the rebellion and the San Gabriel Mission.”

Baca said Vera Rocha, whose husband Manuel was the spiritual leader of the Tongva people, would not step foot on the Mission grounds. “I won’t go in there,” she said. She told the stories of people from her family who died there.

The first effort to construct the San Gabriel Mission was destroyed in an earthquake. The Spanish called the river near it El Rio de Temblores. “The Earth,” she said, “shook off the first mission.” The current mission was built following the destruction of the first.

The Mission was a fortress against the indigenous people, a prison to keep them in and a fortress to keep them out.

“The missions,” Baca recounted, “were the first sweatshops. The people died there in massive numbers not only from disease but from the brutal treatment they received. The fathers counted everything- they were little accountants counting everything they took from indigenous labor, that’s what you see in the records they kept.”

Included in those records were numbers of births and deaths, which have been used by demographers to study the genocidal death rates suffered by native people in Spanish missions, including at San Gabriel. “Often deaths exceeded baptisms of the native people,” Baca said.

The Spanish soldiers raped the women from the day they arrived. Tongva women were locked in cells at night to prevent the soldiers from raping them continually. When the chief protested the rapes, they cut off his head and stuck it on a pike.

“That’s why Toipurinah led the rebellion,” Baca said.

“I’m not surprised we are having such confrontation of opposing forces at this site because somehow embodied in this place is the conflict that took place then.

“Now we’re back, now our peoples are strong and we are in a position not to be victimized at this point.”

“The young women,” she said, “… will be the leaders.”

“Toipurinah is a spirit, an image that can empower them,” Baca said. The majority of people at the first Baldwin Park demonstration and at the Garden Grove demonstration have been young Chicanas.

“The hope is to bring her spirit back to the site so she would be an inspiration to young women today, to show them they can lead. This monument is not a male monument. This is by and about and for these women.”

“We need to amplify the grandmother’s voice and the young women’s voice. Our young people are without a safe place and without a dream. The fundamentalist education they are receiving is stripping them of both safety and the ability to dream.

The Hopi Elders told me, “The grandmothers have to teach now,” Baca said.

Baca has not advocated a literal “reconquest” of the land. Like the framers of the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,” she sees the matter in cultural and spiritual terms, not in military terms, and not as an effort, she said, “to return the land to Mexico or some other sovereign power.”

She said, “That was not my intention with the monument. I was positing that the indigenous were returning and that the demographic changes were in a sense returning the governance perhaps, the presence on the land to the original peoples.”

The complex debate among the Chican@s on the “land question,” over the political, cultural and spiritual meaning of Aztlan, has carried on for decades now. The intact First Nations and those who follow them and their traditions have been consistent, on the other hand, in upholding their right to sovereignty.

The SOS supporters and other radical racist groups have a different, more unified take on the matter. With the election of a Chicano mayor in LA, these elements believe that the city is already in “foreign,” non-white, control. They believe LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will “take orders” directly from Mexico’s neo-liberal president, Vicente Fox.

Culturally, the issue is also simple from a white nationalist perspective. One SOS supporter wrote, “Whose land? Here's to white Californians - all of us - who brought the English language, culture and literature - in short civilization - to the lowlife ingrates that call themselves 'Indigenous' people.' Like the latter day children of Israel, we have made the desert bloom.”

But a blooming desert is an ecological nightmare. Like a dry ocean, it is the inside –out conception of a people seeing the world upside down. What has bloomed in fact is an endless stone village, a borderless metropolis that has consumed the Earth, and that has consumed the waters of the desert for a thousand miles around it. What has bloomed is a metropolis of cars, a way of life out of balance, a way that is choking the life breath from the Earth. It is one of the most imbalanced and ecologically destructive places on Earth.

The change is immense.

In Ancient L.A., Michael Jacob Rochlin points to the reality that the city’s current population centers owe their locations to Tongva villages. “For proximity to sources of forced labor, Missions and Pueblo were placed adjacent to Indigenous Villages. Ranchos reoccupied the desolated sites. Boomtowns replaced ranchos. Grids filled-in open space and melded with adjacent grids.” Now downtown sits near the site of Yangna, San Pedro at Tsavingna, Redondo at Engnovagna. Trails from village to village became roads and, finally, freeways.”

A reviewer from UCLA wrote, “A section about Suangna, the largest of the Gabrielino [sic] villages, is illustrated by images of its likely location today: an Ugly Duckling used-car lot, traffic beside an oil refinery, neo-Nazi graffiti on a storm drain, an empty field.”

The destruction of the land is also documented in Blake Gumprecht’s monograph, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth.

Twenty six Tongva villages lay near the Los Angeles River, which “meandered this way and that through a dense forest of willow and sycamore, elderberry and wild grape,” among “vast marshlands that were home to myriad waterfowl and small animals. Steelhead trout spawned in the river, and grizzly bear roamed its shores in search of food.” These areas were “a sometimes impenetrable jungle of marshes, thickets and dense woods.”

By the mid-1800s “the once tree-covered plain was now barren and desolate.” The forest had been decimated. The river had become a seasonal dry wash and “the once-ample stream had become a local joke.” Today “Nearly all of the water that now flows in the river is treated sewage, authorized industrial discharges, and street runoff.”

It had become, to turn the litany of the anti-migrant racists back on itself, a “cesspool.”

For the Tongva, Chican@ and other indigenous peoples, The most devastating oppression that has been visited upon us is the destruction and deprivation of our function as caretakers of land and life, and it is this, first and foremost, that we must seek once more.

In the words of Hopi Elder Martin Gashweseoma, “…Clearly these foreigners are not here to help, but to destroy everything the original people have left, and in doing so, destroy this world. The only hope for humanity lies in restoring true land title, which is inseparable from our function as caretakers of life."

Former American Indian Movement leader John Trudell reminds us, “All they know is how to act in a repressive, brutal way...Power...we are a natural part of the earth. We are an extension of the earth, we are not separate from it. We are a part of it. The earth is our mother. The earth is a spirit and we are an extension of that spirit. We are spirit. We are power. They want us to believe that we have to believe in them and depend upon them and we have to consume these consumer identities and these religious identities and these political identities and these racial identities. They want to separate us from our power. They want to separate us from who we are.”

The lesson is this.

The Earth does not belong to us.

We belong to Her, and are inseparable from Her, even in exile.

In the struggle for Baldwin Park, our spirits are returning to the Earth, like the spirit of Toipurinah, returning home.