El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Spiritual Plan of Aztlan) is a document adopted in March 1969 by the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference at a convention held at Denver, Colorado. It is considered a foundational document by the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA). The full text of the document is available online.
MEChA is one of many movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, like the Black Power movement of the United States or the Black_Consciousness_Movement of South Africa, in which people of colour in white-ruled societies adopted the ideas of nationalist liberation movements that had successfully overthrown colonial regimes in Africa and Asia. Many of these movements owed a direct or indirect intellectual debt to Franz Fanon, who wrote about the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized, and understood the process of achieving self-determination not only as a process of gaining political power but of attaining pride in one's national and cultural identity.
In an area of the United States that had been taken over from Mexico by the United States in the Mexican American War, where Chicano history was neglected in education, and where discrimination against and segregation of Chicanos was common, this kind of analysis had special resonance for young Chicano activists. The creation of the idea of Aztlán was an important part of this movement, and El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was an extension of that idea.
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán contains several controversial statements which have led many conservative commentators to criticize MEChA as a racist and separatist organization. These criticisms are similar to those made against many similar cultural and political movements in the United States and around the world. Some of those who lodge these criticisms appear to be motivated by a general anti-Mexican agenda (as in the virulently anti-Mexican American Patrol [1]), while others may support Hispanic civil rights more narrowly within the framework of US citizenship and its market-based economic system, but oppose nationalist rhetoric they view as separatist, radical or anti-capitalist. Statements that have generated controversy include:
- Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.
- Literally translated, this means, "By the Race, everything; outside of the Race, nothing." Many people within MEChA understand this as a sentiment similar to "United we stand, divided we fall".[2] Further, the term La Raza, while translating directly to "race", refers to a group of people who are of mestizo origin and often reject narrow definitions of race. But commentators who have translated the slogan literally have understood the Spanish word por as "for" rather than "by" and have translated "La Raza" literally, thus interpreting it to mean, "Everything for the Race, nothing for [those who are] outside of the Race".
- [L]ove for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner "gabacho" who exploits our riches and destroys our culture ... [E]conomic control of our lives and our communities can only come about by driving the exploiter out of our communities, our pueblos, and our lands and by controlling and developing our own talents, sweat, and resources.
- Some commentators have interpreted this as a call to summarily label non-Chicanos "exploiters" and to expel them out of the Chicano community. Another view is that this is a call to recognize exploiters when and where they exist, and to actively work towards independence and self-reliance rather than expecting problems to be solved from the outside.
- Education must be relative to our people, i.e., history, culture, bilingual education, contributions, etc.
- Some view this statement as an unpatriotic rejection of the common history and values shared with the nations of the United States and Mexico. To others, this was a reasonable response to an educational system which tended to ignore Chicano history. A parallel might be in the famous example of people in Francophone countries who uniformly learned history with a book that began "Our ancestors, the Gauls" [3]--the kind of problem that especially interested and infuriated Fanon and other anti-colonialists.
- Self-defense of the community must rely on the combined strength of the people ... For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts.
- Since it is not specified from what entity defense is required, some read this as self-defense from the police and legal authorities, and the justification of juvenile deliquency as a "revolutionary act". It could also be read as a call to defend the civil rights and economic livelihood of Chicanos on the legal battlefield, and the abandonment of juvenile delinquency in favor of progressive political action.
- A nation autonomous and free - culturally, socially, economically, and politically- will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of our goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice (reward and punishment), and the profit of our sweat.
- This appears to be a call of outright secession. But other parts of El Plan seem to advocate working within the system, such as "the creation of an independent local, regional, and national political party." In 1999, MEChA adopted a document entitled The Philosophy of MEChA, which affirmed that "all people are potential Chicanas and Chicanos", and that "Chicano identity is not a nationality but a philosophy".[4] "Nation", as understood within MEChA, refers to Chicanos as a politically empowered ethnic group -- but not necessarily one with a sovereign territory and government, a model similar to Canada's First Nations.
On the one hand, the document's ambitious vision of a Chicano nation embodies a bold move from simply complaining about discrimination and towards demanding self-determination--a positive and independent, rather than negative and dependent, political and cultural agenda. On the other hand, its high-minded rhetoric leaves many aspects open to interpretation by allies as well as by enemies. And like many forms of nationalism, while it gains by building in-group strength, it may also lose by anger from those it excludes.