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Subject: The Messengers:Latino Liberation St
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Subject: The Messengers:Latino Liberation Struggle
From: nyxfer!mim (Maoist Intl'ist Mvmnt)


Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit

from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)

MIM Notes, Issue 70: November, 1992


                         The Messengers:
                    Latino Liberation Struggle

                           by a comrade

In MIM Notes 67, MIM published an interview with CIA (Chicano in
Action), a leader of the rap group Subversive Element. CIA is also
a leader of the Messengers, a growing revolutionary movement of
predominantly young Latinos.  In this issue MIM follows up with a
greater emphasis on the Messengers themselves. A comrade
interviewed Drill Sergeant, and CIA again, in Holyoke, Mass.
Excerpts follow.

                          DRILL SERGEANT

MIM: What is the message of the Messengers?

Drill Sergeant: From my point of view, I think the message of the
Messengers is to empower the Latino people in a positive way, to
educate them more about Puerto Rican history and their culture, so
that they can become more attuned with what's going on in this
society, and what actually is happening in their environment
that's causing all the problems...

When I come I speak to them about Pedro Albizu Campos, the Puerto
Rican revolutionary leader that made an impact on the island of
Puerto Rico. I talk to them about the Taino Arawaks that were
extinct due to Spanish conquest in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean
region, as well as Central and South America. So that's my job
here, so they feel good about themselves as a people.

MIM: How would you describe the political state of the people, in
terms of who's ready for a revolutionary movement?

DS: Revolution has to come from within. It can't come from
without. If we're not ready as a people to come together, there's
no way we're going to do a revolution. Because a lot of people
think of revolution in a negative kind of way. I look at a
revolution from an intellectual point of view. A revolution has to
be brought in when people think the same way, they all share the
same common interests and concerns. Not having people come
together with different interests and different agendas. People
have to be together and think about one thing: Latino empowerment.
Because right now the majority of Messengers are Latinos, but
we're hoping that other people -- Afro-Americans, Native
Americans, Asian Americans, maybe some white people -- come and
join us so that we could be more united and understand each
other's point of view.

We could do a revolution if we understand the concepts of Mao, of
Guevara, of Castro, and other people who have made an impact on
this society. We don't want, y'know -- revolution is not all about
violence. Revolution is about making a change, of making people
aware of the things that are imposing on us, like people looking
on us in a negative type of way, of stereotyping us as gangs.
We're not a gang, we're a classroom. We're here to teach people,
get them out of the streets.

MIM: MIM has described America as being a dominant nation with
internal nations or colonies inside it, and that's one of the best
things for applying Maoism in terms of national liberation
struggle. Is national liberation the way you look at this?

DS: Yes, I think liberation, within the Messengers, within the
Latino people, from the Pioneer Valley, from around the United
States and hopefully around the world, is the way to go. Because
we have to liberate ourselves from the environment. This negative
-- it feels like the type of environment that the majority of
Latinos live in, from the lower income class, is that they're
trapped, they can't get out of the dependency mode.

We can't live like that anymore. We have to structure our lives
and look beyond. Because I believe that if we all educate
ourselves -- because the majority of Messengers are between 14 to
19, and there's some older ones too, but most of them have dropped
out of high school -- so we tell them to educate themselves and
that's one way, that's a step toward freedom, toward liberation.

MIM: Within the U.S. MIM has talked about the Black Panther Party
as being the last revolutionary vanguard movement that was a
movement in Amerika. You talked before about Albizo Campos and the
Puerto Rican struggle. What other kind of inspiration or history
do you look at for motivation?

DS: I also go into the Chinese Revolution -- Mao Zedong -- and
also the Bolshevik Revolution: little revolutions that happened in
the 20th century that have made a change. But we have to focus on
our own struggle, the Latino revolution, first. We look at those
as models, to look up to, to get information from, to get
knowledge from, but we have to come with our own concept of what
we perceive as a revolution.


                     CHICANO IN ACTION (CIA)

MIM: How do you see the role of education and ideology in the
political development of the people?

CIA: I see that we take what we have, which is a common knowledge,
that surpasses what most people have in this community by virtue
of the fact that that knowledge is not easily accessible to them.
Our purpose here is to be the tool for them to gain that
knowledge. I mean, if the city is working against the community,
to deny them that information, then it is our duty, for our
community, to inform them.

MIM: So one of the things going on here is miseducation or
counter-education in the public schools. That's a lot to go up
against. People spend a lot of years in school.

CIA: Oh yeah. Well we witness a lot of ignorant things here. We
have students even in the Messengers who want to learn, they
realize that the system as far as education goes wasn't built to
be attractive to Latin Americans students, and yet we encourage
them to learn it anyway, to get through it, because it wasn't
meant for them to get through. And yet, even though they have the
desire, they have come up against obstacles like being denied the
right to sit down in a classroom as a result of not paying a $20
fine for a book. ... The effort to keep students in is not as much
of a concern to them as to keep them out.

MIM: There's cross purposes where the people want education and
the state wants social control...

CIA: I think they're the same thing. I think that in this society
the idea of education is social control. How could it not be? I
mean, if it doesn't represent this community, the Latin American
community, if it doesn't represent them, it represents something
else, then they are thereby controlling what they learn, and
controlling how they react in society. If they don't swallow it,
then they're going to react in society as something ... they're
going to act lost. When you act lost, and when you act like you're
dying and you're throat is cut, you're going to run around in a
confused state, having mindless actions about you. You're going to
do some mindless things. And that's exactly a control there
itself. They let you run around mindless, and at the same time
they got the control over what you look like in society. So I
think it's the same thing.

MIM: I want to talk about this gang thing a little bit, because
drug trafficking and a lot of other crimes against the people do
go on; at the same time we've taken the position that those are
disputes among the people for the people to work out, and that the
state coming in and condemning gangs, the mainstream media coming
in and condemning gangs, will create more of a negative effect
than a positive effect in terms of combatting any actual problems.
Does that make sense?

CIA: That makes perfect sense. [laughs] Think about it. I know for
a fact that in this particular city $500,000 was asked for by the
police department in order to increase enforcement, an additional
$3,000 to make sure that they had foot officers in the schools,
and $5,000 for a DARE ["anti-drug"] program. Now, that might seem
all good and well to help out the efforts of the police force to
"police" -- and that's a strong word -- the community, but the
community isn't actually seeing any of that money. The community
could use some of that money for reparations to its own buildings,
to its streets, to its school system for books.

MIM: The majority of the white public and the white media does not
make a distinction between "good" oppressed people organizing, and
"bad" oppressed people organizing. Oppressed people organizing for
themselves, they have a label for it now, they call it gangs, they
assume it's about drugs and terrorism...

CIA: Exactly.

MIM: We're dealing with that now with the revolution in Peru. The
story is that they're really just drug traffickers. But if you go
back and look at history, you look at China, the Russian
Revolution, whatever, and look at what the Amerikan press
said -- they said they were terrorists every time.

CIA. Exactly. I mean, I'm pretty clear-headed when it comes to
things like that. I know the difference between the bandit that
Poncho Villa was supposedly and the revolutionary that he actually
was [Pancho Villa was a Mexican revolutionary who led an armed
uprising from 1913 till he was killed in 1923.]...

And in terms of what we're doing out here, they don't want us to
be united. OK, once we're united as a community -- I'm speaking on
Latin America, I'm not just speaking for Puerto Ricans alone or
Mexicans alone, or Colombians alone, etc. -- you talk about
pan-Latin Americanism where you're not just dealing with 16.3
million Mexicans in the United States, and then you start dealing
with a community of close to 100 million, the government turns
around and sees you making a unified and collaborative effort to
make changes here, that's when you become a subversive, that's
when you become an operation to undermine a government, and that's
when you can hear knees shaking in the White House.

When we speak about the white man, we don't speak about the white
man in terms of the person that you see every day. I mean, why
would I want to go and attack a puppet, when I can get the
puppeteer? There's a difference...

The first issue is to throw the cold water on the face of your
people, wake them up, and point them in the right direction. Once
you get them going in the right direction, and not to the side --
oh, the police force is wrong; oh, education is wrong; oh, health
care is wrong, they're all problems within those institutions.
But, they're just on the string of the puppeteer. And if you keep
going headlong, then you're going to see a battle. Too many people
get sidetracked about the results of the efforts of the persons in
charge of the system.

MIM: You get caught up fighting symptoms instead of fighting the
problem.

CIA: Exactly.

                              -30-

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