Movement Embraces Indigenous Past

Jesus Rivera was happy to oblige when the U.S. government requested that he be specific about his race and ethnicity in the 2000 census.

Rivera marked “Mexican” for his ethnicity and “Native American” for race in his questionnaire. But he prefers another option: shedding what he calls his “European slave identity” altogether and instead embracing his indigenous past.

He is part of a small movement of people, in Los Angeles and nationally, who trace their heritage to the ancient civilizations that inhabited Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands before the Spanish conquest. They do not like either “Latino” or “Hispanic,” the two overarching terms used to describe people with Latin American roots.

Their little-known movement was galvanized in part by the increased ethnic and racial options that were available in the 2000 census.

In keeping with his awakened sense of identity, the 23-year-old Rivera, who lives in El Sereno, is pursuing a legal name change to Cuahtli or Yaqui, two terms of indigenous origin.

Followers of the movement say they don’t identify with light-skinned Latinos such as Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera or Antonio Banderas--who is Spanish but is often referred to as Latino.

“This whole Latino-Hispanic agenda destroys our identity as indigenous people. It’s like the Spanish empire lives again,” says Olin Tezcatlipoca. He heads the Mexica Movement in Boyle Heights, which is one of several indigenous organizations gaining new followers.

The movement is made up primarily of brown- or black-skinned people from Mexican, Central American and Caribbean communities resentful of a society that they say has historically made them feel ashamed of their indigenous appearance.

More of them around the nation are joining a once-dormant effort to convince people with roots in Latin America to fully embrace their Indian heritage:

* In Minnesota, college students recently held a hunger strike until the “Hispanic” classification was deleted from university forms.

* In New Jersey, a group of Puerto Rican Taino Indians runs a regional Inter-Tribal Council that promotes indigenous culture and presses political causes locally and back home.

* In Northern California, activist Henry Villalobos has for years collected signatures on a petition calling for the federal and state governments to allow Mexican Americans the same benefits afforded to Native Americans.

“We’re Native Americans too,” Villalobos said of the somewhat controversial effort. “We should embrace our entire identity, not just the European Latino side.

Their historical experience is indeed similar to that of American Indians: Native people forced to forsake their names, languages, customs and religion for those of invaders.

Starting in Mexico with a Spanish colonial edict in 1577 that demanded that indigenous Mexicans abandon their heritage and instead embrace Catholicism, there has been “massive psychological damage done to our people over the centuries,” Tezcatlipoca argued.

His organization, pronounced Meh-SHEE-kah--after the Nahuatl word used to identify indigenous people from Mexico--educates people locally about Mexico’s indigenous culture. Its Web site is https://www.mexica-movement.org.

An office sign states its position bluntly: “Mexican!” it reads. “Not Hispanic. Not Latino. Stop the cultural castration.”

Like Tezcatlipoca, whose name means “Movement for Change” in Nahuatl, the group’s mostly young adult followers often change their names legally from Spanish to indigenous forms. This practice is akin to African Americans switching to African or Muslim names.

Itzcoatl Xochipilli, 25, who named himself after an early Aztec king, said, “Those [Spanish] names have been forced on us in the same way black people got their English names from their masters.”

A substitute teacher for the Los Angeles and Montebello school districts, Xochipilli said his new name--legally adopted in October--often generates a reaction from curious students or skeptical colleagues.

“Whenever I start a class by writing my name on the board, the students usually ask how you pronounce it, and that sometimes starts a conversation about our history,” he said.

“The people who are most opposed to it are the other Mexican teachers,” Xochipilli said. “Most of them teach the kids the same [junk] that we learned in junior high and high school. We maintain the status quo and don’t teach these kids about themselves.”

In Mexico about 60% of the population is mestizo--a mix of Indian and Spanish--and about 30% is predominantly Indian.

Indigenous languages such as Mayan and Nahuatl are still spoken in parts of Mexico, as well as by some Mexicans and Central Americans living in the United States. In Los Angeles, Oaxacan Zapotecs and Guatemalan Mayas who speak neither English nor Spanish number in the thousands, community leaders say.

“The idea that people must give up these aspects of culture in order to be American, to blend into the larger country, is being seen as not necessary,” said Jose Barreiro, a Cuban Indian and editor of the Akwe:kon Press, an indigenous journal published by Cornell University in New York state.

“People can retain their cultural identity and yet be part of American life,” he said.

In contrast to Mexica and other indigenous groups, some people feel just as strongly about keeping “Latino” as an ethnic term of inclusion for people of Latin American descent.

Alan Clayton of the Los Angeles City/County Latino Redistricting Coalition opposes identifying people of Latin American descent as anything but Latino.

“It hurts the community politically,” he said. “Then you’ll have people who say you shouldn’t count as Latino because you marked yourself as something different on the census.”

Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New America Foundation, argues that “inclusiveness is essential to the Mexican identity.

“To turn now against a [Spanish] conquest that was evil is to negate the birth of an entire people, however painful,” he said. Mixed blood, or mestizaje, “is what being Mexican is all about.”

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Associated Press contributed to this story.