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America Libre: A Chicano Turner Diaries

4 November, 2009

Some Mexicans and Mexican-Americans,” writes John Tiffany,
“want to see California, New Mexico and other parts of the United
States given to Mexico. They call it the ‘reconquista,’ Spanish for
‘reconquest,’ and they view the millions of Mexican illegal aliens
entering this country as their army of invaders to achieve that
takeover.” Tiffany points out that, as we’ve heard in recent news
reports, armed Mexican soldiers (in league with or impersonated by drug
traffickers, we are told by Mexico’s smirking, lying government, which
publishes cartoon tracts explaining to Mexican serfs how to sneak
across the border into the U.S.A.) have fired on American Border Patrol officers.
Illegal immigrants have terrorized American ranchers in border states
and the porous Mexican border is an ideal point of entry for Islamist
terrorists impersonating Hispanic illegals.

The organization US Border Control reports that, according to something called the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC, fully 30 percent of the nation’s two million prison inmates are illegal immigrants. Heather MacDonald, in her 2004 report in the City Journal,
wastes no time framing the problem. “Some of the most violent criminals
at large today are illegal aliens,” she writes. She goes on to report
that 95 percent
of all outstanding warrants for homicide (1,200 to 1,500 murders)
“target” illegal aliens. Up to two thirds of all fugitive felony
warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens. What’s worse, according to
MacDonold, is that the Calfiornia Department of Justice has known since
1995 that at least 60 percent of the vicious 18th Street Gang in southern California comprises illegal aliens.

Illegal
aliens in the United States are repeatedly, incessantly characterized
as innocent, hard-working people who just want to find a better life
for themselves and their families. The imagery of these invaders as
hapless would-be citizens fleeing poverty, willing to “do work that
Americans simply will not do,” is so pervasive that it constitutes a de facto
propaganda campaign. Just as “bums” and “winos” have become “the
homeless” (who are repeatedly mischaracterized as misunderstood and
disadvantaged people who are simply “down on their luck,” rather than
as the unpredictable, frequently diseased, often drug-addicted or
mentally unstable societal predators that they too often are), illegal
aliens have become “undocumented immigrants” in an attempt to equate
them with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free who walked
wide-eyed through the gates at Ellis Island. The fact that these latter-day “immigrants” crawled
past barbed wire fences, raped a few ranchers’ wives along the way, and
now accept under-the-table wages while dodging the beleaguered police
forces seeking them on murder charges, is dismissed as irrelevant; it
does not, after all, fit in with the imagery our popular media strive
so hard to create.

When I first picked up a copy of America Libre,
I thought that’s what I was seeing. I thought the book was an
attempt to create a sympathetic view of illegal aliens, equating them
to Hispanic American citizens and decrying the injustices of, well,
actually enforcing immigration laws. When I started reading
the book, however, I was shocked by its content.

Do
you remember the days following the Oklahoma City bombing? In countless
news pieces, we were told that bomber Timothy McVeigh — since rushed
to his execution with his cooperation — was inspired to commit the act
by the book The Turner Diaries.
This is a novel written by a white supremacist who fantasizes about a
future in which his white-power protagonists will finally hang their
other-racial enemies, while striking explosive blows against an
oppressive government secretly run by a Jewish conspiracy. The author
has written (crudely, in a style that borders on illiterate) another
book called “Hunter,” about a fellow whose hobbies include shooting
interracial couples for fun.

Disturbing as these badly
conceived novels were, they paled in comparison to another book, Serpent’s Walk, that I acquired from the same mail-order catalog that
carried the other two. At the time I was curious to know how a book
could drive a man to commit mass murder. The local bookstores would not
deal with the publisher in question, so I went the mail order route,
not realizing that what I was buying was neo-Nazi filth. When I finally
pushed myself to read Serpent’s Walk, having more than had my fill of
bizarre racial conspiracy theories, I was horrified in a new way: The book was well written.

Featuring a complex narrative
and a dynamic protagonist who shows convincing character development
over the book’s plot arc, Serpent’s Walk was clearly written by
someone with genuine literary talent. That such a person could be taken
in by theories of white supremacist hatred was at least as worrisome as
the possibility that such a person might simply be using these
malevolent ideas and ideals as a way of gaining power, cynically and
manipulatively, over racist true believers.

I did this research in the
months following the Oklahoma City bombing. In the intervening years I
forgot most of it, gratefully. When you immerse yourself in racist hate
literature, it creates a sensation akin to dipping your head in a
bucket of garbage. It is cloying, smothering, fetid, and unpleasant;
you can’t wait to remove yourself from it. All of this came flooding
back to me when I happened across a copy of America Libre
by “Raul
Ramos y Sanchez.” Is Ramos a true believer, or the sort of
person who hopes to manipulate racist sentiment for personal gain? Does
it matter?

On his website,
the author claims he wrote the book “as a wake up call to the dangers
of extremism—on both sides of this explosive issue. Illegal
immigration is a hotly debated topic. Yet it is only the tip of the
iceberg.” The first portion of this statement is a blatant lie. America Libre is nothing less than a Chicano nationalist Turner
Diaries, a racist, hate-filled screed that gins up anti-Anglo
resentment by painting a fantasy landscape in which all Americans with
Hispanic surnames or Hispanic spouses are rounded up and put in camps.
Ramos’ heroes fight back by preparing for and then executing the first
stages of a Hispanic revolution, ultimately hoping to create a
UN-recognized “Hispanic Republic of North America.”

The book is more or less
competently written, though the author makes many amateurish mistakes
as he rushes through his exposition with too much omniscient narration.
One rule of good writing is to show
the reader rather than tell the reader. Ramos ignores this rule from
the outset, as he has a lot of work to do. Specifically, his book is
concerned primarily with depicting, transparently, all non-Hispancis as
racist, ignorant, incompetent fools driven only by hatred and given
only to brutality. There are no complex characters; there are only
Hispanics to varying degrees of purity (ranging from a traitorous gang
member to Mano, the novel’s protagonist) and Anglos exhibiting varying
degrees of racism. To the extent that military veteran and bodybuilder
Mano at first loves America, then becomes only too eager to commit
cold-blooded murder in seeking revenge for the injustices perpetrated
against Hispanics, his character could be considered dynamic. He is,
however, only a convenient waterboy carrying the author’s racist hate.

The Anglos against whom Mano
pits himself with only token reluctance are, almost to a man, racist
monsters who spit words like “Beaner,” “Greaser,” and “Pancho” with
every breath. When they’re not attempting to rape Hispanic women or
killing Mano’s children with their incompetence (one of the protagonist’s
children is run down by a military vehicle by accident, while another
dies of lack of medical care in one of the resettlement camps into
which Hispancis are herded), they’re nervously firing into crowds of
understandably angry protesters because these weekend warriors are all ill-trained glory
hounds suffering delusions of action-hero greatness.

Two things disturb me about America Libre. The first is that this book won an International Latino Book Award
when it is clearly no more than a mediocre work from a writing standpoint. (It was also one of USA Today‘s picks for “Summer Reads” and was similarly lauded in Latina magazine.) The second is that Ramos’ depiction of evil,
Hispanic-hating Anglos, only too eager to deny Social Security benefits
to illegal aliens (when they’re not cruelly deporting them outright),
is obviously what he truly thinks of non-Hispanics. “America Libre”
exists for only one reason: to foment hatred and revolutionary
sentiment among a Hispanic population that has already become volatile
in the Southwest United States.

The most damning evidence of
this fact is that the author bends over
backwards, metaphorically, to excuse the actions of one of his primary
characters — a wealthy instigator named “Jo” who pays a gang member
to fire on police officers in order to stir up trouble in the Hispanic
ghetto. Believing this will help encourage the inevitable Hispanic
revolution (which Jo in turns believes is necessary to correct the many
injustices wrought by the evil Anglos and “rednecks” — oh, does Ramos
love to throw around the word “redneck”), she is supposedly shocked
when her paid criminals go “too far” and kill the police officers on
whom they fire. This is supposed to be one of Jo’s “greatest regrets,”
and she is clearly absolved for this crime in the minds of Ramos’
surviving protagonists. By the novel’s end, Mano is fully committed to
the revolution and to “justicia.” He no longer considers himself an
American at all, and neither does his long-suffering wife. He
vows to continue fighting for
these goals. Yet were it not for Jo’s calculated
rabble-rousing, two of Mano’s three children would still be alive.

Or would they?
Obviously, in Ramos’ mind, the confining of Hispanics in
concentration camps is inevitable in an Anglo-dominated, racist
America. The crimes and violence perpetrated by illegal
aliens and by violent Hispanic gangs like MS-13 are, well, understandable,
because, gosh, America is full of redneck racists who won’t give
Hispanics a fair shake. Why, imagine the injustice, the
institutionalized racism, of refusing to let illegal aliens — excuse
me, undocumented immigrants
— live off the earnings of American citizens who pay their
taxes! No wonder those poor people started murdering
politicians they didn’t like. After all, in Ramos’ vision of
the future, the Supreme Court is packed with “hardline conservatives,”
so obviously you can’t expect to vote such tyrants out of office.
Better to revolt and start shooting people — at least in
Ramos’ mind.

There is an obvious parallel to be made between America Libre and right-wing liberty fiction like Unintended Consequences and Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
These latter two books, to use just one pair from among many
examples, are also fantasies — fiction in which oppressed people
overthrow (or at least resist) their oppressors. The fundamental difference between America Libre and these right-wing books is, however, that libertarian fiction is
rooted in a yearning for a free people to return to the ideals our
Founding Fathers set forth in the Constitution of the United States.
In this they are an expression of Enlightenment ideals of
liberty and equality. America Libre is, by contrast, a racist daydream rooted not in a desire for justice, but in a bloodthirsty yearning for revenge. In Ramos’ book, it is not so important that Hispanic people fight for freedom; what is important to Ramos is that those redneck Anglos get what’s coming to them. This is a fundamental difference in tenor, tone, and intent.

Our children are growing up in
a nation on whose streets they may not be able to communicate as adults
unless they learn Spanish. Given this tide and the
implicatinos of the illegal alien invasion threatening to swamp social
services, education, and law enforcement alike, to pen a monstrous
diatribe like America Libre is not merely offensive. It is
tantamount to a declaration of war, comparable to soliciting violence
and murder for the sake of a never-attainable “justice” that can be
wrought only when Hispanics have hanged their imagined enemies from the
nation’s lampposts. That is the terrifying message of America
Libre. This is not a “wake-up call” about widespread extremism; this is a La Raza
fantasy of the “reconquista.”

A third thing that worries me
about this little red book, this Maoist declaration of Chicano
nationalist hatred for and resentment toward non-Hispanics, is that nobody is talking about it. Before my own review at Amazon.com, there
was not a single critical reading of the novel. Certainly
nobody thought to question the racist tone or seditious implications of
a book that encourages violent uprising against non-Hispanics.
In this, America Libre certainly is a “wake-up” call about
one man’s extremism.

That man calls himself Raul
Ramos y Sanchez, and he should be ashamed of himself. >>