Daniel Weintraub, the widely respected Sacramento Bee columnist, posts an unusually hard-hitting dump on Cruz Bustamante’s ethnic politics on his “California Insider” blog.
Let us hope that Cruz Bustamante’s belated renunciation of ethnic nationalism ends the furor over his long-ago membership in the MEChA organization for Mexican-American college students. While Bustamante at first tried to portray MEChA as a harmless social organization, it’s clear from the organization’s founding principles that ethnic nationalism was and is a major part of its identity….
And while people can debate forever whether MEChA and its more virulent cousins do or do not advocate ethnic separatism, it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity. Ethnic preferences gave a handful of favored Latinos a leg up into the universities while our public high schools were allowed to graduate (or see drop out) hundreds of thousands of functionally illiterate Latino kids. Bilingual education doomed young Latino children to second-class status by preventing them from learning English. But ballot measures to rein in both practices were opposed by every elected Latino Democrat in state office, including Bustamante, and not just opposed but condemned as somehow hateful….
I don’t know of anyone who seriously believes that Bustamante supports, or ever supported, the creation of a separate Chicano nation on land to be taken back from the United States. But he does support ethnic-identity politics in the here and now, in a way that is insidious, in a fashion that works its way into everything he stands for and represents as a politician….
What he said.
