The following is from Freedom Road Socialist Organization:
In 2006 there was a huge upsurge in the Immigrant Rights movement, peaking on May 1, when some two million people marched across the country. At the core of this movement is the struggle of Chicanos, Mexicanos, and Central Americans for self-determination and full equality. This paper presents the views of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) on the current immigrant rights movement and the struggle for Chicano, Mexicano, and Central American liberation.
1. Immigration, Imperialism, and National Oppression
In our “Statement on National Oppression, National Liberation and Socialist Revolution” (FRSO, 2004), we say that “It is imperialism that still dominates the countries of the Third World, forcing more immigrants to come to the United States to escape poverty and repression.” This is certainly true for immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has opened up the Mexican economy to even greater penetration by U.S. multinational corporation and agribusiness, driving millions from their hometowns to seek work in the cities and the United States. U.S.-backed governments and counter-revolutionaries in Central American have violently attacked popular movements and governments, leaving economic devastation in their wake, driving hundreds of thousands more to the United States.
Once here in the United States, immigrants from Mexico and Central America face intense national oppression, rooted in the U.S. conquest and seizure of Northern Mexico. Mexicans in the this territory, which today make up the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, were dispossessed of their lands, their language suppressed in schools, and the culture denigrated, and forced to work in the mines, fields, and homes of the capitalists. Thus the Mexican people of the southwest were forged into an oppressed nation, the Chicano Nation, with a common territory, economy, and culture and the right to self-determination, up to and including secession from the United States.
Generations of immigrants from Mexico who have settled in the southwest have been assimilated into the Chicano Nation. Mexican immigrants and their children are changing the demographics of the southwest, as more and more majority Chicano counties emerge, strengthening the demand for self-determination. This so-called “Browning of America” is striking fear into the racist monopoly capitalist class that rules America, but is welcomed by revolutionaries and communists who seek to weaken and ultimately overthrow this class.
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