Remaking America: the flood of legal and illegal immigrants who are not assimilating, and who are being increasingly radicalized, is changing our culture and country.

On Tuesday, May 17, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles. When he takes office in July, he will become the first person of Mexican descent to do so in more than 130 years. He will not be the last. Although there were several factors figuring in his victory, the changing demographics of the City of the Angels stand out prominently. Los Angeles is now 48 percent Hispanic (the term favored by the U.S. Census) and only 31 percent white (now generally used to mean non-Hispanic whites)--and the Hispanic percentage is increasing while the white is shrinking.

Unlike James Hahn, the incumbent mayor, Villaraigosa had no family legacy to rely on. His father crossed the border from Mexico in 1950 and abandoned the family when Villaraigosa was five. What Villaraigosa has going for him is loads of energy and political savvy and La Familia de La Raza--The Family of The Race. The Mexican population of Los Angeles, and more generally the Hispanic population, is growing by leaps and bounds. Moreover, much of that population is not assimilating. Whites aren't encouraged to cast votes simply on the basis of their ethnic identification, but Mexicans are. Exit polls suggest that Villaraigosa won 85 percent or more of the Hispanic vote. While the voter turnout citywide barely exceeded 30 percent, on the virtually all-Hispanic Eastside, where Villaraigosa was reared, it reached nearly 40 percent.

Politics Based on Race

Antonio Villaraigosa was known as Tony Villar when he was growing up on the Eastside. (He combined his surname with that of his wife, Corina Raigosa, to create the last name he uses now.) As Villar, he attended East Los Angeles Junior College and then transferred to UCLA in 1972 under an "affirmative action" program. By the time he left UCLA in 1975, he had not graduated but had risen to a position of leadership in the campus chapter of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, better known by its acronym, MEChA. The group was organized in 1969 by Mexican-American college students, for the most part, who preferred to call themselves Chicanos and Chicanas. MEChA proudly proclaims that its mission is to reclaim California and the rest of the Southwest--an area MEChA calls Aztlan--from "the foreigner 'gabacho' who exploits our riches and destroys our culture.... [W]e declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of tree pueblos, we are Aztlan."

MEChA's motto makes it clear that its movement is all about race: Por La Raz, a todo; Fuera de La Raza nada--"For the Race Everything; Outside the Race Nothing." l wonder how long campus chapters of a white group with similar aspirations and a similar motto would be tolerated. Not only has MEChA been tolerated, it has flourished--with the help of academic radicals and tax-exempt foundations. MEChA now controls "Chicano Studies" centers and departments on many campuses in California and elsewhere.

At UCLA, Tony Villar was one of the MEChA leaders who led the takeover of the Chicano Studies Center. The media does its best to ignore Villaraigosa's membership in MEChA during his years at UCLA, while a white politician with similar baggage would be forced to make repeated confessions of his youthful errors, repudiate his membership in a white racist organization, and denounce the group continually. But in Villaraigosa's case, he has not denounced the racist group to which he belonged, as well he should have. When asked if he still supported MEChA's mission and goals during an interview on a talk-radio station in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa refused to answer.

In Newsweek's May 30 puff-piece article on Villaraigosa, there is no mention of his membership and activism in MEChA. "He's proud of his Mexican heritage," reports Newsweek, "but, he says, 'I don't wear it on my sleeve.'" His radical activism with MEChA would suggest otherwise. "He was one of the guys that would go out there and start the slogans because he was the loudest one," said Arturo Chavez, a fellow MEChAista. "He was one of the people who would make sure people were riled up." According to reports in the Daily Bruin in 1974, Villar was the leader of a campaign to force the UCLA Chicano Studies Center to include what the Bruin Alumni Association has called "a communist Chicano community group" in an advisory role. Villar was also a leader of a protest at the Chicano Studies Center that resulted in vandalism. "Leaders of the demonstration deny any knowledge of the incident," reported the Daily Bruin.

Villar's target was the center's director, Rudolfo Alvarez, whom Villar and fellow MEChAista, Raoul Garcia, thought too moderate. "Both Villar and Garcia," said the Daily Bruin, "attacked the Alvarez-directed CSC [Chicano Studies Center] for working only with government-sponsored drug programs 'instead of community organizations like the National Committee to Free Los Tres.'" Community organization was certainly a euphemistic way to describe the Free Los Tres committee, which had been formed by MEChAistas to defend three members of the radical Chicano organization Casa Carnalismo who were convicted of assaulting a federal narcotics officer. Moreover, a Marxist-Leninist faction within the Free Los Tres committee wanted to make its parent organization. Casa Carnalismo, the "revolutionary vanguard" for the "liberation of the Mexican people."

The protests by Villar and his fellow MEChA radicals succeeded in forcing the resignation of Rudolfo Alvarez as director of the Chicano Studies Center. I remember it clearly as just one more capitulation by UCLA to campus radicals. At the time I was taking my exams for the Ph.D. at UCLA and was regularly amazed at how easily a small number of militants could intimidate the administration--as long as those militants could claim some kind of victim status.

There were more than a thousand students with Spanish surnames on campus at the time--most of whom were Mexican-American--and probably not more than a couple hundred of them could be termed radicals or MEChAistas. Nonetheless, the MEChAistas got their way. There were also quiet, conservative Mexican-Americans busy working and studying who had no representation at all. Whenever one of them dared speak, he was shouted down, threatened, and called "Uncle Tomas."

Over the years Villaraigosa has returned to UCLA, first to finish his degree and then to give speeches. He eventually enrolled at People's College of Law. Located in Los Angeles, the school is not accredited by either the American Bar Association or by the State Bar of California. People's College of Law describes itself as a nonprofit, public interest law school "created to address and balance inequities in our law and society" and "to advocate people before property." Moreover, the school is dedicated to fighting for "tenants' rights" and against "discrimination, economic and political oppression." People's College of Law says it "is looking for students from groups who have been historically denied access to legal training and representation, such as working people, women, and minorities." Neither a college degree nor the LSAT is required for admission.

Although Villaraigosa was awarded a juris doctor degree from People's College of Law, he failed to pass the bar exam--four times. No matter. He became a union organizer and then, in 1994, won election to the California State Assembly. With the support of the Hispanic caucus, he became speaker of the assembly in 1998. He left the legislature and lost his bid for mayor in 2001, but then was elected to the city council from a mostly Hispanic district, immediately to the north and east of downtown Los Angeles. Now the UCLA MEChA radical will become mayor of the city. Does he still want revenge for, in the words of MEChA, "the brutal 'gringo' invasion" of California (though his Mexican father did not come to California until 1950, a hundred years after it was admitted to the Union)? Does he still want "to liberate Aztlan" because "Aztlan belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture"?

Line in the Sand

If he still feels that way, he would be no different from millions of illegal aliens who have jumped the border during the last three decades. Thanks to the relentless efforts of groups like MEChA and the official propaganda of the Mexican government, countless Mexicans have been indoctrinated in the ideological myths of La Reconquista. A Zogby International poll, conducted in Mexico during 2002, found that 58 percent of Mexicans claimed that "the territory of the U.S. Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico" and 57 percent thought that they "should have the right to enter the United States without U.S. permission." It would seem that MEChA and Antonio Villaraigosa do not hold minority views. On the contrary, among La Familia de La Raza, they are mainstream.

Few people seem to understand that the Southwest that Mexico lost in the Mexican War was Mexican for only 24 years, from the time Spanish governors left in 1822 to the arrival of American forces in 1846. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made American possession formal in 1848. Thus, the Southwest was Mexican for 24 or 26 years and has been American for 157 or 159 years, depending on whether one calculates from American occupation or internationally recognized annexation. (See the sidebar below.)

Although California was the least Mexican region of the Southwest--Californians delighted in running Mexican governors and other Mexican officials out of California and installing a local rebel in office during the brief period of Mexican rule--a monument to the fantasy of reconquest has been built on public land and with taxpayers' dollars in California. At a Metrolink station in Baldwin Park, 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, Danza Indigenas, resembling an arch of an old Spanish mission, was erected in 1993 with several inscriptions that warm the hearts of Mexican MEChAistas. States one:

   This land was Mexican once,
   was Indian always
   and is,
   And will be again.

Few outside the more than 80 percent Hispanic town of Baldwin Park took notice of the arch, let alone its inscriptions. When the monument was brought to the attention of Joseph Turner, however, he took action.

Turner decided to organize a small protest at the monument to bring it to the attention of Southern Californians. This was not his first attempt at raising American awareness. He was one of those instrumental in getting Spanish-language television station KRCA to change a billboard advertising campaign promoting the station's nightly newscast. The ad, run on billboards in Hispanic areas throughout southern California, depicted two Latino newscasters with the Los Angeles skyline behind them and the block lettering "Los Angeles, CA" with the CA crossed out and "Mexico" added in bright red. Radio station KFI, led by talk-show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, who dominate the afternoon airwaves, responded by putting up a billboard saying, "Just to clarify, you are here" followed by an arrow pointing to "Los Angeles, CA USA."

Turner contacted the Baldwin City Police Department and arranged for parking and a site near the monument where his group "Save Our State" (SOS) could gather and not disrupt traffic or the commuter train. At noon on Saturday, May 14, Turner and some 40 members of his group arrived with placards and American flags. They were hardly a threatening force--simply men and women, young, middle-aged, and old, mostly white but also brown and black, unarmed, and dressed casually. They quickly learned that a rally of MEChAistas had been in progress for more than an hour before they arrived. Some 400 people had gathered to see Azteca dancers and hear Baldwin Park Mayor Manuel Lozano tell them that the monument would stand as long as he was mayor, and to hear Judy Francisca Baca, the artist who was paid with public funds to create the monument, say, "The quotes tell how the people felt. I listened to the people and I was a vehicle for their voices to be heard."

Of course, that's just the problem. That is, evidently, how so many of her people do feel. It is ironic, also, that they celebrate the Aztecs, a brutal, militaristic tribe that arrived in central Mexico only four or five generations before Cortez. They ruled central Mexico with an iron fist, demanding that subject peoples deliver thousands of children to them to be sacrificed on the tops of the step pyramids. Without the benefit of any kind of anesthetic, Aztec priests cut the hearts out of the children and figuratively fed the hearts and the blood to their sun god. Moreover, during times of famine, the Aztec simply slaughtered thousands of their subject peoples and ate them. When Cortez began his march on Mexico City, most local tribes looked upon him as a liberator.

Ideology of Rage

With the beating drums of Danza Azteca and fiery speeches, the crowd was well roused for the arrival of Turner's "Save Our State" group, which became the object of the Mexican revanchists' wrath. Waving Mexican flags, the crowd of 400, led by MEChAistas and others of similar persuasion, such as the paramilitary Brown Berets, some wearing masks and hoods, surged toward the stalwart forty. Police raced to intercede and told Turner, "We cannot guarantee your safety." A police helicopter arrived overhead. Backup police from surrounding cities and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were soon on the scene.

The heavy police presence kept the MEChAistas on the other side of the street from the SOS patriots. For a while it became a battle of signs and flags: SOS waved Old Glory and held signs saying "No to Reconquista," "No to Aztlan," "No to Illegal Immigration," "Stop Illegal Alien Invasion," "Assimilate or Vacate." Revanchists waved Mexican flags but also displayed one American flag, which they promptly threw to the ground and stomped on, cheering wildly. Their signs also implicitly suggested violence: "A Good Minuteman is a Dead Minuteman," "Minutemen Beware," "White Trash Go Back to Arkansas," "God Must Love Mexicans Because He Made So Many of Us," "Who is Illegal, Pilgrim?" "Viva Aztlan," "F*** the Alamo." Their chants expressed similar sentiments: "This is Mexico!" "You stole this land!" " We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us !"

The MEChAistas also hurled epithets and water bottles at SOS. One bottle hit 66-year-old Dottie Dalton on the head, knocking her to the pavement. The veteran of the Minuteman operation in Arizona was rushed to the ICU of a nearby hospital. Doctors diagnosed her with "inner cranial trauma" and kept her under observation, fearing bleeding on the brain. Meanwhile, the remaining members of SOS were escorted by the police to a secure area at the Baldwin Park City Hall. From there they were taken in police vans to their cars in a fenced lot guarded by police.

Incredibly, Mayor Lozano blames Joseph Turner for the actions of the Mexican revanchists, including the injuries suffered by Dottie Dalton. Turner should not have taken a "senior citizen to an event that could become dangerous," said Lozano two days after the attack, adding, "I was literally outraged. He should be held accountable for using senior citizens in that capacity." Lozano said nothing about his own speech, rallying the crowd, the Azteca dancers, or the Mexican flags. No, according to him, a small group of Americans cannot peaceably assemble on public property and make known the revanchist nature of the monument. The Americans from Save Our State were to blame. They were to blame because they didn't realize, as the MEChAistas chanted, "This is Mexico!"

Projecting Policy

For years, when I addressed audiences outside the state of California on the subject of illegal immigration and illegal aliens, people seemed to think that it was a problem peculiar to crazy, wacky California. I told them that the problem would soon be in their state, too. Few believed me. I only wish I had been wrong. Now towns in Arizona, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia, and North Carolina have schools with student bodies that are comprised of a majority of Spanish-speaking illegal aliens or the Spanish-speaking children of illegal aliens.

Unlike past immigration waves, who came to our shores legally, most of these immigrants are not assimilating. Many of them are being radicalized by so-called victim groups such as MEChA. Many of them are taking full advantage of our social-welfare programs and are not even bothering to learn the common language.

But why should they pull themselves up by the bootstraps, become productive members of our society, and assimilate into the American culture when government policies make it easy for them not to do so? Not only do our schools provide bilingual education, but places such as Los Angeles have become sanctuary cities, refusing to arrest illegal aliens. Now, in these states, hospitals are closing and county social services are collapsing under the weight of the illegal alien invasion.

Political changes, as they have in California, will follow. Every baby born within our borders is considered a U.S. citizen and will be eligible to vote at age 18. Another amnesty--sought by both the Bush administration and Democrats--would eventually enfranchise millions of illegal aliens (see page 19). Then, too, illegal aliens fraudulently vote by the thousands. Republican Robert K. Dornan, a congressman from southern California, lost his seat in a close race as a result of such voting. The Republican Party, fearing alienating Hispanic voters, didn't try to rectify the problem; they abandoned him.

Likewise, elected officials in Baldwin Park reflect their constituents and have no sympathy for Joseph Turner and his crusade against the invasion of illegal aliens. In addition to Mayor Lozano, the mayor pro tem is Ricardo Pacheco, and two of the three city council members are Marlen Garcia and David Olivas. With more than 80 percent of the city's population Hispanic, it is not surprising that there is only one elected non-Hispanic. Nor is it surprising that the elected officials stand united in supporting a monument that advocates La Reconquista. Demographics guide policy.

And changing demographics propelled by the flood of unassimilated immigrants are a creation of our laws, such as the ill-conceived Immigration Act of 1965 and the Amnesty Act of 1986 (formally the Immigration Reform and Control Act), and our lack of political will to enforce our laws against illegal immigration and to punish employers who hire illegal aliens, if we had the political will, we could easily close our southern border to illegal crossings--the Minutemen did so with no better equipment than lawn chairs, binoculars, and cell phones. We must also de-fund the radical left--thereby drying up the funding for groups like MEChA--and use the ballot box to punish politicians who have abetted the illegal immigrant invasion. In California the open border and globalist crowd scream that our lettuce would cost more if agribusiness (and that's what farming is in California--Ma and Pa Kettle are long gone) could not employ illegal aliens. While we are saving ten cents for each head of lettuce we buy, we taxpayers of California are spending ten billion dollars each year to cover the costs of births, medical care, schooling, crime, incarceration, traffic accidents, and subsidized housing for illegal aliens. Some deal.

Much of what man has done, man can undo. The men who have done this are both Republicans and Democrats, both liberals and supposed conservatives. They have sold out America to a potent combination of leftist ideology and transnational corporations. The two would seem mutually antagonistic but actually they are very much compatible. A dissolution of national identity and the creation of a global market and workforce is desired by both. If this happens, we would no longer be Americans united by our bonds of heritage, language, religion, and aspirations but simply unassimilated, diverse people who occupy a geographical area in North America. It will take some old-fashioned gumption and concerted constituent pressure on Congress to reverse this, but we Americans have overcome great adversity before. And we can do so again.

RELATED ARTICLE: Mexican for the briefest of times.

California has been part of the United States since July 7, 1846, when Mexican officials in Monterey peacefully surrendered to Commodore John D. Sloat and the U.S. Pacific Fleet, a mere handful of small warships, and consented to American annexation of the province, nearly 160 years ago. How long was California Mexican? All of 24 years. Moreover, much of that time small revolutions drove Mexican officials back to Mexico, and rule fell to Californios, the upper crust of Spanish and Mexican settlers in California. Before 1822 California belonged to the Spanish, who did not actually plant a settlement in what they termed Alta California until 1769. Before that the area was occupied by dozens of different and often warring tribes of American Indians. The various Indians never organized themselves beyond small tribal groups, lived by hunting and gathering, practiced no agriculture, and had no system of writing, no wheel, and no metalwork.

California was never much more than nominally Mexican. No settlements penetrated California's interior or reached north of Sonoma, just the other side of San Francisco Bay, and most of California was uninhabited and generally untouched by Mexicans. So superficial and infrequent was their contact with the Sierra foothills that they even failed to discover the greatest placer deposits of gold on Earth. Nor did they take any action against a Russian settlement, Fort Ross, on the coast some 70 miles north of San Francisco. Built in 1812 and occupied for 40 years by the Russian-American Fur Company, the fort's population occasionally exceeded 400, making it California's third largest settlement during the 1820s, surpassed only by Monterey, the capital with 700 people, and Los Angeles with 650. There was no San Francisco, only a tiny village named Yerba Buena with fewer than 200 souls. The population of California, other than Indians, was slightly more than 3,000.

Although Mexico was granted her independence from Spain, after years of war, in the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821, California did not hear about it until 1822. The change of sovereignty did not cause much of a stir--at Monterey the Spanish flag was lowered and the Mexican flag raised, and the Spanish governor departed. Mexico cared so little about California that she did not bother to send a governor there until 1825. In the meantime, California enjoyed a quasi-independence that would characterize the territory throughout the short Mexican period. At different times during the 1830s and '40s, Californios, aided by American settlers such as Tennesseean Isaac Graham, a buckskin-clad mountain man, revolted against Mexican rule and declared California a "free and sovereign state." For a couple of years, a local Californio would control what little government there was in California. For a year or two, an appointed Mexican governor would rule. There were occasions when both a Mexican and a Californio would govern simultaneously from different capitals. There were times when nobody governed.

By the early 1840s dozens of prominent Californios, who thought of themselves as Spanish or Castilian--not Mexican--were advocating either annexation to the United States or independence with American protection. It was clear to them that Mexico could not protect California and that some change was needed. Not only did the Russians live with impunity at Ft. Ross but also Commodore T.A.C. Jones, commander of the small U.S. Pacific Fleet, misinterpreted his orders and captured Monterey in 1842, almost without opposition. He promptly declared California annexed to the United States. Two days later he discovered his error and returned California to the local authorities.

During the Mexican period, hundreds of American sailors, artisans, and businessmen settled in California's coastal communities, and hundreds of American frontiersmen established ranches and farms in California's interior valleys. By 1846 Americans comprised a quarter of the non-Indian population of California. Ironically, considering the enormity of illegal immigration today, Mexico only infrequently, and only with great difficulty and very limited success, sent small parties of Mexican settlers to California. At the time of Commodore Sloat's annexation, there were fewer than 10.000 people of Spanish or Mexican descent in all of California and few of them had any great love for Mexico.

This was the state of affairs in the California portion of the mythical Aztlan of MEChA fantasies. This is the history of the land MEChA radicals want to "liberate" from the United States.

Roger D. McGrath, Ph.D., the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes, is a retired history professor.