We all know that in the 1840s the United States illegally annexed much of the American South West from Mexico in a war that was rooted in the interests of protecting slavery in Texas. The Chicanos were the Mexicans who had ended up on the United States side of the border after the conflict, they were and still are treated as second class citizens just like the Palestinians despite being there before the whites. While it’s not purely an indigenous struggle it’s in the interests of the indigenous peoples of America, the Chicanos, and the Mexicans to get the land back that was stolen from them by the United States.
The only problem is this movement is deader than Margaret Thatcher. The chicano political movements petered out along with the black power movements of the seventies. People gave into liberalism. Like Mexicans are okay with working for shit pay in a land that used to belong to them because anyone who speaks out runs the risk of getting deported or having their treats taken away from them. How do we put life back into this movement? We HAVE to tie it to the Palestinian one.
We need young people living from California to Texas to know that the land they live on is stolen, and sure all of the United States is stolen but if we can provide power to just one movement out of all them, this one would be the most important and consequential. The Puerto Rican movement is just one island, the indigenous movements are too fractured, the Black Power movement has had no success with its nationalist movements, but Mexico, if we could get the Mexican president on stage and say “United States, give us back the land you stole, or else” that would be completely justified in the same way Palestinians are justified in fighting their occupiers, because the United States citizens, are occupiers, and Mexico has a right to use the methods of resistance that Palestinians are using right now.
Just because Mexico is a colonial state doesn’t disqualify the grievances they have against the US. The struggle indigenous people have against Mexico and the United States is an entirely separate issue and the issue here is that there is a very legitimate land claim that Mexico has against the US that the left has not explored well enough. We can’t abandon it as an option, like even if the nationalistic element is not really there, such an action would do good at destroying the US empire which is kind of the end goal of what we all believe here.
Neither the United States of America nor United Mexican States are legitimate states. From the perspective of the Indigenous, Americans vs Mexicans is just Anglos vs Boers. A hypothetical conflict is only advantageous insomuch as it’s settler-on-settler violence. And there’s plenty of times in history when the US and Mexico teamed up to crush Indigenous resistance like how they did to the Comanche, so when push comes to shove, there will be settler solidarity against the Indigenous.
And Mexico isn’t that much better for the Indigenous than the US. So many Mexican pretendians larping as Aztecs offer its own challenges. At least US settlers largely stick to being Anglos while there’s an entire movement within Mexico to erode Indigenous identity through mass pretendianism.