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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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September 01, 2003

Forget MEChA--how about bilingual ed?

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. Cruz should have and could have easily condemned that side of the group’s activities while explaining that his interest in joining came from a different place.

Tacitus, a blogger whom I believe was the first to push this issue and kept pushing it until the mainstream media began picking it up, wonders why it took Cruz so long to say he doesn’t support separatism. The reason, no doubt, is that Cruz came of age in politics as part of the Latino Democratic Caucus in the California Legislature, where ethnic identity politics – the belief that you define people first by their ethnic group rather than as individuals -- is an unwritten requirement for membership. Bustamante, ironically, was never one of the more radical members of this group of legislators, as far as I could tell, and there’s evidence that even as a kid he did not believe personally in separating himself from members of other ethnic groups. But he certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly Speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher. Thus there is reason to wonder how he would handle ethnic issues as governor.

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. Now Bustamante is busy demonizing Proposition 54, a controversial but well-meaning ballot initiative that seeks to make the government color-blind by prohibiting, in most cases, the collection of ethnic and racial data on state forms. Finally, there is the question of the state’s public school standards and accountability movement, which was created with support from Latino legislators but is now endangered and not assured the same kind of backing in its fight to survive.

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. Perhaps now that he has come clean on MEChA, that is what the media should be hounding Bustamante to explain.