Dying Art of Activism
Failing Chicano Movement
By Daniel Muniz

Located in a barrio of San Antonio Texas, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is considered to be one of the cornerstones of Chicano art and activism. Throughout the years, this flagship of Hispanic culture has produced such events as the CineFestival, Hecho a Mano, and the Tejano Conjunto Festival.

Nationally acclaimed writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Sandra Cisneros have also read their own works there. In fact, Sandra Cisneros was once a staffer at the Guadalupe Center.

The Center’s Guadalupe Theater has also hosted performances of rising stars such as actor Jesse Borrego.

However, even with all of its successes, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is falling apart. The $2.1 million visual and media arts school and gallery has very little going on and tuition from its classes has been cut almost in half because of dwindling enrollment. Government grants have also been sliced almost in half too. As a result, many of its cultural functions have either been eliminated or greatly scaled back.

But that wasn’t always the case. The Guadalupe Center once had a million-dollar endowment along with multiyear grants from certain prestigious foundations along with a large capital fund. In addition, the Center was also well connected with the business community and it once had a major influence in local politics. In fact, one of its past executive directors was also a serious mayoral candidate.

Unfortunately, all of that is history but it really shouldn’t be of any surprise.

When the illegal aliens and their supporters that numbered in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate for amnesty across the country, many right-wingers were concerned. Certain conservatives imagined that Hispanic activists would form “Reconquista” organizations that would swell up in size and then use their political muscle to further their agenda for illegal immigration. Other conservatives thought that the Reconquistas would even try to return part of the country back to Mexico or at least attempt to create the separate nation of Aztlan from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California.

However, the concerned right-wingers are wrong.

Yes, certain activist groups will become more belligerent and grow in size but all of that is temporary. The reason the growth won’t last long is for the same reason that the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is failing. That is, although poor people might enjoy being empowered, what they really want is to join the great middle class.

It is amazing what prosperity does to you.

When I was growing up in the barrio of a small town of South Texas, my parents put together a plan to get out of it. When we moved to San Antonio, my folks were not interested in finding another barrio to move into. Instead, their new level of income allowed us to relocate to the suburbs and into a brand-new house that had a toilet that had never been flushed. And our new house in the suburbs even had central air-conditioning in it. Imagine that.

Perhaps when my parents were very young and poor, Chicano organizations like La Raza Unida may have briefly appealed to them, but now that they are living in the suburbs and have white people as neighbors, empowerment simply has little relevance to them because they have become a part of the great middle class society. Whatever happens now in the barrio is also of little importance to my folks and to me because we don’t live there anymore. Furthermore, many of the big social problems of the past have been solved.

However, that is also the great flaw for such activist organizations. That is, their supporters and the Hispanics who may sympathize with them eventually get educated, get better paying jobs, and end up wanting bigger and nicer houses in safer neighborhoods. Even the highly esteemed writer Sandra Cisneros doesn’t live in the barrio. She does not live in the urban sprawl of the suburbs but rather in a hip “old money” trendy area of San Antonio.

In fact, successful, well-heeled Hispanics would rather live in a nice neighborhood instead of a dilapidated part of town.

The current executive director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, R. Bret Ruiz, has an undergraduate degree in American studies from Yale. He also has graduate degrees from Northwestern University in art history and in marketing and international business. But somehow I suspect that their leader does not live in the barrio especially since he has been accused of using a derogatory racial term intended to describe low class Hispanics. He still has an investigation pending from that accusation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In fact, his installation at the helm of the Center caused quite a bit of turmoil. He has the book smarts and the Ivy League education and all the credentials but he does not embody the activism that founded the Guadalupe Center. And activism itself is elusive at best because people don’t want to stay in the barrio or be poor for the rest of their lives. Instead, like my parents and millions of other Hispanics, they want to leave the barrio as soon as possible to enjoy a new lifestyle and a better standard of living.

Although right-wingers may have cringed at the sight of massive demonstrations, their fears are unfounded.

There is no doubt that there are certain Hispanic activists who say that part of America is stolen and should be returned to Mexico or that the new country of Aztlan should be formed instead (with them in charge of it). But the allure of the free market that can give poor people mortgages for nicer houses in better neighborhoods, credit cards, better schools, and better jobs will win out again as it has done before in past decades.

The Reconquista movement is nothing new. All of this has been debated before and it has never gained any real popularity among Hispanics.

Instead of relying on fear, conservatives ought to focus on all the mechanisms that continue to make America a great place to live in, like the free market and personal liberty (both of which is severely limited across Latin America). And that is the Gospel that conservatives need to preach and to be proud of. The attraction of the great middle class has far more sway and more appeal to Hispanics than all the empty rhetoric of the Reconquista movement.

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