Journalists Discuss Ethnic Identity with RAZA

Two prominent writers discussed issues of Mexican-American identity and politics with members of the Harvard-Radcliffe RAZA Thursday in Winthrop House.

Patrisia Gonzales, the first Latina syndicated columnist in the country, and Roberto Rodriguez, author of the books La RAZA and Codex Tamanchuan: On Becoming Human, shared a discovery they had recently made on the origin of Mexican-Americans.

According to Sergio J. Campos '00, president of RAZA, the writers said they found a 19th-century map in the national archives in Washington, D.C., that was used to draw up the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty.

On the map, Gonzales and Rodriguez located the ancient residence of the Aztecs in what is today Utah.

Campos said the columnists discussed how the discovery heartened them in the face of personal attacks on their ethnicity.

"What's really neat about this map is that, when people tell us to go back to our own country, we can point to the map and tell them that we actually come from northern Utah," Campos said.

During the two-hour informal discussion, Gonzales and Rodriguez addressed practical issues about what Chicano-American students have to deal with on the East Coast, removed from much of the Mexican-American community.

"They also gave us a feeling of what it's like to be involved in politics on the West Coast, which is not a perspective we commonly get being on the East Coast," Campos said.

RAZA is Harvard's Mexican-American/Chicano/Latino student group. The group's Latino Political Committee (LPC) invited the writers, who have been touring campuses across the country, to speak about their recently published book, Gonzales & Rodriguez: Uncut and Uncensored.

The LPC provides a forum for discussion on issues pertinent to the Chicano and Latino communities at Harvard by holding reuniones--meetings that focus on political, social and cultural topics.

Gonzales and Rodriguez returned on Friday evening to eat dinner at Mesa, RAZA's weekly dinner table in the Adams House dining hall. After dinner, the writers joined the club members in Lyman Common Room for Cafe Viernes. Rodriguez sang two mariachi songs for the students.

"I think it was really nice that they came to speak to us because they are heavily involved in Chicano activism," Campos said. "They don't write from an ideological stance, but rather from the front lines. As columnists, they are really dealing with issues that face Chicanos today, like Proposition 209."

Proposition 209 is the California voter initiative that ended affirmative action programs in that state.

Gonzales and Rodriguez have been writing a syndicated column, "Column of the Americas," for Universal Press Syndicate since 1994. Their column is published in about 40 newspapers nation-wide, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times.

They also served as University of California Regents lecturers at University of California at San Diego in the spring of 1998 and have won several awards for their work, including induction into El Paso's 1997 "Writers of the Pass Hall of Fame."