Warday

their sense of personal pride. The image of the lazy “Meskin” and the “Frito Bandido” was born, but it was not laziness, it was sorrow. We Hispanics are not lazy and we are not bandidos and we are not stupid. If we are so stupid, how come we have the only happy, safe, and well-organized nation north of the Rio Grande? While the Anglos fight bitterly among themselves for the rancid bits of the old United States, we Hispanics have quietly created this beautiful country, this beloved Aztlan!

We even have our own poets, our own writers, our own film stars. Chito Hernandez, “El Nino,” Gabriela Jaime Nunez, all names of which you know nothing. But they are our stars! We make ten films a year in Aztlan, and when you combine those with the ten made in Mexico and the twenty in Spain, you have a new Hispanic movie almost every week. And we have a television and radio industry. The Japanese sell us more radios than we can possibly use. They put up a new station right here in El Paso. Radio “A,” it is called.

We also have Japanese cars and a new Japanese train running on the Santa Fe tracks from Monahans all the way to Tucson, where it connects not only with the Sunset Limited but with the El Costero, which provides super-express service down the Pacific coast of Mexico. We are on the world map, I assure you. People want our soybeans and other farm goods, not to mention our oil and gas and uranium, even coal.

For many people in the old United States, the confusion that resulted from the obliteration of Washington was unbelievably destructive. But for us, the people of Aztlan, it was really almost a blessing. Of course, we are very sorry for all the death and suffering. But Warday also brought some good—our Aztlan.

I do not want to lie to you, though, nor seem too bombastic. I suppose I can’t help it. I’m a natural enthusiast, and I’m excited by what we’re accomplishing here. Still, the way has not been as easy as all that. And Aztlan is far from perfect. You might find things wrong here. But you will also find love and a powerful sense of community. This is the great Chicano state, this Aztlan, and I love it so much that sometimes it hurts my heart, you know, when things are not as I would wish.

We have to rely a great deal on the Japanese, and they are certainly exploiting us. But we have the brotherhood and sisterhood of our nation, and our great heritage. I trust our isolated little country to survive. Anyway, I hope it will.

El Paso

Hector Espinoza is afraid for his infant state, and so tries to hide its weakness behind bold words. But Espinoza does not know his own people. Whatever happens to Aztlan, the eager confidence of its citizens will not be utterly lost. They have created something new here, and it will have its effect. Obviously there have been excesses. There are no Anglo faces in the streets. The Mobil refinery that one sees on the way into town is closed. There are many Japanese soldiers about. Although we were not allowed to visit Fort Bliss, Jim and I both had the impression that it is now a Japanese enclave. No doubt they intend to protect the vast soya plantations that have sprung up in the desert, which must be providing essential foodstuffs to their homeland.

But these facts tell nothing of the feeling of this new El Paso.

The streets are no more full of cars than Dallas or Austin, perhaps even less so. Yellow schoolbuses have been dragooned for street service. Each bus is apparently a small cooperative venture between its drivers and mechanics. At least, all are decorated differently, painted with flowers and slogans, loudspeakers blaring the music of Radio “A” from their roofs.

We have been billeted at the Granada Royale on MO, newly named Paseo de la Revolucion. The hotel is a delight. Its large rooms surround an atrium garden full of flowers. There is an in-door-outdoor pool. The atmosphere is quiet and unhurried. Most of the other guests are Japanese, some of them obviously long-term residents. It is strange to hear somebody speaking Spanish with a thick Japanese accent. We were served breakfast in our suite and spent the next hour trying to arrange a tour of the city. First we used the old Yellow Pages to call Hertz, Avis, and the local car rental agencies. Hertz, now called Autocars Liberidad, was open.

They were taking reservations for November. As this was August, we decided to give up on car rental.

There are no longer conventional taxis in El Paso. By law, they have all become “pesetas,” traveling fixed routes on the smaller thoroughfares, essentially supplementing the buses.

Our last option was to take a bus tour, but we soon found that both Gray Line and Golden Tours were booked for the day, or claimed to be.

Perhaps somebody didn’t want us to tour the city.

We ended up spending the morning in the hotel. I observed the city from the rooftop restaurant, which commands a fine view of the whole area. I saw no planes take off from the airport, which is not far away. Here and there I could see sooty scars on a building, but beyond that there were no obvious signs of the revolution. Senior Espinoza appeared just before noon, his thin body swallowed by a seersucker suit. He was full of brightness and what I can only describe as punch. As soon as we saw him, we requested a tour of El Paso. He said that he would suggest something even better: we should have lunch with him. We could always see the town later, he assured us. He added that he had, by the liberal application of governmental authority, gotten us precious tickets on a “Super Express” bus that left for Las Cruces at three. Tickets on another could not be guaranteed for weeks.

It was becoming clear that we were not intended to make any detailed reconnaissance of this community. Senior Espinoza was, in effect, throwing us out of his country. Given his position of power, we decided to let him do exactly as he pleased.

We were left to swallow our questions about such things as the condition of hospitals and prisons, and what was happening to the homes and property of the Anglos.

The Isabella penthouse restaurant in the Granada is now called Casa del Sol Norte. The food is Tex-Mex, what Senior Espinoza described as “superb Aztlan cuisine.” Actually, his hyperbole was in this case not far from the truth. I used to enjoy Mi Tierra and La Fonda in San Antonio, and Casa Rio on the river. I can also recall going to this restaurant’s namesake, the Casa del Sol in Juarez.

When I lived in New York, I sought good Mexican food constantly, but what I found only increased my hunger for flavors like these.

I will repeat the menu in detail. We had cheese enchiladas, cabrito chili, chicken tacos, rice, and refried beans. The tacos were generously garnished with tomatoes, lettuce, and onions, and the seasonings were uniformly excellent. We drank Carta Blanca beer from Mexico. The menu showed that the meal was five pesos “A” to privates, two pesos to comunistas.

After lunch, we were not too surprised to find we had barely enough time to get to the bus. Senior Espinoza claimed to have forgotten the time and left, pleading an urgent appointment. We soon found out the reason for the abrupt departure. Without the use of a private car, we were going to have to struggle to get to the station on time. Neither of us wanted to find out what would happen if we missed our connection.

Jim stood beside me outside the hotel as we waited for a bus.

He was silent and withdrawn. Aztlan had saddened him, because it seemed to him a failure of the racial harmony that had been growing in Texas before the war, and yet another doomed ideological attempt to alter blood and land with words.

I felt much better about it. There was energy and optimism there, and the powerful spirit of cooperation was something that we would do well to import into the United States. I suspected that Aztlan was going to work, though not in the way foreseen by Senior Espinoza, nor in the way feared by Governor Parker. That bee-hive of little cooperative enterprises was going to grow, spreading its new economic ideas in all directions.

I also suspected that Senior Espinoza’s caution was not based so much on a desire to hide his problems as it was on a fear that we might be spies for Governor Parker. After all, a letter from Parker preceded us here, probably by just a few hours. Espinoza was terrified of Parker, and probably also of us.

Before I went to Aztlan, the word cooperative suggested to me rural electric power on the one hand and vast, spiritless Soviet communes on the other. I was not prepared to meet such a strange new economy as the one we found: thousands of tiny co-ops, each dependent solely upon its own success to pay its members, none larger than the smallest economic unit necessary to perform its particular function.

This means that the motel where we stayed, for example, was run by two separate co-ops, the restaurant workers and the hotel staff. The state does not pay them, nor does it plan for them. They keep their own books and