Southwest Shall Secede From U.S., Professor Predicts

Some Mexicans are not in the least bit subtle about their designs for Mexico to "take back" territories of the United States. Listen to Charles Truxillo, as reported in an Albuquerque Tribune news story of May 19, 2000.

Charles Truxillo, a professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, suggests "Republica del Norte" would be a good name for a new, sovereign Hispanic nation he foresees straddling the current border between the United States and Mexico. The Republic of the North--he predicts its creation as "an inevitability"--would include all of the present U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, plus southern Colorado."

Stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, it would also include the northern tier of current Mexican states: Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. The capital would probably be Los Angeles. Truxillo, 47, has said the new country should be brought into being "by any means necessary."

But in a recent interview at a coffee shop near the UNM campus, Truxillo said it was "unlikely" civil war would attend its birth. Instead, he said, the creation of the Republic of the North will be accomplished by political process, by the "electoral pressure" of the future majority Hispanic population throughout the region rather than by violence.

"Not within the next 20 years but within 80 years," he said. "I may not live to see the Hispanic homeland, but by the end of the century my students' kids will live in it, sovereign and free." Truxillo said it's his task to help develop a "cadre of intellectuals" to begin thinking about the practicalities of how the Republic of the North can become a reality.

In the past, of course, wars have erupted when states seceded from either parent nation--including the U.S. Civil War to keep the South in the Union and, in Truxillo's quick description, "the Alamo and all that" when Texas declared itself independent of Mexico. Truxillo said the U.S. Civil War settled the question of secession militarily but not in a legal sense. States do have the right to secede, he maintained, if--as was untrue in the 1860s--the rest of the country is willing to let them go.

Truxillo listed a number of international developments that he said would have seemed "far-fetched in the 1950s," including the breakup of the Soviet Union, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the apparently imminent creation of an independent West Bank Palestinian state agreed to by Israel, and ballot-box separatist movements aimed at achieving a Quebec independent of Canada. The "tide of history" is moving the U.S.-Mexico border region toward political autonomy, Truxillo said.

He listed a number of Spanish and Mexican treaties dating back to 1494 and ending with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, by which Mexico granted to the United States--after the Mexican-American War--possession of parts of what are now California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. "None of the rights of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were fulfilled," he told Tijerina. "None of the obligations were upheld. You told us this was our country, our patria, and that we should fight for our rights, that all colonized and exploited peoples should rise up in struggle for independence.

"We will one day be a majority and reclaim our birthright by any means necessary--and we shouldn't shy away."

U.S. census estimates of New Mexico's 1998 population: 52 percent Hispanic, Indian, Black and Asian; 48 percent non-Hispanic white. The Hispanic population alone was estimated at 40.3 percent. The 2000 census is expected to provide more precise figures. Texas is likely to become the next minority-majority state, Truxillo said, adding Hispanics are already in the majority in the border regions of all the Southwest states, largely because of a long and continuing immigration from Mexico.

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