By Francisco Miraval

DENVER – Four decades after launching the Chicano movement, veteran leaders say that despite the progress made, a lot still needs to be done to meet Hispanic demands for social justice.

In March 1969 the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference was held in Denver, where the term “Aztlan” was popularized and spurred the Mexican-American community to mobilize and demand its civil rights.

The term “Aztlan” has been used since then to designate both the territory that Mexico lost to the United States in 1848 as a consequence of the Mexican-American War, and the need to preserve the original Mexican culture of those lands.

As a result of the Denver conference, the Mexican-American Youth Organization in the following month changed its name to the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, denoted by the Spanish acronym MEChA, and began spreading to universities all over the country.

One of the first leaders of MEChA in the University of Colorado at Boulder was Stan Perea, at that time an accounting student and now, at 62, a pastor, writer and consultant on educational topics.

“I have very beautiful memories of my days as a radical Chicano in Boulder. We’ve achieved a lot since 1969. Our kids today don’t get the intolerable treatment we got back then. Racism still exists, but it’s no longer the generalized, accepted system it was in the 1960s,” Perea told Efe.

“But we’re still unable to accept people different from ourselves without them having to fight for acceptance. That becomes obvious when we see how Chicanos react to the new immigrants,” he said.

Another leader, Dr. Ramon Del Castillo, 60, a Kansas native who went to Denver at the beginning of the 1970s, joined the Chicano movement to defend family, identity and education.

At present, Del Castillo is a well-known poet and director of the Center for Chicano Studies at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

“Since 1969 La Raza (the Hispanic-American community) has won victories both at the local and national levels in all aspects of social life, including education, politics, business and social justice,” Del Castillo said.

“The recent appointment of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latino on the Supreme Court of the United States shows that through education and constant pressure, La Raza will eventually occupy its rightful place in history and in society,” he said.

Both Perea and Del Castillo agree that the concepts of Aztlan and La Raza remain as relevant today as they were four decades ago.

“Aztlan has become a reality though no one wants to admit it. We are living in Aztlan, since La Raza is in charge of the southwestern part of the country due to the great number of Latinos in the area. There is no sector of life in that region that has not been deeply affected by Mexican-Americans,” Perea said.

For his part, Del Castillo said that the analysis of the 16th-century Map of Cuauhtinchan by Dr. David Carrasco at Harvard University Divinity School has shown that Aztlan is no longer a myth but a reality.”

“We’re people with a land that is the essential basis of our continued struggle,” he said.

The two leaders agree that the Chicano movement also marked a crucial moment in Denver history because of the permanent political and social changes it wrought.

Thanks to work since the end of the 1960s by people like Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, founder of the Crusade for Justice, and Polly Baca, the first Latino woman to be elected to the Colorado legislature and a personal friend of Justice Sotomayor, Latinos’ quality of life has not only been improved but in 1983 for the first time Denver elected a mayor of Hispanic origin, Federico Peña.

“From then on, Hispanics could be mayors, police chiefs, fire chiefs or security chiefs,” Fidel “Butch” Montoya, 57, said, another veteran Mexican-American leader who was himself deputy mayor of Denver for most of the last decade. EFE