Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
Longtime Cal State Northridge professor Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, who recently died at age 93, was described by the New York Times as a “forthright scholar at the forefront of Chicano studies.” As the people should know, Acuña is not the “godfather” of Chicano studies and his Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, is not the movement’s founding document.
Those honors belong to Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959) Mexican education minister, presidential candidate and author of La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race). As the author contends, students from English, Dutch and Scandinavian backgrounds are “slower, almost dull,” compared to “mestizo children and youths from the south.” Blacks are “uglier stocks” and “intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust.” The Mongol, “with the mystery of his slanted eyes,” is part of an “exhausted people” that lacks the “boldness for new enterprises.” Apparently Japan’s Sanae Takaichi didn’t get the memo.
According to La Raza Cósmica, the fusion of Spaniards and Indians is a new race destined to overtake all others. That is the raza replacing those awful “Anglo-Saxons,” code for people who speak English, with names like O’Hoolihan, Renaud and Horowitz, and who “are gradually becoming more a part of yesterday.”
The late Didier Jaén, former professor of Latin American literature at UC Davis, noted that most critics rejected Vasconcelos’ idea of a superior race, and that Marxists “summarily dismissed” the notion. It should have ended there but so-called “Chicano” movement in the United States, identified with the concept of La Raza, giving Vasconcelos a new audience.
In 1979, the Chicano Studies department at Cal State University at Los Angeles republished La Raza Cósmica, but some American Marxists were on to it. As the Stalinist Bert Corona explained in Memoirs of Chicano History, Vasconcelos’ racial theory was “close to the kind of German racial superiority theory supported by Hitler.” Indeed, Vasconcelos served as a Nazi propagandist, editor of the pro-Axis Timon magazine.
In Occupied America, as Bruce Bawer notes, Acuña admires British Communists E.P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm and “gushes over” Fidel Castro as “the symbol of Latin America’s anticolonial struggle with the United States.” America’s territorial gains, including the victory over Mexico, were all “theft.” Vasconcelos believed likewise and in the late 1960s his racial supremacy spawned the Southwest Council of La Raza in Arizona. That group evolved into the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), headquartered in Washington DC, and very cozy with Democrat administrations.
Cecilia Muñoz served as National Council of La Raza vice president before the Obama administration tapped Muñoz for White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. In 2018 the NCLR the National Council of La Raza changed its name to UnidosUS, but it’s still rooted in the racism of Vasconcelos and Rodolfo Acuña. In 2024, the UnidosUS Action Fund endorsed Joe Biden, who allowed more than 10 million illegals into the USA, many of them criminals.
Acuña was no fan of the border, and it comes as no surprise that the New York Times got it wrong on the institutional racist. In early April, the Times misidentified NATO as the “North American Treaty Organization,” in a headline, no less. Shortly after Hamas October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the New York Times accused Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital. That wasn’t true but it was hardly the Times biggest falsification.
In the early 1930s Stalin set out to collectivize agriculture, which required the elimination of the kulaks, independent farmers, as a class. To that end Stalin launched a planned famine that claimed 3.5 to 7 million innocents in Ukraine and Russia. New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty denied that any famine took place, and all was well under the wise leadership of Stalin and his planned economy.
Duranty’s series of articles won a Pulitzer Prize, and the Guardian’s Malcolm Muggeridge, who broke the story of the famine, was widely reviled. The Pulitzer Board did not revoke Duranty’s prize, and the Times took it’s time acknowledging his falsehoods. So best to call the paper the Daily Duranty, a pioneer of fake news.
Meanwhile, “forthright scholar” Rudy Acuña, looked the other way at Mexico, which Mario Vargas Llosa accurately described as “the perfect dictatorship.” For Acuña, the United States of America was an oppressive place – except for his cushy tenured position, supported by California taxpayers.
Professor Rudy should be remembered as an America-hating leftist, an apologist of Stalinist regimes, and a recycler of the racist propaganda now branded as “Chicano Studies.” To call it a non-discipline would be kind, but it now occupies many university campuses and has been incorporated into “ethnic studies” in K-12 curricula.
Institutional racism has no place in America. The Trump administration should strive to eliminate “Chicano Studies” and similar junkthought nationwide. The people will be watching.
