Our struggle isn't just for tolerance. It isn't just about saying that everybody should be respected or that all cultures have value. It's recognizin… - Elizabeth Martínez

being denied the right to speak Spanish is an old form of racism that has plagued Latinos for decades. To speak Spanish represents defense of one's culture in a Eurocentric, racist nation that doesn't want to remember that Spanish-not English-was the common language in much of the Southwest for 250 years.

The truth is that we need to reexamine and redefine our culture. Some of us do not believe that in our culture, femininity has always meant: weak, passive delicate looking... in other words, qualities that inflate the male ego. The women of La Raza is traditionally a fighter and revolutionary.

Manifest Destiny saw Yankee conquest as the inevitable result of a confrontation between enterprise and progress (white) versus passivity and backwardness (Indian, Mexican)...The concept of Manifest Destiny, with its assertion of racial superiority sustained by military power, has defined U.S. identity for 150 years. Only the Vietnam War brought a serious challenge to that concept of almightiness. Bitter debate, moral anguish, images of My Lai and the prospect of military defeat for the first time in U.S. history all suggested that the long-standing marriage of virtue and violence might soon be on the rocks.