The Homeland, Aztlan/El otro Mexico The Homeland, Aztlan/EI otro Mexic re were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disembo- In the 1930s, after Anglo agribusiness corporations cheated nd se om our identity and the small Chicano landowners of their land, the corporations history. Many, under the threat of Anglo terrorism, abandoned hired gangs of mexicanos to pull out the brush, chaparral and cactus and to irrigate the desert. The land they toiled over had tested. But as the courts, law enforcement officials, and govern- once belonged to many of them, or had been used communally by ly ignored their pleas but penalize eir efforts, tejanos had no other recourse but armed retaliation and had the Mexicans scrape the land clean of natural vegetation robbed a train Brownsville, Texas on October 18, 1915, Anglo vigilante groups land cleared; saw the huge pipes connected to underwater sources the brush and shoot them. One hundred Chicanos were killed in ai those canals when they were full and hunt for e g in some of when they were dry. In the 1950s I saw the land, cut up into to Mexico, leaving their small ranches and farms. The anglos, thousands of neat rectangles and squares, constantly being irri- fraid that the mexicanos would seek independence from the gated In the 340-day growth season, the seeds of any kind of fruit U.S., brought in 20,000 army troops to put an end to the social or vegetable had only to be stuck in the ground in order to grow protest movement in South Texas. Race hatred had finally More big land corporations came in and bought up the remaining fomented into an all out war. 11 My grandmother lost all her cattle, To make a living my father became a sharecropper. Rio they stole her land. Farms Incorporated loaned him seed money and living expenses At harvest time, my father repaid the loan and forked over 40% Drought hir South Texas, "my mother tells me."La of the earnings. Sometimes we earned less than we owed, but se puso bien seca y los animales comenzdron a morrirse de se, M always the corporations fared well. Some had major holdings in ocbo bwercos, with eight kids and one on the way. Yo fui la gether ole trucking, livestock auctions and cotton gins. Alto- papa se mario de un heart attack dejando a mama pregnant y con lived on three successive Rio farms: the second was mayor, tenia diez anos. The next year the drought continued el adjacent to the King Ranch and included a dairy farm; the third ganado got hoof and mouth. Se calleron in droves en las pastas y was a chicken farm. I remember the white feathers of three el brushland, pe blancas ballooning to the skies. El siguient thousand Leghorn chickens blanketing the land for acres around. afo still no rain, Mi pobre madre viuda perdio two-thirds of her My sister, mother and I cleaned, weighed and packaged eggs. (For ganado. A smart gabacbo lawyer took the land away mamahadn't years afterwards I couldn,'t stomach the sight of an egg. )I paid taxes. No hablaba ingles, she didn't know how to ask for remember my mother attending some of the meetings sponsored time to raise the money. "My father's mother, Mama Locha, also by well-meaning whites from Rio Farms. They talked about good lost her terreno. For a while we got $12.50 a year for the"mineral nutrition, health, and held huge barbeques. The only thing rights"of six acres of cemetery, all that was left of the ancestral lands. Mama Locha had asked that we bury her there beside her food canning and a food-stained book they printed made up of husband. EL cemeterio estaba cercado. But there was a fence recipes from Rio Farms' Mexican women. How proud my around the cemetery, chained and padlocked by the ranch owners mother was to have her recipe for enchiladas coloradas in a book. f the surrounding land. We couldn 't even get in to visit the ch less bury her there. Today, it is sti E l adlocke sign reads: Keep out. Trespassers will be shot ' Abora si ya tengo un tumba para llora upon being reu with