The Librotraficante Manifesto

The 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to Tucson was intended to smuggle books back into the hands of our youth, after they were boxed up and carted out of class rooms during class time, in order to comply with Arizona House Bill 2281. This law was created to prohibit courses in high schools in all of Arizona. However, the only course, for now, that administrators saw fit to prohibit was the innovative and brilliant K through 12th grade Mexican American Studies program in place at the Tucson Unified School District.

This led to the prohibition of all the courses that fell under this curriculum and the confiscation and boxing up of all the books, over 80, that were taught in those courses.

I had time to re-read some of these important texts on the bus during our caravan. Yes, books help me step into the mind of our greatest thinkers and help me see history differently, in three dimensions-in 6 even 7 even more dimensions. As we convened with our brothers and sisters in the southwest, from Houston, to San Antonio, to El Paso, Texas; then Mesilla, New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, then Tucson; as we convened with the Madrinos and Padrinos of our literature-Sandra Cisneros, Carmen Tofolla, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chavez, Rudolfo Anaya, and Dagoberto Gilb it became clear that our magic bus of mind-altering prose was marking the launch of the new Latino Renaissance.

As we walked hand and hand with our brothers and sisters across the South West, after having marched with our brothers and sisters in New York, after speaking with allies in Canada, England Italy, as our extended family fed us, loved us, gave us books to take to our people, helped us to start Under Ground Libraries, it was clear that we were walking in a special moment in history.

We need only to re-read some of the now sacred texts confiscated from class rooms in Tucson, we need only re-read the texts of our deepest and greatest thinkers to see that we are reliving the Civil Rights movement archived in the book CHICANO by Arturo Rosales. We are all like the members of the Raza Unida party, and thus, we must like they did in Crystal City, begin to win elections.

The Aztecs, creators of the Sun Stone, the greatest work of art in North America, believed that every 50 or 60 years the world must be recreated. Well, here we are, 50 or 60 years later-reliving the Civil Rights Movement. This is the beginning of the new world that the Maya were predicting.

It is now the duty of our people to unite and to struggle on behalf of all Americans to preserve the most essential of American values-Freedom of Speech. We must defy censorship.

It now falls on us, the Children of The American Dream, to defend the Civil Rights of all Americans because that is what is on the line.

And thus with this great mission, I urge all of us to assume our full power and vision and step boldly into this historical charge, and for this I offer up-as did my predecessor Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez with the writings in his confiscated book  MESSAGE TO AZTLAN-I, Tony Diaz, El LIbrotraficante, offer to History, the Librotraficante Manifesto.



The Librotraficante Manifesto

1. Arizona House Bill 2281, created to prohibit courses in Arizona high schools, must be repealed. The powers that be would like to make it seem as if it was designed to target only Mexican American Studies. However, as with the anti-immigrant legislation that Arizona created, this template will spread to other states and be used to eliminate all other Ethnic Studies programs.

2. The brilliant and innovative Kindergarten to 12th grade Mexican American Studies program, which the Tucson Unified School District prohibited to comply with AZ HB 2281, must be re-instated.

3. Sean Arce, former director of MAS in the Tucson Unified School District must be reinstated.

4. We must laud as heroes and we must support all the students leading Teach-ins, protests, and championing our culture in Tucson;  the Tucson 11, the teachers who lead the MAS courses, and the 3 the young students who are locked in legal battle, suing the state of Arizona to defend their Freedom of Speech and thus all our first amendment rights.

5. We profess Quantum Demographics which embraces deep links between cultures that seem disparate at first glance. We want and need to study our own history so that we can then study other histories more fully. We do not strive to exclude others from our history or to deny others their history. We strive for the day when we all know our own stories to such an extent that we can see the links and bridges to the stories of others.

6. Every state of the Union must incorporate Ethnic Studies programs that not only provide a global perspective but that value and archive the local history of their own people, so that scholars and writers and artists can be inspired to archive the many facets of American history, the many local stories that add up to our national story.

7. We must organize to elect in every city school board members with great minds and big hearts, who truly care about our youth, who will answer to the people of a community. Under quantum demographics, it should be obvious that we do not suggest that we would vote for only Mexican American candidates. In fact, there are some Latinos that we must vote out of office.

8. The architects of AZ HB 2281 have been quoted as having their sites set on prohibiting Mexican American studies at the University level as well. We must never tolerate impositions on Freedom of Speech at our schools of higher learning, ever.

9. We must create and maintain Librotraficante Under Ground Libraries throughout the nation, so that our histories, our cultures are never at the whim of an administration ever again.

10. We owe it to future generations to create networks and leave in our wake community resources that will last for decades and beyond. As such, we must recognize that we, like our best fields of study, must be multi-disciplinary, as must our institutions, as must be the make up of all our groups and alliances. We must employ Quantum Demographics in our activism as well, thus, writers must advocate justice and must also be entrepreneurs, only then will businessmen and women become poets. We all must respect and become teachers. We must proceed with the knowledge that we are not simply paving the way for our youth, but we are teaching them how lead.


Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante
www.librotraficante.com
www.nuestrapalabra.org

Librotraficante™