FOREWORD I thought it would be important to mention my Harlem experience, as a fair-skinned Puerto Rican, in a predominantly African American public housing project.  The experience of surviving in Harlem clearly has impacted my world view and has literally taken me to a very heightened level of race consciousness.  My elementary education experience began with the Catholic nuns from the Handmaids of Mary, who, interestingly enough, were one of three major orders of African American Nuns in the United States.  Although we were living in a legally segregated society in the 1950s, they convinced me that God put us here to do great things and, as children of God, we are all the same in his eyes. Little did I know, that it would take me a long time to figure out the significant lessons taught to us and why my parents selected St. Aloysius Catholic School on 132nd Street.  Both my parents and the nuns were giving me the tools to protect myself from White Supremacy.   White Supremacy is not only a psychosis which espouses white racial superiority but creates a "street psychology" which prompts people of color to literally destroy themselves daily.  The concept that we were created by God to serve a greater purpose was instilled very early in my childhood and has literally saved my life.  The proof of this is that very few of my childhood friends from the St. Nicholas Housing Project are alive today. I have been fortunate when I look back at the many events which shaped my views later in life.  The impact of the Harlem riots in the early 1960s and the Black Nationalist speeches given by Malcolm X on those hot summer days on 125th Street were confusing to a Puerto Rican youngster whose main occupation was to play basketball.  As a youngster, I never realized those fleeting moments would profoundly effect my psyche. My greatest childhood memory was the real fear of White people which existed amongst my black childhood friends.  The bogeyman or the "the Devil" really existed for these black children whose parents would share the same old stories about their encounters with Jim Crowism in the North.  My parents were not as dramatic, but it was always the "Americanos" that controlled everything.  As a child, I always associated power with Whites and never talked too much around them.  My family never referred to Black folks as "Americanos;" instead, they were called "morenos" (derived from the word Moor, meaning dark people). The race issue surfaced very early in my life when my family and I experienced the fear of a "neighborhood under siege" when the New York City Tactical Police Force quelled the Harlem riots and remained in our community for several days.  My window was like a television set as I saw black rioters get shot, beaten, and arrested.  I saw a White news reporter pulled from the Daily News van and nearly beaten to death.  I saw city leaders come through the neighborhood with bullhorns trying to calm the rioters.  A Black Muslim sect called the Five Percenters were beating up anyone who look remotely white.  The Latino families went pretty much unscathed since most of the black families in the projects had known us for years.  I will never forget the everyday fear of traveling to school and avoiding certain blocks which were known to prey on individuals that did not live there. I vividly remember Harlem's exhilaration when my mother took me to see Fidel Castro as he visited the only black hotel in New York City, the Hotel Theresa, because he refused to stay downtown with the "Americanos" or White folks.  He waved and he said something in Spanish, and I thought it was pretty "cool" since I was one of the few people in the crowd besides my mother who really understood him.   Harlemites were so happy because he stayed uptown; however, in later years I learned this happened only to politically embarrass the US government. As I began high school, anger was my prevailing state of mind.  The political discussions with my father were about revolution and the need to take hold of our communities.  My father thought I was crazy and that I should become an accountant or an engineer and move into a good neighborhood.  My father would always remind me of how this is the greatest country in the world.  Dad moved us during my high schools years to the Bronx and the Vietnam conflict was going strong.  The young Black and Puerto Rican men from my old South Bronx neighborhood, who were full of verve and energy, came back from Vietnam as shells of their former selves.  My Dad and I agreed to disagree that we were the best country in the world. I had lost faith that the system would provide a means for community empowerment, especially with the White resistance I witnessed in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle for school board control.  My dreams were to go to Latin America and follow in the footsteps of my high school heroes, Che Guevara, Huey P. Newton, and Regis Debray.   Anything would have been better than my neighborhood.  With the encouragement of Leon Silverman, my high school teacher and mentor, I could best serve the revolution if I went to college.  I was eventually accepted into Wesleyan University, the hot-bed of White liberalism and radical political thought. This tiny Connecticut school provided me the opportunity to travel to fascist Spain during the Franco regime and I remained in Europe for approximately a year.  This experience taught me more about the roots of race relations in the Caribbean and Latin America than any college course in my academic career at Wesleyan.  I had never realized North Africa was so close to the Spanish coastline.  Suddenly, I had a wider historical perspective on the Moors who ruled Spain for 700 hundred years. Traveling as a Puerto Rican, with an American passport, also jarred my sense of identity when I was stopped by a Spanish customs agent and asked about my country of origin, I replied "Puerto Rico," but the agent grew frustrated with my response because my passport was clearly from the United States of America.  The reality that I had no official international status as a member of the Puerto Rican people was crushing.  The agent reprimanded me and said "Tu eres Americano" or "You are American" and ordered me to move on.  That is not what my Dad told me! These events in my life have had a lasting effect on defining my existence as a human being on this planet.  Fortunately, between my parents and the Handmaids of Mary, I have been given the foundation to survive as an adult, the current world order of White Supremacy.  The Latino Manifesto will hopefully motivate young writers and political activists to research some of the subject areas which I have not adequately covered because of the limitations of time and resources.   Moreover, we hope the Latino youth will set up forums to discuss the issue of race and strategize how we will create our own Latino institutions for the survival our people.  Maybe the young people of today can do a better job of saving the lives of their neighborhood friends than my generation did in the 1990s. Christopher Rodriguez Columbia, MD

Introduction The Latino Manifesto is a community call to a higher level of race consciousness and to begin a long delayed journey which has eluded Latinos for centuries.  In the US landscape, Latinos are still observers and not full participants in the Black/White political discussions.  Unfortunately, this renders Latinos racially and culturally impotent to engage in modern political debates.  We must recognize that race consciousness is not synonymous with racism or holding racist values.  It is the ability to achieve a level of awareness where we recognize the events within our present reality and interpret them from a context which does not ignore the historical presence of   White Supremacy as a norm in our cultural environment.  The Manifesto boldly analyzes the impact of this norm on the  masses of Latinos of color in a very serious way particularly in the areas of education, mental health, economics and religion. How do Latinos address the issue of African-American slavery which continually overshadows our ability to negotiate resources to build our communities?  Our struggle is diminished in the face of the horrors of the Middle Passage and we have been sold the idea that we have no claim to reparations.   The eurocentric education of our leadership is unable to address this issue because of the lack of historical knowledge which demonstrates a common slave legacy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Their main fear is to openly discuss and expose the Spanish and Portuguese involvement and major promoters of a mindset which impacted the rest of the Americas including the US.  Furthermore, this same Latino leadership plays the dangerous color blind strategy which threatens the future survival of our communities.  If we continue on this course, Latinos will serve as the scapegoat for both Blacks and Whites in this country.  The past historical lessons on racism must be analyzed in order that new social paradigms may be constructed which are inclusive of the Spanish, Native American and African legacies which comprises modern Latino culture. This can only be done by re-educating both U.S. blacks and whites about the role of genocide and White Supremacy  in Latin America.          There is very little material which addresses the Latino race perspective from a non-eurocentic point of view.  Racism is normally addressed through the interpretation of standard literary artforms such as music, poetry and the theater.  These influences stemmed mainly from the Spanish language poetry of negritude which emanated from authors like Nicolas Guillen and Luis Pales Matos both from Cuba and Puerto Rico respectively.  But social scientific analysis outside of the literary artforms were seriously lacking particularly on the subject of Latinos residing in the United States.   However, if we examine closely, there is a rich history of race relations which started with the conquest of the Americas and can potentially be the key to help social scientists predict the future of Latinos in the US.      There is very little written which synthesizes the Latino experience surviving in a racist state of historical occupation and battling the social barriers towards self determination.  Therefore, the only models available are the afrocentric models of analysis which views the effects of racism in a scientific manner and provides the tools to make the leap to true race consciousness.  The history of  US Latinos must be analyzed in the context of the racism toward the African-American communities and how it is inextricably linked to us.   It is not accidental that Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens, are stopped and searched under current immigration laws,  and also the televised thrashing of Mexican "illegal aliens" which was only rivaled by the beating of Rodney King executed by the Los Angeles Police Department. We cannot delude ourselves that these are isolated incidences which would not have occurred under normal circumstances.   Our ability to achieve true cultural competence within US society cannot be attained through the Latino assimilationist concept of "passing for white" and looking the other way when Latino community problems arise.    In order to address the flourishing of this mindset, we must simultaneously analyze the history of racism in this country and how Latinos are ultimately entwined in the same racial web.  The forces of White Supremacy did not act in isolation against African Americans during the past 400 hundred year existence of the Americas. The most articulate spokesperson during the Civil Rights era who crystallized the historical problem of racism as a psychosis was the irreverent Malcolm X.  Previous leaders such as W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington had many heated intellectual debates in the early part of the twentieth century on how to solve the problem of "the negro."  Martin Luther King was fighting for the right to integrate public facilities and have the right to become part of the economic mainstream .  However, Malcolm X brought the race debate to the laps of urban Blacks in a manner which threatened the political establishment unlike any other Black leader.  He dared discuss the issue of self determination over assimilation and became the predecessor of the Black Power Movement.  The strategy was to reconstruct the mindset of psychological slavery and create a truly self sufficient nation and protect itself from self-destruction.  His premise was that as long as you are in bed with White Supremacy you will never escape its poisonous bite.  He brilliantly used the press in a way to reach the Black and White audiences nationwide.   Unfortunately, the media's portrayal of him as a Black supremacist overshadowed his insightful ideas for the psychological reconstruction of the Black man. Malcolm X (a.k.a. Malik El Hajj Shabazz) stated in a speech at Oxford University in the early 1960s that White Supremacy is the political ideology of the United States democratic system. What could Malcolm X have meant by such a statement, and what would he accomplish by making such inflammatory remarks?  Malcolm X understood the historical legacy of this country and  the roots of the American Constitution.  He understood what the founding fathers meant when they said all men are created equal;  naturally, they were only referring to a patrician class of White men who were the only persons allowed to own property and capital.  Obviously, the operating assumption at the time did not allow that people of color and women could have access to the power of the democratic institutions created. Malcolm X   focused directly on the root of the race problem in America by analyzing the operating assumptions of racism in its historical context. One of the best analyses of American politics appeared in a speech entitled "Ballots or the Bullets," wherein Malcolm X poignantly described racism in the American political context. He goes into detail as to how the structure of the political system provided an illusion that democracy existed in the form of competition between Democrats and Republicans. In reality, the underlying assumption is the preservation of White Supremacy--the competition is amongst White men to the exclusion of people of color.  He cites historical examples which support his basic premise that the principles of equality are violated time after time when "justice" is rendered to black people. When Malcolm X  stated that he would defend himself against this type of mindset "by any means necessary,"  was he really talking about attacking European Americans indiscriminately or was he coding language which refers to defending himself against a psychological state of mind which threatens the  Black community as a whole?  Malcolm X embodies the response to an extreme form of psychological behavior which continues to afflict the conscience of this nation, yet remains relatively unexplored.    In its simplest form, White Supremacy can be defined as a psychosis of white racial groups who feel the moral obligation to demonstrate racial, political, religious, and economic superiority over people of color.  In past years, many serious scientific studies and projects were researched to prove the natural superiority of white racial groups over people of color.  Religious leaders also debated the moral justification for the past subjugation of Africans and Indians under the bondage of slavery.  These were not quacks but serious and respectable citizens of their times.   For example, Dr. Lewis Terman of Stanford University, was one of the most eminent psychologists of his time and leader of the IQ movement. In his book, The Measurement of Intelligence, published in 1916, the Stanford psychologist claimed his tests proved that a low level of intelligence was "very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial."  Scientific racism was also evident in places like Cuba.  Antonio Maceo, the great Afro-Cuban patriot was known as a brilliant military general and strategist during the Spanish American War.  Because of his level of intelligence, white scientists of his day determined him to be biologically White.  After his death, these scientists conducted cranial studies and examined his corpse to determine the racial bone structure of Maceo's body to further conclude he was racially White.  In other words, it was the common thinking of the times to that a man of color could not possess his level of intelligence; therefore, he had to be White. After World War II, the New York State Chamber of Commerce issued "A Study on Puerto Rican Children in New York City to Psychological Tests." This study clearly set out to prove that Puerto Rican children had significantly lower IQs than American-born whites.   It did so in response to the heavy migration and the resultant xenophobia of the 1940s.  Even in more recent  times,  Physicist  Dr. William Schockley, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for pioneering work in Electronics, continually espoused that a Black person's intelligence rises in proportion to his or her percentage of white blood.     We must ask this question:  Where would this leave other people of color, such as Latinos?  In answering this question, this book will focus on the subliminal thinking of mainstream America as opposed to that of racial fanatics who already receive an inordinate amount of written and televised coverage.  The psychosis exists with the mainstream intellectuals and average individuals who perpetuate the myths, stereotypes, and religious beliefs which govern the present times. The book will also discuss the movement of self-preservation of Europeans; especially since the publications of demographic forecasts for the year 2000 where it states that Whites will become the minority in the United States.  The anxiety around this issue is manifesting itself in the increased conservatism and the consensus to cut back programs which are perceived to benefit the so called "minority populations" such as welfare or bilingual education .  This fear will normally coincide with the downturn of the US economy or regional areas of high unemployment and the illegal immigration of Latinos.    The psychological makeup of modern US Latinos reflects a culture of denial surrounding race discrimination which greatly impacts our political ability to operate in a race conscious society.  "Denial is used by individuals, groups, and even nations to defend themselves against disturbing feelings, contradictions, thoughts or events.  An unpleasant situation is rendered nonexistent.  Responsibility or blame is projected neatly upon someone else."    It appears today that if Latinos acknowledge the presence of discrimination they must implicitly declare their African or Indian racial ancestry.   These attitudes of denial stem from the early Spanish colonials who implemented state policies to create historical amnesia of our African and Indian heritage.  They designed comprehensive immigration policies to whiten the populations of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.  This was seen as a solution to the race problem particularly in areas were Latinos of African and Indian descent were the majority.  Early European theorists in the nineteenth century had concluded that the whiter the population the higher the level of intelligence.  As a result, special immigration policies to attract greater numbers of White Europeans were implemented in countries like Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.  This mindset still prevails and provokes great ire among many Latinos when any association is made with their African and Indian historical legacy.  Many US Latinos would rather suffer the indignity of discrimination than consciously admit any mistreatment which is associated with being a person of color.    What we will focus on is the unconscious level of this psychosis on Latinos in the United States and the Americas and how it has affected in particular both the mainstream European American and people of color in all aspects of their lives. Every facet of today's interpretation of the North and South American psychological mindset involves the issue of White Supremacy whether we speak of  education, local political control, economic development, psychological treatment or religious worship.   The cancer of White Supremacy or racism which afflicts all of the Americas continues to fester without the proper attention and analysis particularly in Latin America.  White Supremacy has affected the relationships of our ties to a historical past which is vital to full psychological recovery and achieving a new level of consciousness.   Most are not aware of the deep rooted psychological damage which White racial groups and people of color suffer because of this institutionalized legacy.  In a speech delivered in 1854, Chief Seattle stated the following to an assembly of tribes after agreeing to sign away lands under duress: We know that the white man does not understand our ways.  One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.  He leaves his father's graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not care. His father's graves and his children's birthright are forgotten.He treats his mother, the earth, and brother the sky, as things to be bought , plundered, sold  like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.   The legacy described by Chief Seattle of the White man's lack of understanding of how his own actions is a type of moral thrashing or a call to consciousness.  Chief Seattle understands the consequences when humans live in a moral vacuum and disrespect their own ancestral connectedness to the mother earth.  Chief Seattle, in short,  prophesizes the destruction of all of humankind.  Modern White Supremacy is symbolized by a powerful and sophisticated technology which has catapulted mankind to the brink of nuclear disaster e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis.  In order to protect those vested interests, a modern media machinery has been created to shape the world's opinions to maintain the status quo.  Lastly, it has developed a militaristic culture which can be whipped up in a frenzy and serve as the pointmen to feed this insatiable appetite described by Chief Seattle.           Latinos, as a people,  must be wary of White Supremacy in planning future strategies for community control and how much of this psychosis we have internalized in our thinking.  We are also delving into the area of psychohistorical analysis which has very little legitimacy in Western academic circles.  We must take the bold step of tackling new paradigms of thought which critically question our reality.  In other words, we who identify ourselves as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Central Americans must understand that this abnormal psychosis has become the norm, and the norm has become the abnormal.