Excerpt of LA Speech

Reies Tijerina was one of the four founders of the militant Chicano political movement. This is an excerpt from his talk at UCLA in 1969 where he declared that La Raza would take over the entire American continent, north, and south. He mentions that this mestizo racial supremacy theory is based on the book by Jose Vasconcelos, who was the major pro-Nazi propagandist in Latin America at the start of World War II.

Though he says La Raza will dominate “with peace”, Reies Tijerina was infamous for his armed raid on a courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, where he hoped to kidnap a DA that opposed him. His men shot two police officers in that raid, both men and the DA were Hispanic. Tijerina wrote in his biography that his biggest enemies had always been other Hispanics, who wanted to live the American way of life. When he was sent to prison, he was diagnosed as being a psychopath.

Background

Tijerina is one of the Chicano leaders honored in the historical mural at Chicano Park in San Diego, along with communist dictators, Castro and Che Guevara. He’s third from the right in the image below.

The officer, who was killed, was going to testify against Tijerina. He was brutally beaten to death shortly before the trial. They put his body in his vehicle and pushed it off a cliff into a ravine to make it look like an accident. They did not have enough evidence to charge anyone, but it was thought fairly certain to have been Tijerina’s men who murdered him to prevent him from testifying against Tijerina. See the book, “Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid” by Peter Nabokov for more information about Reies Tijerina.

Compared Himself to Nazi

In an Interview with the Albuquerque Journal, Tijerina compared himself to Nazi war criminal, Rudolf Hess. See the image below.

Excerpted from the Albuquerque Journal article,
Reies Lopez Tijerina — ‘A hero to the Chicano movement’.

Image added to provide a thumbnail.