Wampum

This is my Los Angeles of Memory keepsake jpg. My father's mother's father's father came to Los Angeles (from German Denmark) about 30 years before this photo was taken, and their home had grape arbors and rocking horse oil wells. My mother's father came to Los Angeles (from Indian Territory) about the same temporal distance after the photo was taken, when lots of Oklahoma/Arkansaws Indians moved to the City of Angels, followed twenty years later by BIA relocatees from Dinétah and the Northern Plains, making LA the largest Federally Recognized Indian metropolis in the the US. And that's not counting los Indios. From time to time I remember I'm an Angeleno. From Alta California. Republic of Mexico. A Wicked Far Western Settlements Cherokee¹.

The Republicans have a demographic problem. Democrats have one too. Macho values, but no mucho dinero, and La Migra. That's not a win. Money, but politically colonized, and La Migra. That's not a win either. Both parties may fail to find a means to incorporate spanish speaking Americans, native and naturalized, and make labor, and capital, predictable and ... unarmed, removing La Migra as it exists, and creating something that hasn't existed, yet. For as long as that endures, Texas and the states of the Mexican War cessessions will be cyclic toss-ups, or decided by the local Anglo elites. Which ever party figures out the accommodation problem first will have ... predictable electoral votes.

Leaving capital free to move at will up and down (mostly down) the Americas, and attempting to regulate labor, and economic migration, seasonal, short-term or long-term, seems like a non-starter, for us under-capitalized documented prisioners in El Norte, so some Dem, or someone else, is going to have to drive a wooden stake through the heart of Bill Clinton's "North American Free Trade Agreement" and its sequela. Hell, Pat Buchanan could start speaking economically and culturally sound Spanglish, kicking NAFTA and capitalists and not kicking brown people and then ... now that would be awkward. A business trip took me to California in the '00 cycle around primary time and I couldn't figure out why he thought an anti-Hispanic message would win him California, let alone put him in the cat-bird seat in the next several cycles.

I'm going to dream of tacos. Pico and Sepulveda. Pico and Sepulveda. Pico and Sepulveda. Pico and Sepulveda.

Others writing about this: Digby at Hullabaloo, Pam Spaulding at Pandagon, Jeralyn (who took no position on Arnold Schwarzenegger vs Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in Darrell Issa's recall of Gov. Grey Davis, courtesy of Enron's gas and electric price destabilization whipsaws) at Talk Left, cookie jill askippy the bush kangaroo and probably others.

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¹ In 1822 the Republic of Mexico granted Cherokees in the formerly Mexican Arkansaws freedom and immigration rights to the eastern part of the Mexican province of Texas. In 1839 the Republic of Texas attacked the Cherokee Towns in east Texas. Most of the Western Cherokee moved to Indian Territory, though some moved to Mexico. These, and the Arkansaws Cherokee bands are the Old Settlers of the Western Settlements in Tsalagi history.