666 Laws
By Tony Diaz
I am writing this the day 666 laws go into effect in Texas- giving it the title of the most far-right state of the Union.
Of course, metaphors are forced confessions. So the number 666 is appropriate. Some of the laws are so evil that I suspect the devil has self deported from Texas. Of course, we activists are used to the heat. So although some of this may seem new, it is clear to we community organizers on the ground that this is a reboot of past oppression. Texas is always behind the times. Retro-fashion is cool, retro-racism is not cool.
I’m not going to go over every single one of these laws. I don’t even have time to provide a “top ten worst laws” list. There is one specific law that demands our attention.
Texas’s right wing Republicans, as in other states, have implemented their own “Anti-Critical Race Theory Law.” I hate to repeat that name because it plays into the right wing strategy of misinformation. This law should be called the “Anti-Black Lives Matter Law” or the “Anti-George Floyd Era Law” because this law is intended to prevent and intimidate educators from talking about the structural racism exposed during that movement. Notice that news about the anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns picked up steam as more and more confederate statues were being taken down across the country. CRT misinformation has now dominated the news.
The Anti-CRT movement is a repurposing of past oppression. I don’t mean in general. I have receipts.
You see, I am a Librotraficante. You can translate that into English as Book Trafficker.
I clearly remember when Arizona right wing Republicans banned Mexican American Studies. They enforced the law in 2012, forcing administrators to walk into class rooms, during class time, and box up books by some of our most beloved authors, in front of our youth. There were 80+ works on what should have been extolled as the gold standard of Ethnic Studies Courses. This curriculum raised the graduation rate to 98% for the predominantly Mexican American student population of the Tucson Unified School District.
Instead of celebrating our art, history, and culture, reactionary Republicans banned it.
When I and 4 other veteran members of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say heard about this attack on our familia in Tucson, we were enraged.
If Arizona officials were going to ban our history, we would make more.
We organized the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle back into Tucson the books that formed the brilliant Mexican American Studies Curriculum that Arizona right wing Republicans banned.
We mobilized Houston’s Community Cultural Capital, then linked with Communities across Texas to unite with our gente from Arizona. Soon the entire Southwest galvanized, Calfornia, then other states. We united to overturn that racist law.
Each member of our crew had over 10 years experience (at least) organizing our community through Nuestra Palabra. I founded Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say in April of 1998. It would become the first regular Latino reading series in a city where we formed over 45% of the population. Librotraficante High Tech Aztec aka Bryan Parras, Librotraficante Lips Mendez aka Lupe Mendez-recently named Texas Poet Laureate; Librotraficante La Laura aka Laura Razo, and Librotraficante Lilo aka Liana Lopez.
We are approaching the ten year anniversary of the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan, and it is clear that right wing Republicans have re-purposed that attack on our community, our imaginations, our history, our culture. They have changed the details, but the overall attack plan is the same. And this time it has spread.
But we are expert. We are fueling the bus, re-stocking the contraband prose, and alerting all our Librotraficante Under Ground Libraries.
Let us know if you are ready to ride.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer, activist, and professor Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, was the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He earned his bachelor's degree in Communications from De Paul University in Chicago. Diaz is currently a professor of Mexican American Literature and Rhetorical Analysis in Houston, Texas.