I am pretty shocked to learn from
Liberal Oasis that CNN's Lou Dobbs ran a scare story about "Aztlan" last night that featured a map sourced to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group. Dobbs evidently used the map to suggest that Mexico intends to retake "Aztlan," defined by the CCC as the states that were in whole or in part annexed by the USA after the Mexican-American War. I'm shocked that CNN would run information provided to them by the CCC on immigration -- it is exactly like running some negative slur against African-Americans sourced to the KKK. It also demonstrates extreme ignorance about the concept of Aztlan.
"Aztlan" refers in the Nahuatl language to the "place of the herons" that was the home of the Aztec people before the historic migration of the Aztecs from wherever Aztlan was to Lake Tenochtitlan, the site of Mexico City. Speculation places Aztlan anywhere from the state of Nayarit in western Mexico to as far north as Utah (where I have, in fact, noticed a few herons).
There are a lot of different views of Aztlan out there, but I would say this myself: Aztlan figures prominently in Chicano culture, but not as part of some European-style irredentist urge to reunite the southwestern states with Mexico. Totally to the contrary, the concept of Aztlan is used to place Chicanos as natives of the United States and is a reaction to a dominant narrative that describes people of Mexican/New Mexican origin as foreigners regardless of how many generations their family has lived north of the border. The message is we are here to stay and we are not going "back" to Mexico -- the United States, not Mexico, is our homeland.
The point is that if CNN believes a discussion of the concept of Aztlan is appropriate in the context of a visit by Mexican President Vicente Fox to the United States (which I would seriously question) there are plenty of reputable Chicano Studies professors out there who I am sure would have been pleased to give a better dissertation on the topic than I just gave. Shame on Lou Dobbs and CNN for using a white supremacist group as their source to explain Aztlan to the public.