Fears of Aztan - Smartest Kids in America

In March of last year, MIT named Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Oscar Vazquez and Luis Aranda as winners of the NASA sponsored Underwater Robotics contests.

These four have been called, "The Smartest Kids in America." Beating the well manned and funded team from MIT.

It turns out that they were undocumented immigrants, but NASA awarded them first prize anyway.

Now, that the dust has settled, reality sets in and we find these four exceptionally gifted youth resigning to the plight which is their destiny as is for many of the poor, ignored and persecuted members of our society.

Vazquez and Aranda graduated from Hayden last spring, but they're not in college now because they're undocumented immigrants and thus ineligible for student loans or low cost in-state tuition. Vazquez is hanging drywall and Aranda is filing papers at a Social Security office. Santillan and Arcega are still at Hayden; their chances for a college education are slim.

If these children were from Canada, Europe, or even Asia, they would probably have been assisted in becoming legal residents or been awarded college financial assistance, but with the current hostilities towards Mexicans in general, it is just luck that they have not been deported.

Great minds are not exempt form the xenophobic rampage gripping the drone leading to the upcoming election year.

Some Americans are advocating for constitutional amendments that would allow foreign-born persons to be elected to the presidency and repeal birth right citizenship to prevent the Mexican-American population from gaining political numbers.

Social scientists say that the true nature of these proposed amendments are to keep Hilary Clinton from being elected in 2008 and George P. Bush, who is brown skinned with a Mexican American mother from being elected in 2012.

Fears of Aztlan arise as the Southwestern United States has shown a considerable shift in demographics, where the majority in major cities are Mexican-Americans. Chicanos, the most politically active of Latino cultures in the US, have won seats in Los Angeles and Sacramento and are gaining economic control in much of the Southwest.

Last year Latinos filled one third of the US Job Market and the Latino economy continues to solidify its growing influence in the 21st century, the ripple effects already have begun to profoundly alter the nation’s political, social, cultural, and economic structures.

Anti-diversity advocates like Sen. Tancredo, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Jim Gilchrist and Bill O’Reilly state that they have been warning Americans of this miscegenation of American culture, but what they have failed to accept is that one of Americana's most renowned icons is in essences and substance Mexican in origin - the Cowboy. They also fail to recognize the fact that Mexico, as Nuevo España, funded 80% of the American Revolution and provided troops that fought the British from the Gulf of Mexico to York Town – many were Mestizos and Mexican Indians. The Fourth of July banquet consists of Mesoamerican Indigenous foods introduced by Mexicans to the Europeans in the US: barbecue, corn-on-the-cob, tomatoes, and potatoes.

Ignorance is bliss and some Americans will live in ignorance, believing that only White people have contributed to the building of our nation. I pity them.