Aztlan

**Aztlan**, officially the **Socialist American Republic of Aztlan**, is a constituent state of the Union of Socialist American Republics.

## History

### Pre-Revolution

After the Delano Grape Strike was broken up by the National Guard in 1965, the state of California issued a warrant for the arrests of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, on trumped-up charges of obstruction of justice and inciting violence. Chávez fled California, relocating to Tucson, Arizona. Huerta was apprehended by the state and killed in a shootout.

With Huerta's death, Chávez became convinced that peaceful striking, while important, would not alone end the plight of the Latino farmer, and that more direct action was required.

He began his crusade on a minor scale, going out in the night and distributing flyers advertising secret meetings for urban Latinos tired of police brutality and poor wages. In 1967 he brought together the cotton and citrus farmers of southern Arizona and led them in a strike against Arizona's white agrarian elite. Once again, the National Guard broke up the strike with brutal force. 12 farmers were dead and Caesar Chávez was wanted on charges of High Treason against the Government and People of the United States of America. Chávez went into hiding. Neither the U.S. government nor the Pima County Sheriff's department could find him; he had completely vanished.

Chávez was in reality still in Tucson and, sheltered by many of the dispossessed workers he had met with in the previous two years, redoubled his efforts. Growing more radical still, he spent his nights sabotaging the personal property of the farm-owners and holding midnight rallies. It was at one of these rallies that he met a young lawyer named Oscar Acosta.

Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta was an up and coming civil rights lawyer and Chicano movement activist who took on police brutality and discrimination in southern California. He, too, fell victim to the increasing tyranny and brutishness of the U.S. government and found himself disbarred. He returned to his native El Paso and became a prominent anti-war activist. But, by 1968, protests against the Vietnam war had grown violent, with most major cities in the USA in near-revolution. The Federal Government, in response, declared itself in a state of domestic war, suspending civil rights and jailing dissidents. Oscar heard whispers of Chávez's rallies and drove to Tucson, as the embers of revolution began to smoke around the country. Chicano unrest across the southwestern USA grew. Student walkouts and protests occurred daily. Chicanos began to assert themselves and their culture. They wanted a land in which they were the majority, where they would not be brutalized for their skin color or language. They looked to their Aztec heritage and named their homeland, the illegally seized territory from the Mexican-American War, accordingly. They called it Aztlán. With Aztlán came the Aztlán Workers Liberation Force, founded in 1968 by Chávez and Acosta.

Acosta and Chávez and the AWLF worked tirelessly together, forging relationships with alienated Latino proletariat across New Mexico, Arizona and South Texas. Their efforts to expand in California failed, due to widespread crackdowns. By 1969, Latinos throughout southern California were fleeing into Arizona and Mexico due to the unbearable brutality of the Californian counter-revolution.

The AWLF organized a general strike, planned for the 14 of March, 1970. Heavy resistance by the establishment was expected, and so Acosta began arming farm-workers. It started small--Molotov cocktails ready to be assembled stashed under floorboards, surplus munitions stolen in the night from army bases and smuggled under the hood of a tractor. It wasn't much: a pistol here, brass knuckles there, and a flare gun or two, but it helped. In mid-1969, Hector Veracruz, an ex-con incarcerated for smuggling weapons into Mexico, joined the cause, and began smuggling weapons out of mexico, and into the hands of Latinos throughout the southwest. Now came assault rifles and bayonets and bombs. ATF raids intensified as the government feverishly searched for the source, but Veracruz was never apprehended.

### Revolution

On the morning of October 27, Caesar Chávez awoke to his surprise to news of Worcester, MA, burning in the flames of revolution. Chávez pooled his resources and, three days later, called a premature general strike throughout the southwest.

Farmworkers walked off of the land, retreated into their shantytowns, and reemerged toting guns and machetes. Industrial workers cut fuses and broke machinery, blockading factory doors with steel and their iron wills. The National Guard of Arizona was the first to fire on the strikers, and were immediately fired back upon. El Paso was next to erupt into violence.

#### Socialist Republic of Aztlan

Now in all-out revolution, the AWLF declared the independece of the Socialist Republic of Aztlán (*La República Socialista de Aztlán*), claiming all of the territory of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, and pledged allegiance to the Socialist Army of America. Caesar Chávez was the first *Presidente de República* and began to restructure his militia into a proper fighting force. He waged a vicious guerilla campaign in the cities and fields of southern Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. In Texas, the National Guard responded quickly and with force, rolling out tanks and even beginning airstrikes. The AWLF was pushed out of El Paso, but fighting continued even without AWLF leadership.

Eventually, clear zones of control began to coalesce. By 1972, after two years of intense fighting, the AWLF controlled only Tucson and parts of southern Arizona completely, and government forces began closing in.

#### Expansion

Fortune, however, was on their side. The Arizona national guard began falling apart as a coherent fighting force and desertions skyrocketed. On December 16, 1972, Augustus Frederickson in Phoenix and his Revolutionary Phoenix Army (RPA), a small militia force of disenchanted vietnam veterans and college students, stormed the capital building of Phoenix, forcing then-governor Jack Williams and his cabinet to relocate to Flagstaff. Frederickson joined the USAR and, in his first act, recognized Chávez's government and offered to cede all land south of the Gila River to Aztlán.

The AWLF, recognizing its dire situation, accepted Marx's offer, renouncing its claims to the rest of Arizona. With the northern frontier secured, and the Arizona Guard in pieces, the AWLF began once again to expand. They liberated western Arizona, capturing the city of Yuma on the California border, the city of Chávez's birth, on January 29, 1973. 1974 was spent on the so-called Desert March toward El Paso. On 2 November, 1974, El Paso was captured from the Texas National Guard . Texas's government, under assault from the west from the AWLF and the east from Babineaux's Worker's Red Militia of Louisiana, part of the new Union of Socialist American Republics, was unable to withstand to pressure of both of the encroaching armies. With the U.S. Military mostly evacuated from the area and engaged in fighting on the East Coast and Deep South, the National Guard was unable to compete. Texas fell to a revolution in Austin in 1975. The AWLF forced the newly independent Peoples' Republic of Texas to cede everything south of the Brazos river and west of the Colorado river to Aztlán. The PRT joined the USAR on May 1, 1975.

#### Fighting the NCR

From 1975 to 1979, Aztlán engaged in large-scale fighting against the armies of the New California Republic, a reactionary state based in Los Angeles, composed of the remnants of the State of California's government, which had fled south after the success of the Berkeley Revolution and the new California SAR in Northern California. The fighting devolved into trench warfare along the banks of the Colorado river, lasting until 1979, when the California SAR finally conquered Southern California. Aztlán is allowed to keep the land east of Riverside, California, that it had occupied. In Delano, where Chávez once struck, the Filipino workers now controlled the grape farms. Chávez and Acosta, tired of war, agree to renounce their claims on the rest of Southern California.

#### Joining the USAR

Now surrounded by the rapidly expanding USAR, Aztlán found itself in a tough diplomatic position. To the south, Mexican forces had begun building up on the southern border, eager to take advantage of Aztlán's war exhaustion to reconquer lost territory. To the north, the USAR could at any point decide to forcibly incorporate Aztlán and Aztlán would be unable to resist. In 1981, the fall of the last remaining US government forces left the USAR the sole power north of the Gila river. After the death of César Chávez (who had supported remaining independent) on February 24, 1981, the last obstacle to accession was removed and Aztlán entered the USAR. Oscar Zeta Acosta became the first governor of the Aztlán SAR on 14 March 1981.

## Flag

    The flag of Aztlán finds its origins in the flag of the United Farm Workers (UFW) founded by Dolores Huerta. The black eagle on a red and white background was designed to be easily-reproducible by striking farm-workers. This flag would also be used as the first flag of the Socialist Republic of Aztlán, and remained in use until 1972, when a new flag was designed, incorporating elements from the Mexican flag to stress common mexican heritage.