The Lesson of the Navajo

Hispanics Ally Themselves with the Struggle of Native Americans in Arizona

A sort of mystical Native American energy has drifted into the movement that Hispanics have organized to battle the new Arizona immigration law. “Until now, the Indians were going about things on their own, and this is the first time that they have joined forces with something more,”* pointed out one of the local leaders in the fight against the SB 1070 legislation. The demonstration on Saturday that spread through the streets of Phoenix started with an Indian ceremony, and their representatives were the first who spoke at the rostrum.

While Native Americans were inspired by speeches given by the likes of the Bolivian Evo Morales, it is also a certainty that, in their own right, the influence of Native Americans in Arizona is considerable. In this state, 21 different tribes live on Indian reservations, which account for a quarter of the total land area. In this movement that defends the rights of illegal immigrants, one sees posters of Geronimo — the Apache rebel who fought over these deserts — overlapping posters of Zapata.

“They crossed the border because they were here long before the borders,”* explained Salvador Reza, one of the leaders of the mobilization against the SB 1070 law, which will go into effect starting July 29 if the global protests do not prevent it, and which will allow the police to stop and identify whomever they believe to be in the U.S. illegally. Members of the Tohono Oodham tribe, for example, speak Spanish in northern Mexico and English in the southern United States because they are brothers separated by the border. This tribe, with 20,000 members, is the second largest in the U.S. after the Navajo Nation, which, with 250,000 members, is the largest tribe in the country. And there are also the Hopi, Cocopah, Apaches, Yavapai, Mtehojave, Quechan and Paiute …

In front of the Arizona capitol, one can see a giant statue in tribute to the Navajos who participated in the Second World War; the Navajo code talkers, the forgotten heroes of that conflict, used the Navajo language to communicate. Their ancestral language became a simple yet secret code that remained indecipherable to the Japanese. The downside was that they could not be captured alive (as in their portrayal in “Wind Talkers,” the John Woo film with Nicolas Cage, which had so many slow motion shots that it doesn’t do justice to their feats) because, above all, the code had to be protected. Their role was recognized only much later in the 1960s because, in theory, their identities had to remain secret so that enemies (at that time, the communists) would not engage in a study of the Navajo language. In reality, at the root of this omission was the deliberate intention to deprive the Indians of their due recognition.

The vast Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona is a rough and arid territory without resources, poverty stricken and using prohibition to battle alcoholism. But despite all this, it is awash in ancestral dignity. There are two sides to the conflict dividing the state and the country: those who support deportation of all illegal immigrants and those who fight for the civil rights they earned with their work. The Native Americans have chosen to support the latter side. The Navajo Reservation contains two of the most scenic sites in the United States: Monument Valley, with icebergs of red rock that stand in the middle of nowhere, where John Ford filmed masterpieces like “The Searchers”; and the Canyon de Chelly, a sacred site for the Navajos because it embodies their resistance to the white man and especially symbolizes their principal virtue: that they never gave in and that they keep on living there. A real lesson in life.

*Translator’s note: Original quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified.