Antonio Villaraigosa Educational Campaign

Press Release

Villaraigosa Renounces MEChA Past After Bruin Alumni Association Campaign

May 12, 2005; Los Angeles, CA – Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa yesterday renounced the militant Chicano college organization MEChA he once led at UCLA, following a campaign by the Bruin Alumni Association to publicize his radical ties.  As reported in today’s  La Opinion by reporter Jazmin Ortega, Villaraigosa stated “I am not in agreement with most of {MEChA’s] precepts. … Of course I renounce its philosophy.”  The comment was in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference and stemmed from four days of sustained demands by the Bruin Alumni Association that Villaraigosa renounce his MEChA ties.  President Andrew Jones stated: “Villaraigosa’s renouncement of MEChA is a victory for our Antonio Villaraigosa Educational Campaign, and a victory for UCLA alums who oppose MEChA’s history of violence and seditionist rhetoric.”  Villaraigosa’s statement Wednesday followed a dismissive response to the same questions at a Monday press conference; and Villaraigosa’s speech at a MEChA National Conference held on the UCLA campus in 1998.

            The Antonio Villaraigosa Educational Campaign publicized two issues:

- Archival investigation of UCLA campus newspaper The Daily Bruin revealed that Villaraigosa (then known simply as Tony Villar) engineered the removal of the director of the Chicano Studies Center for his refusal to include “community involvement,” specifically from the Communist Chicano group “National Committee to Free Los Tres.”  The NCFLT, as the full story on www.bruinalumni.com shows, was a Marxist-Leninist faction whose goals included the creation of a "revolutionary vanguard" dedicated to the "liberation of the Mexican people."

- MEChA itself holds similarly racist, separatist and treasonous views.  Its founding document El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan states, “We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent,” declares that “For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts,” and introduced the motto “Por la raza, todo. Fuera de la raza, nada (For those of the [Hispanic] race, everything.  For those not of the [Hispanic] race, nothing).”

The Bruin Alumni Association, a non-profit 501(c)3 organization founded in 2005, serves to educate UCLA alumni and the general public about campus matters, including the radical take-over of the faculty, administration, and student body, and seeks to reverse the ongoing destruction of UCLA’s good name.

* The La Opinion article “The delinquency, center of the last days of the campaign” is at http://www.laopinion.com/supp62/?rkey=00050511221605389466. Relevant quotes are in the last paragraph.

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