By David Magallanes / Guest contributor
On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King gave, in retrospect, an eerily prophetic speech that hinted at his assassination one day later. He also appeared to shred the veil between our perceived reality and Ultimate Reality — what Chicanos would call “Aztlán.” On that fateful night, King said in a stirring and at the same time troubling speech:
“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything” [Wikipedia].
We see here that just as Moses had led his people to the top of a mountain and showed them the Promised Land, so do other teachers and philosophers who both preceded and followed Moses, attempt to show us a way to make our lives truly meaningful and at least relatively happy.
Life coaches, such as Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and countless other gurus, orators and writers have tried and tried and tried to get us to understand that as transitory as our life might be in absolute terms, it is nonetheless of infinite importance and is an integral part of the unfolding of the universe.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve laid the groundwork for a journey that in itself has the potential to fill us with awe and energize our life as surely as the view of the Promised Land must have transfixed and transformed those who looked down upon it from high above.
So now we’ve prepared. We have our gear. Now let’s get on with this journey into Aztlán, into the very depths of our being.
The greatest loss of all is to have lived and not partaken in the delights of a deeper realization of reality. What we perceive as “real” is the product of our thinking, and our thinking can be tuned, much like radios, to a frequency that discerns a core of reality not obvious to the masses. Once we become aware of this other level of existence, we won’t even want to “go back home again,” since our more immediate “home” — where we come from, spiritually speaking — was relatively limited in scope. Instead, we will yearn for our ancestral home, our “Eden,” which Mexicanos and Chicanos might interpret as “Aztlán.”
Chicano author Luis Leal describes Aztlán as “the lost paradise” (p. 13).* In his view, Aztlán parallels the biblical Eden, to which both Adam and Eve had lost access because, well, they “blew it” (my words).
In a sense, we too have “blown it” because, in too many cases, we have lost that vision of a more peaceful, more meaningful, more abundant life. Instead, we find ourselves grappling at times (if not often) with anger, stress, finances that crush us and relationships in which we don’t find happiness and fulfillment. We’ve been wandering for so long in the desert, just as the Jews of the Old Testament did. The difference being that we’ve been wandering, symbolically speaking, in the Sonoran desert of northwest Mexico, far from our ancestral Aztlán, rather than the wilderness of Sinai, far from the Jews’ ancestral homeland.
But writers like Leal try to bring us to the mountaintop, to enable us to look down and gasp, “What a view!” At that moment, our perspective changes, sometimes radically, but always forever.
My epiphany — the moment I finally began to understand the concept of Aztlán, was when I read (on p. 13) Leal’s account* of Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya’s character Clemente Chavéz in his (Anaya’s) novel, “Heart of Aztlán.” Here, Anaya describes a typical profoundly spiritual moment, the kind that normally occurs maybe a couple of times in one’s lifetime (if we’re lucky). Clemente’s life is instantly turned, quite literally, inside-out:
“Time stood still, and in that enduring moment he felt the rhythm of the heart of Aztlán beat to the measure of his own heart. Dreams and visions became reality, and reality was but the thin substance of myth and legends. A joyful power coursed from the dark womb-heart of the earth into his soul and he cried out I AM AZTLÁN!” (p. 131)
There it is! I AM AZTLÁN! That is what had escaped us so long ago when, coincidentally, we had lost paradise, when we had lost our way and couldn’t find the breadcrumbs to recover our way back, perhaps until now.
We’ve been looking in all the wrong places (possibly the same places where we’ve been searching for “love”). We’ve been looking for something outside of ourselves, when all this time it was “within.” Our divinely inspired teachers have “hit us over the head” with this idea, often to no avail, because the tendency of the world is to look in the wrong direction — outwardly — for understanding.
Leal concludes his essay in a manner that stunningly echoes the words of the great teachers: “…whoever wants to find Aztlán, let him look for it, not on the maps, but in the most intimate part of his being.”
And so, we see that Aztlán is far more than the physical place from which the Aztecs began their pilgrimage to Tenochtitlán, the heart of their extensive, powerful and ultimately doomed empire. The attainment of Aztlán, a state of mind, is, in the larger view, our objective, that inner place from which we perceive the world and deeper levels of reality. What that means for us in our day-to-day experiences and outlook will be explored next week.
*Edited by Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomeli. Aztlán — Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Academia/El Norte Publications, 1989.
— David Magallanes is the creator of his own enterprise, Real World Projects, a business primarily dedicated to building distribution outlets for highly reputable products that offer a healthier life and a more vibrant lifestyle. An emerging branch of Real World Projects is Edifiquemos, a Spanish language enterprise dedicated to teaching the Spanish-speaking how to create a profitable international (U.S./Mexico) enterprise with low investment and high earning potential. David may be available for speaking opportunities. To contact him and for more information, you are invited to visit and explore his web sites at www.realworldprojects.info and at www.edifiquemos.com