The Saga of Ken Salazar

What is America's true strength? What has made this country preeminent in the world? Many factors have contributed to our ascendancy, but it's not primarily our military power. It's not our abundant natural resources, not even the pristine continent that we inherited from the Native Americans. It's not even our capitalist economic system, or rather our mixed capitalist/socialistic system. Ken Salazar, the former Colorado attorney general, Colorado senator, Secretary of the Interior and ambassador to the Mexican Republic, knows the truth about our dominance and success: it's our human diversity and our social inclusivity which has allowed us to live out the motto, "E Pluribus Unum." Salazar spells it out in his just published autobiography, Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America.

The San Luis Valley native remembers the words of Ronald Reagan's City on a Hill: "In my mind it was a tall, proud City built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God -blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace." This is Ken Salazar's style, evoking both Republican and Democratic icons in laying out the philosophy that has guided him on his journey from the family ranch near Manassa, to the Denver Capitol of Colorado, to the halls of Congress. and literally to the halls of Moctezuma. 

We have lofty ideals in this country but most of the time we honor them in the breach rather than in the observance. The bedrock American values of diversity and inclusivity have often fallen prey to virulent intolerance, paranoid xenophobia, and deeply rooted racism. The history books are clear about our failures to accept the ideal that "people of all kinds can live in harmony and peace." The dominant Euro American population is determined to maintain their supremacy, and while multiculturalism has made headway, resistance to a full-fledged transformation of society has been strong.

Salazar is a Mexican American. That's what he calls himself. I suppose he finds that necessary, moving in the elite circles he inhabits. But I identify him as a Chicano, a politically significant identifier. I wish he had embraced "Chicano" as an acceptance of his role in the "fight for an inclusive America." "Chicano" denotes recognition of non-white Mexican and Southwestern U.S. indigenous ancestry, and like all mestizo Mexican people, Ken Salazar owns that bloodline, even if in the genetic lottery he ended up rather light-skinned. Chicano consciousness is an absolutely essential awareness, driving the urgent need to elevate the long-suffering predominantly lower-class Hispanics to meaningful economic and social success in the U.S. So far that has not happened. But Salazar's book is the latest salvo in that battle, and it's a good one.

Let me be clear. He may not identify as such, but Ken Salazar is actually very much a Chicano at heart. Conscious of forgotten American history, he laments the tragic failure of American education which perpetuates an abysmal ignorance of diversity and inclusiveness. As a young man he voiced this poignant lament: "How could I have lived for eighteen years in a place that was half Mexican American and yet never learn about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (the treaty which ended the Mexican War of 1846-1848 and ceded more than half of Mexico's territory to the United States)? Why was I never taught that my Mexican ancestors became United States citizens through conquest, not choice? How could U.S. schools have failed so completely to teach students about their own history and heritage--not only mine but everyone else's, too? Why didn't we have a better understanding of the Americas, from Mexico to Central and South America? Could it be possible to unite the Americas to create better opportunity for people of the Western Hemisphere? Could we work together to deal with poverty, security, violence and corruption throughout our shared half of the globe?" Here it is--a solution to the current immigration dilemma, the complete revamping of American education to change the attitudes creating the tragedies of exclusion and nativism.   

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History.