One campus in which opposition to MEChA has escalated to new heights is California State University at Northridge. Rudolfo Acuna, co-founder of Chicano Studies, says an off-campus conservative group has been monitoring activities and harassing MEChA--going so far as placing a full-page ad in a major daily which attacked the student organization. The conservative group has also accused the president of that chapter of MEChA of attacking its members.

During a recent statewide MEChA conference held at Cal State-Northridge, campus police attempted to arrest the MEChA president, Filiberto Gonzalez, for allegedly throwing a journalist out of the conference. Acuna and Gonzalez maintain that the person was actually a member of the conservative organization, posing as a journalist. Gonzalez says that the incident was featured on the conservations web page the day after the: coherence. Although charges were filed against Gonzalez, the district attorney did not prosecute.

At the Universities of California at Riverside and at Berkeley, police recently arrested demonstrators -- mostly Latinos and many of them MEChA members--who protested against the recently passed Proposition 209. Unless the charges of "Failure to disperse" against the students are dropped at UC-Riverside, Chicano/Latino students are contemplating a consumer boycott of a proposed university village, according to Zarina Zanipatin.

Aztlan was the original homeland of the Mexica--more commonly known as the Aztecs. It is also the name Chicano activists gave to the southwest United States--the land that formerly belonged to Mexico. MEChA was founded in California in 1969 and since its inception, has been at the forefront of virtually all of the major human rights struggles of Mexican Americans.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Cox, Matthews & Associates