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On April 9, the New York Times reported the death of 93-year-old Rodolfo Acuña, whom the obituary’s subhead described as a “Forthright Scholar at Forefront of Chicano Studies.” The highlights: Acuña, “born in East Los Angeles to Mexican immigrant parents,” earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history from USC, taught at CSU Northridge, and authored the bible of Chicano Studies, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (now in its ninth edition).

Acuña’s guiding premise – as his book’s title suggests – was that Mexicans living in the U.S. are a conquered people, suppressed and exploited by “Euro-Americans” (i.e., whites). It was an assertion that resonated powerfully among many Mexican-Americans when Acuña began his academic career in the late 1960s. Back then, rage was the favor of the month among many Latinos who’d been swayed by the more radical extremes of the black civil-rights movement. It was that rage that led to the establishment of Chicano Studies, a useless academic discipline if there ever was one, and that made possible Acuña’s career.

Yet by the end of that career, the Chicano rage of the Sixties was a distant memory, and Acuña’s new bugaboo was “young Chicanos today who fail to recognize themselves as oppressed.” As it happens, they have good reason not to feel oppressed: today, many if not most Mexican-Americans – at least those who are in the county legally – are quite satisfied with their lot. More and more over the decades, they’ve seen themselves as Americans, not as Americans’ victims. This sea change, of course, totally destroyed Acuña’s beloved victimhood narrative. In later editions of Occupied America, he lamented that “the illusion of the American Dream has gripped many younger Mexican Americans,” and that, as a result, they (a) “don’t appreciate their forebears’ sacrifices,” (b) prefer to describe themselves with neutral-sounding labels like “Latino” and “Hispanic” rather than with the more old-fashioned, rebellious-sounding “Chicano,” and (c) embrace “the illusion that they are equal partners in the great society.”

An insistence that Mexicans in America are downtrodden victims – never beneficiaries of the American dream – isn’t the only theme that runs through Acuña’s work, and through the discipline he helped invent. Another is the contention that the pre-Columbian civilizations in what is now Latin America – the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas – were highly sophisticated and peaceable, in contrast to the supposedly primitive and barbaric Spanish conquerors. Acuña actually maintained that the pre-Columbians’ “mathematical discoveries” and “cosmological understandings” were “in advance of those of other civilizations,” even as he chided those who “choose to dwell on the bizarre practices such as human sacrifice” that were, in fact, pivotal elements of those pre-Columbian cultures. Never mind, then, that, as I wrote in The Victims’ Revolution,

the Aztecs appeased the fire god, Huehueteotl, by burning live captives and tearing out their hearts, and paid tribute to the god Tlaloc by burning children to death. (Archaeologists have discovered mass graves of both Aztec and Toltec children—the latter of whom had been decapitated.) And never mind that nearly every important event on the Inca calendar appears to have called for the murder of children—and not just any children, but those who were the healthiest, most well formed, and most beautiful, the better to please the gods.

Was any of this information recorded in Acuña’s textbook?  No. Is it ever brought up in any Chicano Studies classroom? Well, all I know is that in carrying out the research for The Victims’ Revolution – which involved reading a great many textbooks, sitting in on college classes, interviewing professors who are considered the leading experts in the field, and attending several sessions at a national Chicano Studies convention – I never heard a single reference to Aztec, Toltec, Mayan, and Inca atrocities.

No, Chicano Studies has never had time for such things. Nor did Acuña. He was always too laser-focused on the alleged evils of America, which he regarded as bad in every way – racist, corrupt, warlike, rapacious, a country of gangsters, lynch mobs, and robber barons. In Acuña’s view, our territorial gains in the Mexican War were “theft”; ditto the Gadsden Purchase and the annexation of Texas. If not for these acts of thievery, according to Acuña, Mexico would have been far richer than it is now – his assumption being that California and Texas, under Mexican sovereignty, would have developed economies just as extraordinary as the ones they’ve developed as American states. The very idea, needless to say, is ludicrous.

The chief exception to Acuña’s contempt for caucasians was his admiration for British Communists like E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm. Indeed, throughout Occupied America, he gushes over Communists, eulogizing Fideo Castro, for instance, as “the symbol of Latin America’s anticolonial struggle with the United States.” (Castro’s record of human-rights offenses, like the atrocities of the pre-Columbians, goes unmentioned in Acuña’s book.) Acuña mocks Cold War concerns about Communist infiltration as “paranoia,” praises Communist front groups without admitting that they were Communist front groups, and celebrates the Socialist Workers Party, the Mexican Communist Party, and the Maoist August 29th Movement. The men and women whom he holds up as Mexican-American cultural heroes are all radical-left activists; as I pointed out in my book, Mexican-Americans such as “Peanuts animator Bill Melendez, novelist John Rechy, dancer and choreographer Jose Limon, Nobel Prize chemist Mario J. Molina, singers Vikki Carr and Ritchie Valens, and actors Anthony Quinn, Dolores del Rio, Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalban, Eva Longoria, Salma Hayek, Edward Furlong, and Jessica Alba” go unnamed.

But then, such people’s success stories make nonsense of the thesis at the heart of Acuña’s oeuvre. He knew as much, and he hated it, complaining in a later edition of Occupied America that as Mexican Americans entered the middle class in greater and greater numbers, they gained “more of a voice in government and society” and acquired “social and economic interests differing from those of the working class,” and were consequently “coopted by the mainstream.” In other words, their very lives made a joke of Acuña’s victim narrative. Perhaps worst of all, from Acuña’s perspective, is that the people he continued to call Chicanos – long after almost all of them had rejected the label – became increasingly inclined to vote Republican. It makes sense. Latinos tend to be pious Catholics, devoted to family and hostile by nature to such newfangled rubbish as gender ideology, which today’s Democratic Party has placed at the top of its platform.

Did the Times obituary cite Acuña’s America-hatred, his love of Castro, or his enmity toward the very idea of Mexicans thriving in America? Of course not. To be sure, it acknowledged that Acuña could be difficult – litigious, headstrong – but the clear implication was that his problematic traits were driven by an admirable passion for his people’s betterment. The obituary did say that Acuña “was sometimes a target of political conservatives” and that such “conservatives” had succeeded in removing Occupied America (temporarily) from public-school classrooms on the grounds that it “fostered resentment of white people.” What the Times failed to note here was that the book did indeed foster not just resentment but also outright malice toward whites. White-hatred, America-hatred, antipathy toward capitalism, reverence for Communism, and an unshakable victim mentality: these are the toxic elements that make up the legacy of Rodolfo Acuña. Thank goodness that so few Latinos have followed his path!