Who Are La Raza?

For many people, the word “Raza” goes back to an ancestral place; it’s old, grounded in the people whose blood runs deep in this hemisphere. Embodied in La Raza is the story of how the world was once black and white, and how it was transformed into a rainbow of colors. Embodied in La Raza is the blood of Inca, Maya, Mexica, Tolteca, Zapoteca, and hundreds of other Indigenous peoples—some mixed with the blood of the conquerors, some mixed with the blood of the enslaved, and some mixed with both.

We the orphans of opportunity

have dared to pass through the door opened by the Zapatistas

and cross to the other side of the mirror

where everyone can be the same

because we are different,

where there can be more than one way of living

where rejection of the present system

exists together with the desire to build a new world

in which many worlds will fit.

(from the Zapatista Movement)