Reyes Cárdenas: “If We Praise the Aztecs”

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Reyes Cárdenas: “If We Praise the Aztecs”
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https://doi.org/10.3735/9781935306856.book-part-138

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Abstract

In his poem “If We Praise the Aztecs,” Reyes Cárdenas expresses the dilemma faced by many Mexican American activists in the years following the decline of the Chicano Movement. Being of that generation himself, his insight allows him to capture the mixed feelings felt by many Chicanas and Chicanos who had championed various causes during the turbulent period of the 1960s and 1970s. These causes included social, cultural, and political actions that were defined ideologically by their militant and revolutionary undercurrents. By the time Cárdenas published “If We Praise the Aztecs” in his 1986 book of poems I Was Never a Militant Chicano, that radical activist period was in the past.

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