Dr. Navarro's Radical Ideas

In UCR, 36% of the student population in a campus of 31,000 is Latino, Navarro recalls that in many summits and events that he has organized only a handful of students and a small amount of Latino faculty turnout to support. Navarro feels that many UCR students lack an interest in civil rights in contrast with counterparts from his generation. This significant cultural mental shift to the individual from the collective with newer generations is also reflected on the lack of interest from students to participate in supporting the Ethnic Studies department on campus, which the Chicano movement fought to implement. Our communities are short of much needed leaders. Dr. Navarro firmly believes that we need to re-equip ourselves with a new movement …show more content…
Navarro’s radical ideas expressed in Mexicano and Latino Politics and the Quest for Self-determination: What Needs to be Done. The premise of the book underlines what he calls the 3 D’s in politics “Desperate people do desperate things in desperate times.” Navarro argues that one of the reasons for the extremist ideas of the current presidential candidates like Trump and Sanders is due to the fact that the country is in serious trouble from a policy perspective and extreme measures must be taken. “The United States is no longer the superpower it was 10 years ago. “China, Russia, India are coming up and now Mexico could become a superpower in the 21st century and that will perhaps threaten the interests of the United States,” says Dr. Navarro. He is currently working on a book titled Mexico: Emergent Global Power of the 21st Century which he hopes will prepare people for what he predicts is coming. Through a qualitative and quantitative approach, Dr. Navarro’s book Mexicano and Latino Politics and the Quest for Self-determination: What Needs to be Done concludes and justifies two possible ideological change solutions. The first is that we as Latinos/Mexicanos have the possibility to become a nation within a nation and he uses as example the functionality of the Mormon Nation of Utah and that of French Quebec in which those communities themselves control politics and education. The second solution Dr. Navarro offers as an extreme measure that could be taken should conditions become so intolerable and deplorable for Latinos in the United States--which in his opinion can happen with a person like Trump in power. Latinos can mobilize to seek succession and create an independent country or reintegrate with Mexico who is moving fast to becoming a major