Some Mexicans and Mexican-Americans," writes John Tiffany, "want to see California, New Mexico and other parts of the United States given to Mexico. They call it the 'reconquista,' Spanish for 'reconquest,' and they view the millions of Mexican illegal aliens entering this country as their army of invaders to achieve that takeover." Tiffany points out that, as we've heard in recent news reports, armed Mexican soldiers (in league with or impersonated by drug traffickers, we are told by Mexico's smirking, lying government, which publishes cartoon tracts explaining to Mexican serfs how to sneak across the border into the U.S.A.) have fired on American Border Patrol officers. Illegal immigrants have terrorized American ranchers in border states and the porous Mexican border is an ideal point of entry for Islamist terrorists impersonating Hispanic illegals.

The organization US Border Control reports that, according to something called the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC, fully 30 percent of the nation's two million prison inmates are illegal immigrants. Heather MacDonald, in her 2004 report in the City Journal, wastes no time framing the problem. "Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens," she writes. She goes on to report that 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (1,200 to 1,500 murders) "target" illegal aliens. Up to two thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens. What's worse, according to MacDonold, is that the Calfiornia Department of Justice has known since 1995 that at least 60 percent of the vicious 18th Street Gang in southern California comprises illegal aliens.

Illegal aliens in the United States are repeatedly, incessantly characterized as innocent, hard-working people who just want to find a better life for themselves and their families. The imagery of these invaders as hapless would-be citizens fleeing poverty, willing to "do work that Americans simply will not do," is so pervasive that it constitutes a de facto propaganda campaign. Just as "bums" and "winos" have become "the homeless" (who are repeatedly mischaracterized as misunderstood and disadvantaged people who are simply "down on their luck," rather than as the unpredictable, frequently diseased, often drug-addicted or mentally unstable societal predators that they too often are), illegal aliens have become "undocumented immigrants" in an attempt to equate them with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free who walked wide-eyed through the gates at Ellis Island. The fact that these latter-day "immigrants" crawled past barbed wire fences, raped a few ranchers' wives along the way, and now accept under-the-table wages while dodging the beleaguered police forces seeking them on murder charges, is dismissed as irrelevant; it does not, after all, fit in with the imagery our popular media strive so hard to create.

When I first picked up a copy of America Libre, I thought that's what I was seeing. I thought the book was an attempt to create a sympathetic view of illegal aliens, equating them to Hispanic American citizens and decrying the injustices of, well, actually enforcing immigration laws. When I started reading the book, however, I was shocked by its content.

Do you remember the days following the Oklahoma City bombing? In countless news pieces, we were told that bomber Timothy McVeigh -- since rushed to his execution with his cooperation -- was inspired to commit the act by the book The Turner Diaries. This is a novel written by a white supremacist who fantasizes about a future in which his white-power protagonists will finally hang their other-racial enemies, while striking explosive blows against an oppressive government secretly run by a Jewish conspiracy. The author has written (crudely, in a style that borders on illiterate) another book called "Hunter," about a fellow whose hobbies include shooting interracial couples for fun.

Disturbing as these badly conceived novels were, they paled in comparison to another book, Serpent's Walk, that I acquired from the same mail-order catalog that carried the other two. At the time I was curious to know how a book could drive a man to commit mass murder. The local bookstores would not deal with the publisher in question, so I went the mail order route, not realizing that what I was buying was neo-Nazi filth. When I finally pushed myself to read Serpent's Walk, having more than had my fill of bizarre racial conspiracy theories, I was horrified in a new way: The book was well written.

Featuring a complex narrative and a dynamic protagonist who shows convincing character development over the book's plot arc, Serpent's Walk was clearly written by someone with genuine literary talent. That such a person could be taken in by theories of white supremacist hatred was at least as worrisome as the possibility that such a person might simply be using these malevolent ideas and ideals as a way of gaining power, cynically and manipulatively, over racist true believers.

I did this research in the months following the Oklahoma City bombing. In the intervening years I forgot most of it, gratefully. When you immerse yourself in racist hate literature, it creates a sensation akin to dipping your head in a bucket of garbage. It is cloying, smothering, fetid, and unpleasant; you can't wait to remove yourself from it. All of this came flooding back to me when I happened across a copy of America Libre by "Raul Ramos y Sanchez." Is Ramos a true believer, or the sort of person who hopes to manipulate racist sentiment for personal gain? Does it matter?

On his website, the author claims he wrote the book "as a wake up call to the dangers of extremism--on both sides of this explosive issue. Illegal immigration is a hotly debated topic. Yet it is only the tip of the iceberg." The first portion of this statement is a blatant lie. America Libre is nothing less than a Chicano nationalist Turner Diaries, a racist, hate-filled screed that gins up anti-Anglo resentment by painting a fantasy landscape in which all Americans with Hispanic surnames or Hispanic spouses are rounded up and put in camps. Ramos' heroes fight back by preparing for and then executing the first stages of a Hispanic revolution, ultimately hoping to create a UN-recognized "Hispanic Republic of North America."

The book is more or less competently written, though the author makes many amateurish mistakes as he rushes through his exposition with too much omniscient narration. One rule of good writing is to show the reader rather than tell the reader. Ramos ignores this rule from the outset, as he has a lot of work to do. Specifically, his book is concerned primarily with depicting, transparently, all non-Hispancis as racist, ignorant, incompetent fools driven only by hatred and given only to brutality. There are no complex characters; there are only Hispanics to varying degrees of purity (ranging from a traitorous gang member to Mano, the novel's protagonist) and Anglos exhibiting varying degrees of racism. To the extent that military veteran and bodybuilder Mano at first loves America, then becomes only too eager to commit cold-blooded murder in seeking revenge for the injustices perpetrated against Hispanics, his character could be considered dynamic. He is, however, only a convenient waterboy carrying the author's racist hate.

The Anglos against whom Mano pits himself with only token reluctance are, almost to a man, racist monsters who spit words like "Beaner," "Greaser," and "Pancho" with every breath. When they're not attempting to rape Hispanic women or killing Mano's children with their incompetence (one of the protagonist's children is run down by a military vehicle by accident, while another dies of lack of medical care in one of the resettlement camps into which Hispancis are herded), they're nervously firing into crowds of understandably angry protesters because these weekend warriors are all ill-trained glory hounds suffering delusions of action-hero greatness.

Two things disturb me about America Libre. The first is that this book won an International Latino Book Award when it is clearly no more than a mediocre work from a writing standpoint. (It was also one of USA Today's picks for "Summer Reads" and was similarly lauded in Latina magazine.) The second is that Ramos' depiction of evil, Hispanic-hating Anglos, only too eager to deny Social Security benefits to illegal aliens (when they're not cruelly deporting them outright), is obviously what he truly thinks of non-Hispanics. "America Libre" exists for only one reason: to foment hatred and revolutionary sentiment among a Hispanic population that has already become volatile in the Southwest United States.

The most damning evidence of this fact is that the author bends over backwards, metaphorically, to excuse the actions of one of his primary characters -- a wealthy instigator named "Jo" who pays a gang member to fire on police officers in order to stir up trouble in the Hispanic ghetto. Believing this will help encourage the inevitable Hispanic revolution (which Jo in turns believes is necessary to correct the many injustices wrought by the evil Anglos and "rednecks" -- oh, does Ramos love to throw around the word "redneck"), she is supposedly shocked when her paid criminals go "too far" and kill the police officers on whom they fire. This is supposed to be one of Jo's "greatest regrets," and she is clearly absolved for this crime in the minds of Ramos' surviving protagonists. By the novel's end, Mano is fully committed to the revolution and to "justicia." He no longer considers himself an American at all, and neither does his long-suffering wife. He vows to continue fighting for these goals. Yet were it not for Jo's calculated rabble-rousing, two of Mano's three children would still be alive.

Or would they? Obviously, in Ramos' mind, the confining of Hispanics in concentration camps is inevitable in an Anglo-dominated, racist America. The crimes and violence perpetrated by illegal aliens and by violent Hispanic gangs like MS-13 are, well, understandable, because, gosh, America is full of redneck racists who won't give Hispanics a fair shake. Why, imagine the injustice, the institutionalized racism, of refusing to let illegal aliens -- excuse me, undocumented immigrants -- live off the earnings of American citizens who pay their taxes! No wonder those poor people started murdering politicians they didn't like. After all, in Ramos' vision of the future, the Supreme Court is packed with "hardline conservatives," so obviously you can't expect to vote such tyrants out of office. Better to revolt and start shooting people -- at least in Ramos' mind.

There is an obvious parallel to be made between America Libre and right-wing liberty fiction like Unintended Consequences and Enemies Foreign and Domestic. These latter two books, to use just one pair from among many examples, are also fantasies -- fiction in which oppressed people overthrow (or at least resist) their oppressors. The fundamental difference between America Libre and these right-wing books is, however, that libertarian fiction is rooted in a yearning for a free people to return to the ideals our Founding Fathers set forth in the Constitution of the United States. In this they are an expression of Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. America Libre is, by contrast, a racist daydream rooted not in a desire for justice, but in a bloodthirsty yearning for revenge. In Ramos' book, it is not so important that Hispanic people fight for freedom; what is important to Ramos is that those redneck Anglos get what's coming to them. This is a fundamental difference in tenor, tone, and intent.

Our children are growing up in a nation on whose streets they may not be able to communicate as adults unless they learn Spanish. Given this tide and the implicatinos of the illegal alien invasion threatening to swamp social services, education, and law enforcement alike, to pen a monstrous diatribe like America Libre is not merely offensive. It is tantamount to a declaration of war, comparable to soliciting violence and murder for the sake of a never-attainable "justice" that can be wrought only when Hispanics have hanged their imagined enemies from the nation's lampposts. That is the terrifying message of America Libre. This is not a "wake-up call" about widespread extremism; this is a La Raza fantasy of the "reconquista."

A third thing that worries me about this little red book, this Maoist declaration of Chicano nationalist hatred for and resentment toward non-Hispanics, is that nobody is talking about it. Before my own review at Amazon, there was not a single critical reading of the novel. Certainly nobody thought to question the racist tone or seditious implications of a book that encourages violent uprising against non-Hispanics. In this, America Libre certainly is a "wake-up" call about one man's extremism.

That man calls himself Raul Ramos y Sanchez, and he should be ashamed of himself.