Out here on the border, antiquated concepts of race lie in the desert like deserted DeSoto cars. Rusted and abandoned, they remain mile markers on a road to an ugly past. Occasionally, tourists come out with a tow truck in tow, and pick up one and haul it away.

The locals are usually happy about that.

Hillary Clinton was poking through the desert the other day. She found none other than Raul Yzaguirre, a washed-up Latino racist whose ideas are more tired than the indigenous Mexican burro on which he rode to intellectual splendor and great acclaim from guilty American liberals.

You can read a sympathetic entry about La Raza here. Most importantly, Hillary will be pleased to note that La Raza became a multi-million dollar producing exclusionist advocacy group. Vampire-like, she clearly expects to be able to suck dollars out of the necks of the people Yzaguirre co-opted (in the finest Mexican tradition of co-optation).

Yzaguirre often engaged in inflammatory rhetoric to make his racist points. He once deried an English-language movement by saying, “US English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks.”

Classy guy all around.

No, actually, he’s a schmuck, that Yiddish probably being to his ears like a Border Patrol agent is to a coyote. Which helps explain why he got picked up by Billary for her campaign: she needs bigger schmucks than she is, in order to come across like a sensible, moderate woman person.

Aztlan, Chicomoztoc: The spiritual homes of Yzaguirre.

MEChA. Chicano Progressives. La Raza Cosmica. Californio. Nuevomexicano. Tejano. Pachuco: his frames of reference.

When Hillary Clinton isn’t test-driving her own 1966 Thunderbird convertible for her Thelma and Louise moment through such laughables as her newly-discovered Black English Vernacular accent, she’s busy one-upping John Edwards’ misguided choices of campaign web lackeys.

But you know, it’s really not hard to take Yzaguirre for a racist when he chaired an outdated, clownish organization whose basic identity was underpinned by the concept of race.

And that won’t play well on the border, where most immigrants would still rather be American than Mexican-American, Raza, Chicanos, Latinos, Hispanics or, for that matter, Clintonistas.

Hat Tip: Diggers Realm