On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?

The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’

One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)

Oops.

The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.

MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.

MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.

NCLR is a Washington, DC-based advocacy and lobbying group with a $40 million annual budget. Its president, Janet Murguía, is a former Congressional staffer who served as deputy director of legislative affairs in the Clinton White House. (After leaving the Clinton administration Murguía spent three years as Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of Kansas before assuming the NCLR presidency.) As noted above, John McCain spoke at NCLR’s 2008 national convention, which was held at the San Diego Convention Center and drew an estimated twenty thousand attendees.

MEChA, in contrast, is a grass-roots organization — its campus chapters operate largely autonomously. It is active on the local and regional level, and holds an annual national conference, but has neither a president or a national office.

Oh, and that “Por La Raza todo” quote? NCLR publicly repudiated it in 2006, in response to similar slurs. MEChA leaders say their group doesn’t use the phrase either, and note that their motto is “La Union Hace La Fuerza” — Strength In Unity.

Update: A 2006 opinion piece from Representative Charlie Norwood, now making the conservative rounds again, claims that “as recently as 2003, La Raza was actively funding MEChA.” The truth, according to NCLR, is that in 2003 they gave Georgetown University’s MEChA chapter a single $2500 grant in support of a regional conference. That’s it.

As for MEChA itself, NCLR “freely acknowledges that some of the organization’s founding documents … contain inappropriate rhetoric,” and that some statements by MEChA members have been “extremist and inflammatory.” They note that they have “publicly and repeatedly disavowed” such statements, but that they make no apologies for supporting “programs and activities that help more Hispanics enter and finish college.”