Hispanic Heritage Month: A Perspective

Hispanic Heritage Month officially ends this fall on October 15 after a month of events commemorating the contributions of people from this demographic. It all started in June of 1968 when Southern California house of representative George E. Brown nobly spearheaded a resolution to right the omission of the contributions of a significant part of his constituency, ethnic Mexicans. The decree garnered 19 western cosponsors for a week-long acknowledgment. Subsequently, the administrations of presidents Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan extended this fete to a month-long tribute as the electoral power of Spanish surnamed citizens swelled in our nation’s politics.

The yearly launch of this homage aligns with the independence anniversaries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica from the Spanish empire in 1821.

(A girl works on a craft project at a Hispanic Heritage Festival at the Somerset (N.J.) Public Library in October 2015)

But I don’t pay much attention to Hispanic Heritage month even though I stand in fellowship with the people of continental America who continue a 500-year struggle against new forms of settler colonialism.

Why?

Because I and most ethnic Mexican compas, colleagues, and gente in communities of my ilk do not identify with Spain’s legacy of violence and exploitation in the Americas. Oh sure, I have known people, family even, who exalt their Iberian lineage at the expense of their indigenous ancestry. But I do not.

Ethnic Mexicans (citizens and migrants, the documented and undocumented) are people with a long history in America. In addition, self-identified Chicanas/os like me are conscious of our culture being historically rooted in sexual violence that encompasses many ethnicities and races: indigenous first Americans of the Western Hemisphere, Iberians (a good number expelled Sephardic Jews), Africans, Asians, and a range of European nationalities.

The early twentieth-century Mexican philosopher-politician Jose Vasconcelos conferred upon his people the cognomen La Raza Cosmica. Many outsiders of my culture gauchely translate raza to mean race. Most Chicanas/os don’t as it suggests a yeasty cross-cultural community of working-class people.

Other ethnic Mexicans adopt the Chicano epithet similarly. I recall how my politically moderate dad referenced with a gentle pride feisty ethnic Mexican crowds at Oxnard’s placita as la chicanada, the hoi polloi of which we belonged, as they enjoyed Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence fiestas or the city’s Salsa Festival.

As legendary journalist Ruben Salazar rhetorically asked in a February 6, 1970, Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?, I aver that I am a Mexican American, with a “non-Anglo image…who resents being told Columbus ‘discovered’ America when…Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer's trip to the ‘New World.’”

Conscious of the cultural labyrinth of ethnic Mexicans, I also reject the “Hispanic” label, fabricated by strangers, as it eradicates the historical presence of my people in the Southwest.

The attorney turned historian Carey McWilliams aptly coined fairy-tale functions like Hispanic Heritage Month a fantasy heritage by which early twentieth century Anglo American boosters glorified the Iberian as a hegemonic ploy in the form of Santa Barbara Fiesta Days, the Ramona Pageant, Columbus Day, and real estate promotion such as the multimillion-dollar development of Spanish Hills in the Ventura County city of Camarillo when it was the Mexican that settled California.

(Granted branding exclusive neighborhoods in historical fact did not promise retailers the attainment of their California dream of hand-over-fist profits as they understood that a Mexican Hills designation would not appeal to prospective deep-pockets buyers)

McWilliams also recognized the Spanish fantasy heritage as a lie that erased the reality that ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. were here before the Anglo. Hence, they are not foreigners. When he published ostensibly the first Chicano studies book in 1948 North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People in the United States, he argued that our nation’s European origins was first conceived in the Spanish colony in New Mexico in 1598 not the English Jamestown nine years later.

So, when ethnic Mexicans trek north from Mexico today, they follow a centuries-long migrant stream predating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that concluded a war instigated by the U.S. to acquire what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California.

And from different parts of Latin America and Haiti, refugees often flee repressive authoritarian regimes backed by our government to cross a synthetic U.S.-Mexico border born in nativism and brutality secured by guards on horseback, respectively, in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the Texas Rangers before the creation of the border patrol. Historian Monica Muñoz Martinez magisterially documents these truths in The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018).

During the Chicano Movement in Ventura County, intrepid activists such as Yvonne De Los Santos, Rachel Murguia Wong, and Roberto Flores teamed up with allies and peers in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to insist that an inclusive curriculum that centered the history and culture of people of color be adopted in schools to make such a heritage month unnecessary. To publicize this demand along with others to redress the exploitation of farmworkers, challenge police brutality, dismantle school segregation, and end the war in Vietnam which Mexican American military troops experienced a casualty rate disproportionate to their numbers in the Southwest, Chicanas/os embarked upon the La Marcha de la Reconquista in the spring of 1971 from Calexico to Sacramento.

With self-determination, they marched northward six hundred miles from town to town not as Hispanics but as Chicanas and Chicanos. And that I can celebrate.

C/S fpb Meta of History, History News Network, Ventura County Star, Vida (Spanish), Vida (English)

The Making of a Logophile

 

As a nescient logophile and non-accustomed reader (but open to the idea) as a young Chicano, I was intrigued by the 1980s tv sitcom ALF (Alien Life Form) and listening to the respective commentary and play-by-play of sports announcers Howard Cosell, in his oft glum mien, and Dick Vitale with his hyper bombast. These three expressed themselves with an erudition that fascinated me. For example, I remember in one episode the snarky Alf debated Willy, the always haggard head of the household, with the riposte, "Willy, let's not embark on syllogisms….” “Syllogisms? What does that mean?” I thought. So, after the show I arose from laying on the living room chase, that was the floor, to search the tattered, coverless, dictionary in my parents’ Levittown-era house, probably bought at a secunda for $1 or left behind as we moved in the late 1960s (that I still have, btw. See pic), to learn its definition as I have repeatedly since then because my brain just doesn’t encode the meaning of certain words—another is the awkward “a priori.”

While I intensely studied Carey McWilliams’ North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948) as part of my course prep as an assistant professor at Cypress College in the early 1990s, words like “filigree,” “garroted,” “tatterdemalion,” “ultramontane,” and others, in a numinous way, made me self-conscious of my scholastic illiteracy. This, along with my interaction with academics and managers, I regularly listened to lectures and speeches embedded with words I did not know the meaning of. My lexiconic shortcomings made this working-class, ethnic Mexican person uneasy. To the point of having a complex.

But I worked on this imposter syndrome. Before the age of mobile phones, I memorized arcane words at commencement and convocation-like ceremonies to define when I returned to my study. In one instance, my boss, CI President Richard Rush, now retired, tied in the word “euphonious” into one of his campus addresses. As a Jesuit-trained scholar, he regularly integrated such words into his syncopated Catholic-Mass-inflected disquisitions. In this instance, his wife Jane shunted him aside to brashly take over the mic to say in her ethnic, northeast borough insouciance, “‘Euphonious’ means it sounds nice!” Thanks, Jane, and R.I.P.

Now to further improve my command of language, I am a subscriber to The New Yorker. But television continues to inspire me. The latest being Schitt’s Creek. For each episode, I sat ready to press the pause button of the remote to define Moira Rose’s melodramatic introduction of words like “callipygian,” “epistle inamorata,” and “nocturnal enuresis.”

Well, that’s the end of my laconic reverie on how I became a word buff. My next dispatch will account how I came up with the titles of my two books: Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 and Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945-1975.

C/S

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Mexican Americans with Moxie

This week journalist Gustavo Arellano, with his emblematic Promethean-flair, featured

in the Los Angeles Times' Essential California newsletter. He trenchantly nailed my bio and the book's essence. To read his investigative reporting and prose, subscribe to the LA Times and sign up for GUSTAVO ARELLANO'S WEEKLY. And don't forget to buy him tacos.

#respect

C/S

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Nuts, Not Bananas: US Rebellions Past n Present

Horrorstruck by last week’s terrorist attack on our nation’s capital by Trump’s willing executioners, former president George W. Bush; Republican, Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demurred the idea that the United States resembled a Latin American “banana republic.”

Image: Los Angeles Times.2021.01.12

Their reactions exhibited a white supremacist hubris in and of itself. For them, only the brown people of Latin America revolted in such a way.

Alzheimer’s may explain the three forgetting the extremism of this past May and October in Michigan where Trump loyalists stormed the state’s capital with assault rifles in the first instance and plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the second. Nor did they recall other racists rebelling with tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017 chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Then there is our nation’s granddaddy of rebellions: the American Civil War that started in 1861 as secessionist forces attacked the US base that was Fort Sumter. Why did southern Confederates secede? Because president Abraham Lincoln would not allow the further expansion of slavery. 

I will give non-students of history a pass on not considering Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. The former involved insurrectionists, many armed revolutionary war veterans, attacking Massachusetts’s courts, to stop the foreclosures of farms, and a federal arsenal in 1786. The latter entailed a federal excise tax on whiskey that prompted western Pennsylvania distillers to assault tax collectors in 1791.

In 1794, President George Washington led 13,000 federalized soldiers into Pennsylvania’s backcountry to quash the rebellion. Later that year in an address to Congress, he characterized the whiskey insurrection as "fomented by combinations of men who...have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government."

My point is that the "banana republic" appellation signifies the notion that the US is beyond socio-political upheaval. This is grounded in the portrayal of brown “other” nations as culturally, if not racially, prone to political violence. Indeed, that is how media conditioned me in my youth.

As I came of age in the 1980s, I did not read much but viewed a lot of television. As a latchkey kid, I watched reruns after school: Hogan’s Heroes, MASH, and Baa Baa Black Sheep. Living in Greater Los Angeles, I also pass the time with Channel 7’s KABC Eyewitness News that featured debates between Bruce Herschensohn and John Tunney.

Herschensohn was a conservative commentator who served in the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Tunney was a one-term California U.S. Senator connected to the Kennedys who championed the liberal perspective.

In covering US foreign policy, the two regularly argued about the incessant wars and golpes in the Caribbean and Central America, particularly the revolutions of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

Back then these governments were popularly labeled “banana republics.” The origin of the epithet stemmed from the region’s economic dependency on the export of this fruit and other commodities such as coffee and sugar as dictated by US financiers and corporations such as Chiquita (formerly United Fruit) and Dole dating back to the early twentieth century.

The cognomen is also drenched with racist assumptions of American exceptionalism. As the City Upon the Hill, the US felt obligated to mentor such nations. Ostensibly, Latin Americans, as a race, were too unstable and corrupt to govern themselves without its tutelage.

This is in addition to their protection from European interference as declared in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Tacitly, only the US could.

As I watched Herschensohn and Tunney reprise a nightmare of death squads, strongmen, assassins, “freedom fighters,” and insurgencies, I ignorantly bought into this epistemology and thought to myself, “Why can’t these countries just get their act together like the USA?”

Then in college, I was assigned Walter Lefeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1983). It detailed a long history of US interventionism, both overt and covert, to instate vicious rulers throughout the region by way of cunning regime change that entailed coups, military advisors, naval and marine invasion, and contrived elections.

If a nationalist government with ambitions of self-determination emerged, the US systematically attempted to destabilize it. Think Cuba historically and Valenzuela in the present.

Further reading revealed the Central Intelligence Agency’s sponsorship of the murderous coups of the democratically elected presidencies of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Their crime, the pursuit of their citizens having greater control of their lands’ resources at some expense of US conglomerates.

Hence, the respective installation of the merciless military dictatorships of Carlos Castillo Armas and Augusto Pinochet. To paraphrase President Franklin Roosevelt’s alleged description of the US-supported Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, the two were sons of bitches, but they were our sons of bitches.

Although the ideological pretext for US interventionism was to combat the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, the material motive was to maintain commercial hegemony while smothering alternative autochthonous economic models that privileged the social needs of Latin Americans over US business interests.

In sum, the history of the US is anything but one of continuity. So, while we may not be bananas, history and the pro-Trump sedition of last week reminds us that we have a fair share of nuts.

C/S

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