Cato Unbound: Mexicans In America with Richard Rodriguez

Cato Unbound, the weblog-magazine publication of the Cato Institute, is focusing this edition on "Mexicans in America" with the lead essay is by Richard Rodriguez. Richard Rodriguez's book "Brown" was the topic of a book review by Orange County Latino's Gustavo Arellano.

Rodriguez has a glittery wit and in his Cato Unbound lead essay described two very important cultural traits of the Mexicans and the Americans in two compact and amusing paragraphs:

Mexicans are a cynical people, you will find—sweet, but cynical. Their cynicism derives from the notion of Original Sin and the sense that humans fail inevitably. Mexicans are patient with this knowledge, charmingly so in some instances (lard, beer), dangerously so in other instances, as when Mexicans tolerate civic corruption. It is no coincidence that Mexican border towns have become the fiefdoms of drug lords.

Americans are a hypocritical people—nice people, but hypocritical. Americans prefer unknowing. They believe innocence clings to them by election. Americans prefer to ignore the correlation between our need for drugs and the creation of a vast criminal economy that stretches from Afghanistan to Bolivia to Tijuana.

The Ultimate Worthlessness of Cinco de Mayo by Gustavo Arellano

The Ultimate Worthlessness of Cinco de Mayo

by Gustavo Arellano
Editor-in-chief, emeritus

Cinco de Mayo is worthless. There, I said it.

It’s not pointless because it serves the nationalist project of promoting pride in one’s country and its heritage. And for this reason, it’s not stupid since it has worked like a charm of making Mexicans out of all of us come May 5, even if the extent of commitment for México lindo y querido is drinking Corona instead of Budweiser.

But it is worthless.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo is worthless because it commemorates a supposedly grand victory that ultimately meant and did nothing. Sure, Zaragosa and his troops held off the French that glorious day in Puebla in 1862 but it didn’t drive the frogs away for good; indeed, this humiliating defeat convinced them that they needed more troops. The next time the French and Mexicans fought (a year later), the French whipped some Mexican ass and ushered in the era of the French occupation under the Hapsburg Maximillian.

I do not mean to diminish the actual event itself, since the ragtag Mexican army crushed what was considered the finest military in the world at the time. Nevertheless, celebrating Cinco de Mayo is like remembering Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” for the charging part while conveniently forgetting the massacre at the end. It’s like celebrating for jumping off the tower at Chapultepec Castle while forgetting the reason why (and btw, counter-legend has it that it was American troops who threw those boys from the tower). Call it bravery, call it resistance; I call it ignorance and self-defeatism.

To celebrate the blip of Cinco de May in the ultimate struggle that didn’t do much to stop the French onslaught is to continue the peculiarly Mexican fixation of harping over our losses.

We bemoan the Conquest nearly 500 years after the fact, simultaneously outraged that the Spaniards slaughtered and raped the inhabitants of Anahuac and angry that Montezuma acquiesced so quickly to Cortes. The outright theft of half of Mexico 150 years ago because of Santa Anna’s moronicies gets Chicanos so caught up in misery they actually start comparing themselves to Palestinians (Palestinians! As if someone who speaks horrid Spanish, has parents born in Jalisco that are descended from Europeans and Mexican Indians, and who hasn’t lived a day without potable water can logically compare themselves to people who have lived in the same parched spot since the time of Christ). The PRI bilked us dry year after year. Díaz sold us out to the Americans. That pretty-boy vendido De la Hoya beat our national hero Chávez—twice. Loss is in all Mexicans’ mind in one way or another, as is the bitter thought that there was nothing we were able to do about it and we can’t change it even if we tried.

Cinco de Mayo merely continues that. Cinco de Mayo isn’t a victory at all, as much as we try to tell ourselves and others that it is. The French occupation of Mexico was successful even if we did drive them out. We taste it every morning in our pan dulce, listlessly practice it in our quinceañera waltzes, and praise it to high heaven in whenever the mariachi violins begin their pizzicato coda. Cinco de Mayo is a painful reminder of our failings in trying to confront those who would colonize Mexico and our constant carping over it.

Let’s start getting rid of this fatalistic streak by stopping the Cinco de Mayo celebration. Napoleon III was an egomaniac who during his lifetime began France’s imperialism in Indochina and Africa in the hopes of emulating his uncle (for a great portrayal of how loony the Third really was, check out Claude Rains’ hammy performance in 1939’s Juarez). The Maximillian-Carlota duo that ruled Mexico with a velvet glove is best remembered as two pitiful royals desperate for the adoration of their subjects. Yet we celebrate the memory of their conquest every fifth of May by claiming that we defeated them. If only that were truly the case.

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Gustavo Arellano is the senior editor of OC Latino and didn’t even get to Cinco de Mayo’s takeover by American beer companies, though he made a slight allusion to it (last sentence of second paragraph).

Libraries for Latinos? Not in Santa Ana by Bruce Jensen

Libraries for Latinos? Not in Santa Ana

A half-editorial, half-reporting, all reading report

Bruce Jensen
Contributing Writer

A four-block walk in downtown Santa Ana was all it took to get me hooked. The city seized me around the shoulders and pulled me close, roaring ¡Órale, hermano! Ya has llegado, güey, pos make yourself at home! Can I get you something? You want a cheve?

In the downtown core I felt a pulse, action, movimiento. The sidewalks were crowded and music came pouring out of damn near every open door. You could smell empanadas and find fresh tortillas and see Y tu Mamá También for a $3.50 double-feature ticket—without subtitles. Within five minutes I had a half-dozen local Spanish-language newspapers tucked under my arm. There was even a pupuseria in this pluricultural paradise, and nearby was a truly happening bookstore-café-neighborhood nerve center.

Pásate, compa, a donde tu chambita. Let’s check out the pinche library

That’s why I was in town: a job at the Santa Ana library. What drew me into public librarianship, see, was my dissatisfaction with the service that so-called linguistic minorities usually get—or rather, don’t get—from their libraries.

Back in ’98 while in the hinterlands of Oregon, amidst Mixtecs and Zapotecs who were evidently too short or too dark to matter to librarians, I launched an informational website that’s been growing ever since. Later I went back to grad school (little-known fact from this hierarchical field: without a master’s degree in Information Studies, you’re not called a librarian) at UCLA, because there I could study public libraries that sit in Korean and Russian and Central American neighborhoods.

When I heard of an opening in Santa Ana I jumped all over it, aware that the 2000 census had identified it as the Spanish-speakingest city in the country, a place where fully three-quarters of the residents use Spanish at home. A “minority language”? Not here. I could just imagine the exciting, groundbreaking work being done by a library in such an exceptional town.

The phone interview went well—well enough that they rewrote the job description to fit my background and did a brief pro forma posting. My wife and I decided to put up in Santa Ana a week ahead of the final interview so we could start to get a feel for the place. I’d take the job, I told her, only if we both felt comfortable living a short walk from where I’d work. A librarian should be part of the community, and no way was I going to drag my paychecks out to Fountain Valley or Anaheim like some highly paid guest worker. (Oh, did I mention that a librarian gig in Santa Ana starts at around $50K a year, plus all the icing?)

Vente, carnal, y mira nomás qué chula…

As I approached the building, part of Santa Ana’s impressive civic center, I felt giddy anticipation. Meeting a new library is always fun, and the city’s ambiente had me wondering what would be inside this library, so well positioned was it to be a cultural touchstone for its community.

Then I actually went in. The pulse that throbbed outside had gone flatline. In what should have been a busy time of day there were few readers. They and the staff seemed to be moving underwater.

The signs were mostly in English, many of them carelessly taped up and forgotten with their corners curling away from the wall. Rolled-up posters rested atop shelves; stuff was lying around at random. Some decorations in a glass case still displayed their Big Lots price tags.

I lingered near a reference desk, just an anonymous patron, eavesdropping on my prospective colleagues who chatted away as if there were nobody around. The librarians were in the middle of a sleepy conversation devoted to badmouthing an absent co-worker.

I made my way over to the Spanish-language collection—a small part of the library, mind you, in this city where most people use Spanish. It’s a vintage collection that any library U.S. could be proud of, provided that library is in a backwoods town somewhere near the Canadian border.

Of the eight free newspapers I’d picked up downtown not one was available at the library. Neither that day nor the other two times I visited. But, hell—they weren’t giving away the OC Weekly, either.

In the days that followed I walked and rode buses to visit the two neighborhood branch libraries. Even though their book collections left a lot to be desired, at least those branches didn’t have the same end-of-the-world dreariness that prevailed downtown.

Still, if I wanted timely, relevant reading matter in Spanish, none of the libraries could rival the typical Santa Ana tortillería. Library as community information hub? Not in this town.

Dig this: Thirty years ago Roberto Haro worked as a librarian in Sacramento and East L.A. He spent five years doing what few of his modern-day colleagues would ever bother to do—he went out, sometimes in disguise, and asked people in the neighborhood what they thought about the library. Now he’s Dr. Haro, professor of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, but back then he was a bibliotecario dedicated to fingering the reasons why so few Latinos regarded the public library as their own.

This street-level ethnographic research is great stuff that’s never been equaled in Libraryland, where Haro’s work has long since been forgotten. Fueled by Movimiento optimism and his fierce passion, Haro imagined the day when raza would rise up to protest racist, classist library service. He was dreaming; experience shows that nobody gets organized to complain seriously about libraries unless they have plenty of time on their hands.

Fast-forward to 1998, when the American Library Association ran a census of librarian ethnicity and gender. Guess what they found? The figures are even more extreme than you might imagine: in public, college, and school libraries alike, the percentage of Latina/o librarians is on the order of two to three percent. Even in places like Santa Ana.

C’mon, don’t laugh; this isn’t funny.

If you’re looking for signage in Spanish, or public service staff who really knows the language, where would you go first—the public library or the K-Mart across the street? Why the hell is that?

Some libraries do better than others, and mind you, the situation in OC as a whole is not as awful as it is in many other places. The county is even home to one of the most committed and accomplished activists, Latina or otherwise, in U.S. library history: Elizabeth Martínez, former director of the American Library Association as well as the OC and Los Angeles public library systems. But most of my friends and colleagues, when I asked them about Santa Ana Public Library, alluded vaguely to its “problems.” That often means money, certainly. In this case though things might go rather deeper.

In 1990 the LA Times reported on a “mutiny” at the library. Employees called the director, who’s still in charge, a “Hitler,” and one vowed that if he had a gun he’d blow the guy’s head off. The staff printed up caustic buttons and wore them at work until the director issued a memo telling them to knock it off.

His side of it? The staff was afraid of change. It’s not implausible. A classic librarian joke goes something like this:

Q: How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Uhhh…change?

The way Santa Ana Public Library does a disservice to its community is nothing unusual. The rationale, too, is familiar and has a lot to do with who librarians are, and aren’t. “I don’t speak English,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said, “but that does not mean that English doesn’t exist.” A wildly unbalanced collection that slights the languages people are speaking outside reflects a library’s desire to make those people stop existing—at least, they won’t be darkening the library’s door.

Library dinosaurs still haven’t picked up the clue: any business that ignores and insults its biggest customer base might as well soap the windows. Though libraries don’t have to satisfy stockholders, the unspoken truth is that without real community support they invariably languish in another kind of bankruptcy.

My interview? It began well, with a language test. The first question was about library philosophy, and without thinking about it I uncorked a rollo that would’ve had Fidel Castro gasping for breath. On an on I went, about libraries’ important role in helping newcomers adjust to the surroundings, their responsibility to furnish comprehensible information about health and law and opportunities, about the library as the richest egalitarian source of entertainment and facts and diversion that we have going, the one place where we’re all welcome regardless of what’s in our pockets that day. That means (I continued, starting to get warmed up) that the library has a duty to tailor its offerings to the folks moving in and milling around outside; it’s irresponsible to keep serving the same old faces the same old way…

The interlocutor wrote a high score on her sheet and looked me in the eye: don’t be nervous about the rest of the interview, she said: “They need librarians like you.”

Thus buoyed, I walked in to face the Human Resources guy and the mid-level librarian who were my real interview panel. Way too confident, and still in a philosophical mood, I treated the interview like a collegial conversation. I subtly criticized some of what I’d observed at the libraries and speculated about other ways of doing things. Not the smartest approach; the order of the day was meek, non-boat-rocking subservience. Gradually I woke up that I had genially talked myself straight out of a job.

The city’s HR professionals haven’t gotten back to me just yet, but it has been two months since my interview so I figured I’d better find something else to do. The next chapter in the SAPL saga, however it reads, won’t include me, but in any case it’s not going to be librarians who solve the system’s problems. No, that comes down to the library’s owners: the people who pay—whether they know they pay or not—for those books and magazine subscriptions and those displays from Big Lots. That is to say YOU.

Librarians seldom meet anyone but satisfied customers. The people the library ignores, you see, don't come in. It doesn't much matter if those people represent a majority of the citizenry. None of this is gonna change until somebody calls the libraries on their shit because the librarians are not about to call their own shit on themselves. The librarians will just keep doing what's comfortable and what earns them pats on the butt until it's time to collect on that sweet pension.

Try it. Just you and a few friends. Call your library on their shit, and in two languages. The result might be a pleasant surprise. A lot of librarians (and this is gonna shock you) aren't all that tough.

A little organized griping from just a few library owners packs a bigger wallop than you’d expect. If some santanenses were to get together and make enough noise, they might be surprised--after some initial kicking and screaming—what they can squeeze out of their library. If not, well…there’s always Reuben Martinez’s bookstore…or the newspaper rack outside El Metate.

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Bruce Jensen is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Críticas magazine. His carefully crafted boberías have recently appeared in books like The Changing Culture of Libraries, Alternative Library Literature 2000-2001, The Power of Language/El Poder de la Palabra, and the upcoming Revolting Librarians Redux.

Maria and Me: An Homage to the Image by by Adriana Alba-Sánchez

Maria and Me: An Homage to the Image

by Adriana Alba-Sánchez
Editor, emeritus

Maria Felix died last Monday. I found out upon getting home, after I kicked off my shoes, flopped down on the couch, and turned on the tube to see Vicente Fox standing somberly next to an oak coffin between vases of long Calla Lilies and surrounded by a hoard of politicians, celebrities and cameramen. It took a while before I realized that all the escandalo was because Maria Felix was dead.

As expected, for the next couple of days Spanish Network Channels have paraded one homage after another to the Mexican Icon. Article upon article has already been written about her film career, her numerous lovers, her arrogant political commentary, her art collections, her life in Europe, the elite circles she ran with; so I don't want to go there. I want to write about Maria and me. No one has covered that angle yet.

My father was always a big fan of all films that came out of Mexico's "Epoca de Oro." When I was a child, it was a Sunday ritual to go to the local video store and come home with a stack of black and white films that featured Mexican men in full splendor-on top of a horse with two guns swinging from their hips and a mournful ranchera dancing out of their throats. I don't remember the first time I saw the sickle shaped brows that arched above those infinitely dark eyes staring down Pedro Armendariz, Jorge Negrete, or Pedro Infante. It was before my mind developed the ability to organize memories and images, but the flaming rage and relentless pride that glowed from the depths of her gaze had a haunting and contagious flicker.

This admiration for the black and white image that graced the screen of our thirteen-inch T.V. was a reaction to a deep suspicion. At that young age I was looking around trying to figure out what it would mean for me to be a woman. Everything that I saw and heard in real life was teaching me that woman's role was to find a man and be a mother. Women (especially Mexican women) were supposed to be delicate and nurturing, accepting and always loving. Our power was that we kept men's worlds in meticulous order--washed, ironed and folded neatly in their drawers.

I must have been ten the day I turned to my mom and declared, "I want to be like Maria Felix when I grow up." My mom responded to my articulated desires with, "Esa vieja es una vulgar." To her she was vulgar because Maria was vicious and always ready to strike any "canalla" that tried to impose his rule on her. She smoked and dressed like a man in movies, she led wars, she ran her own ranchos and had a deep voice that demanded nothing less than full command. She was not the "Patron's" dutiful wife. She was La Patrona, (or the boss) in the fullest sense of the word. She was not a Mexican Marilyn Monroe, simply oozing with sex and filled with bubbly giggles. She was not blonde and never played delicate or helpless women like the ones I saw in telenovelas every day. La Doña never lowered her eyes for anyone. If that type of independence signified vulgarity, I wouldn't mind the notoriety.

In real life she really was arrogant and self-righteous as hell. Quick to criticize everything around her, she once even went so far as to call Subcomandante Marcos a clown and the Zapatistas "Indios apestosos." Her elitist rhetoric offended me. I felt angry and betrayed, let down. I had to learn to take her for what she really was: a Mexican post-revolutionary creation, much like the PRI. She got rich by playing the heroine that symbolized nationhood in 20th Century Mexico. She was propaganda!

I know that now, but I still feel the same knot in my stomach when I see her in "La Generala" or "Enamorada." From that image of female rebellion I learned that my biology was not my destiny. The fact that I was born with ovaries did not mean that my life would have to be marked with self-sacrifice and sufrimientos.

There are images that come about in our lives that are transformative. They are initially shocking and hauntingly linger inside of us. They are representations of deep inner desires; some truth we feel born with and remains buried until we are able to somehow connect it to something outside of our own skin. Such was La Doña to me.

I Sing the Nation Brown: Richard Rodriguez and Latinos as the End of Race by Gustavo Arellano

I Sing the Nation Brown: Richard Rodriguez and Latinos as the End of Race

by Gustavo Arellano
Editor-in-chief, emeritus

W.E.B Dubois famously predicted at the dawn of the 20th century that its most urgent concern would be “the problem of the color line.” There’s been little progress in solving it a century later, the dissolution of colonial empires and scientific theories on race notwithstanding. But Richard Rodriguez thinks he has the answer to Dubois’ prophecy: Latinos.

In his latest book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez doesn’t examine real-life Latino lives so much as take Latinos and their most associated skin tone as a metaphor to show how race can be overcome in this country. To Rodriguez, the sanguinary diversity of Latinos—“la raza cósmica” (the cosmic race) as the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos called them—makes them the ultimate solution to the ingrained racial vista of the United States. Heavy in ideas, outlandish in its arrogance, yet ultimately vindicated by its radical hypothesis, Brown has the potential to serve as a starting point for a much-needed racial dialogue for the coming century.

Throughout Brown, Rodriguez interchanges "Latino" and "brown" as metaphors with dazzling results. "Brown as impurity. I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several," he writes in the preface to the book. He then proceeds to tell in the next nine chapters' different ways in which Latino/brown has influenced the United States, changing everything from America's relation to the world to its imperialistic outlook of East/West to North/South to-most importantly to Rodriguez-the racial divide.

The book is strongest when Rodriguez-emulating Whitman and Baldwin with his lyrical, introspective prose-expands on his Latinos-as-the-eradicators-of race thesis. When he actually speaks about what the Latino community is as opposed to what it represents, though, the book falters. Brown’s one chapter exclusively devoted to Latinos drowns in self-righteousness and snootiness as Rodriguez abandons intellectual dissemination and comes off sounding like Barbara Coe with lines like "I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up."

But Brown is saved when Rodriguez finds his thesis of the Latino/brown promise amongst-of all the people on Earth, how weird is this?-Richard Nixon. Walking around the lame Nixon Library ("The guards are spooky, their walkie-talkie vigilance suggests only crackpots visit this tomb," Rodriguez wryly notes), Rodriguez finds in the young Nixon the tragic truth of the American racial life. He remembers that when Nixon fumbled and sweated his way through his 1960 debate with John Kennedy, "I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it."

Rather than attempt to help his kind (the working class, not “whites”), though, Nixon apparently betrayed his "people" by classifying people in five racial groups in 1973 (of which "Hispanic" was the most prominent) because it was politically expedient at the time to allow affirmative action to flourish under race rather than class. Within this bureaucratic decree (O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15, to be exact), Rodriguez argues, Nixon also unwittingly laid the seeds of race's destruction because there was no way such narrow classifications could survive America's ensuing multicultural madness. Especially that of “Hispanic”: “Mayan Indians from the Yucatán were directed to the Hispanic pavilion which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami.” All of this thanks to whom Rodriguez only half-jokingly refers to as "the dark father of hispanicity" and who might ultimately turn out to be our greatest civil rights reformer.

Brown embraces Latinos not for who they are but what they symbolize: the impurity in America's traditional black/white dichotomy that will probably do away with the country's most pernicious problem. The book makes a convincing case that America can no longer afford to think of itself in racial terms-all thanks to a people/color that the United States set its eyes on subjugating but is now the other way around. "And I am left", Rodriguez writes from his home in San Francisco, "sitting inside, deconstructing the American English word for myself-Hispanic []-by which I celebrate my own deliverance from ; the deliverance of the United States of America from race.”

BROWN: THE LAST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, VIKING PRESS, 231 PAGES, $24.95

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Gustavo Arellano is the Editor in Chief for OC Latino. He is also a contributing writer for the OC Weekly.