Hispanic Fanatic

The last time I called my mother, she complimented me on the quality of the blog and, specifically, on my post “From the Motherland.” She may have had a bias toward the subject matter of that particular piece, it’s true, but I still appreciated the praise.

In any case, she added that it was good for me to post regularly because of the cathartic effect of writing. She said, “You know we Hispanics don’t believe in therapy. We believe in poetry.”

I thought she made an astute point (although I myself have no interest in poetry and couldn’t tell you the difference between a sonnet and a salamander).

Her main argument, of course, is that Latinos have traditionally embraced art and creativity when confronting personal issues rather than calling upon psychology or therapy. I believe that she’s right, but I don’t know the cultural or sociological reasons for this.

Given the choice between expressing our turmoil with epic novels or dropping on a couch to discuss how our fathers never loved us, we will start scribbling away. If we can get it all out with some angry song or wild dance, we will skip hyperanalyzing the Freudian reasons that we forgot our spouse’s birthday. And we would much rather create a deranged painting or warped sculpture than pay $150 an hour to hear a bald man ask, “How did it make you feel to be picked last for the kickball team?”

Think about it. What is the likelihood of ever seeing a Woody Allen movie in which a Latino kvetches to his psychologist?

I don’t know of any Hispanics who have benefited from therapy. Maybe it’s class thing, because many Hispanics are frankly too broke to splurge on something as trivial as their mental health. Or maybe Latino culture prioritizes self-expression over introspection. Or perhaps we just have a surplus of writers and artists with a backlog of violent revolutions and colorful family members to supply acres of good material.

I can’t explain it, but I admit that I’m much more likely to write it all down than seek out a trained therapist. I’m not saying that it’s a superior method. Indeed, perhaps I could benefit from a head-shrinking.

But now I’m getting all angsty.  Maybe I should talk to somebody about that.

The ever-angry, eye-poppingly-furious BF has returned (see my previous two posts and the comments). This time BF says that I am, more or less, a traitor to my race and don’t have any balls.

Yikes. Why all the rage, BF?

Sounds to me like someone needs a hug.

Regardless, I have no intention of continuing this flame war with BF, otherwise we run the risk of it turning into some cyber form of brown-on-brown violence.

So I’m going to let my last word (at least for the time being) on the topic come from the cartoonist Darby Conley, who writes “Get Fuzzy.” It seems that Conley is aware of the touchy subject that my previous posts addressed.

Hispanics can get very defensive if you get their country of origin, or preferred ethnic identity, wrong – even if that Latino is of the canine persuasion:

Broken Forum has taken me to task for my previous post, in which I dissed a guy who was wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed his Chicano identity (see BF’s comment in the post below). BF says the guy was right and that Chicanos “have nothing in common” with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, etc.

I must admit that I thought these groups shared at least a few traits. But now that you mention it, Chicanos apparently have more in common with Germans, Poles, and Serbs, in that all of them are inexplicably fascinated with accordion music. Really, you’d never get a Puerto Rican to pick up the squeezebox.

Without even getting into the many cultural and racial similarities – or the shared challenges that Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and so on face in American society – I’ll just point out that people aren’t described as Chicano unless it is through self-identification or via a demand for acknowledgement. The larger U.S. population sees only “Hispanic” or “Latino,” and we are lucky if we get those descriptors, rather than being referred to as “that Spanish guy” or having other, more colorful terms tossed at us.

BF also disputes that the shirt was meant to be confrontational. But my point is that the message didn’t say “Chicano Pride” or something positive like that. The shirt was about exclusion, defining the person by what he is not, and by extension, implying that the wearer’s group (in this case, Chicanos) is superior to the dreaded Others (ie, Hispanics or Latinos).

BF also says that I have “cultural insecurities.” This is incorrect.

What I have is cultural schizophrenia.

So I was standing in line at a theme park, waiting to jump on a monsterously huge rollercoaster, when I noticed a swaggering young hombre in front of me. He was hanging with his girlfriend, a cute little Latina. The guy was obviously Chicano, and if anyone doubted the joven’s ethnicity, it was right there, spelled out on his t-shirt.

The words on the back of his shirt read

“Hispanic: No!

Latino: No!

Chicano: Yes!”

The wording was all-caps, for damn sakes, to minimize the danger of subtlety escaping. The front of the shirt featured the standard eagles and snakes and La Virgin imagery.

I lost sight of the guy by the time I got on the rollercoaster, and I forgot all about him for the two minutes of whiplash speed that I received in exchange for my hour in line (this was very poor ROI).

But I thought about him later, and I realized that the shirt pissed me off. This hombre was adamant, a walking billboard, in fact, for the idea that Chicanos are completely different from the rest of the Hispanic world. I had run into this mindset before, but not so explicitly. The implication, of course, is that they are better or superior to, say, Nicaraguans or Cubans or Peruvians.

I could understand if someone asked the guy if he was Bolivian or Colombian. In that case, maybe he would just want to be clear and/or take pride in his ethnicity. But instead he was performing a pre-emptive strike on anyone who would think, for a split second, that he could be part of the larger Hispanic or Latino tribe. He didn’t want to be included with me or anyone who didn’t have roots in Mexico.

What is the point of this demand for separation? Is it like the paper-thin differences emphasized by, for example, the British and the Welsh? And if so, will there be any involvement from women as hot as Catherine Zeta-Jones (she’s Welsh, not Hispanic, you know).

In any case, it was yet another example of our human capacity to emphasize differences over similarities. It’s little wonder that we get into crazed debates over larger, more ambiguous definitions (eg, who is a real American?) when we can’t even agree that Chicanos are Latino. It’s also symptomatic of Hispanic culture’s inability to coalesce, which is one reason the political power of Latinos is one notch above the lobbying strength of Idaho beet farmers.

Despite my annoyance, I wish no ill harm to the young Chicano. I hope the guy enjoyed the rollercoaster. But I also hope that at some point during the day, when he was strolling hand in hand with his girlfriend and eating cotton candy and handing stuffed animals to her, that she looked deep into his eyes and said, “You know, honey, that’s a really stupid t-shirt.”

First off, thanks to Eddy for commenting on my post “Witnesses Described Him as Brown…” He supplied one of the best, bravest, and most poignant comments that I’ve received.

Thanks also to all who have commented on “From the Motherland,” the post about my mom. Most of the comments have been via email or verbal, but it’s still good to know that certain pieces resonate.

Along those lines, I will continue with the theme of family by introducing you to the cousins.

Let me be clear that I’ve never related to the the whole concept of extended family. I don’t have distant relatives I’m forced to visit or creepy old uncles who make everyone uncomfortable or anonymous children who just show up at Thanksgiving.

Rather, I have the cousins. There are eight of us, and we were basically raised as siblings. Growing up, I thought it was normal to see your cousins at least once a week (usually more) and go to stay at their houses for days at a time and share inside jokes and get into fights about what TV show you were going to watch.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and talked to other people about their childhoods, that I realized most Americans think of “cousin” as that weird kid they saw at funerals or the exotic older relative who bought them beer.

It wasn’t like that for us.

Perhaps this is because in Hispanic culture, valuing family is not just lip service. It is a hardcore component of life. There are good and bad aspects of this principle, which I’ll address in a future post. But regardless of its consequences, I can verify its existence and strength with Latinos.

Among the cousins, I’m the oldest, and my brother (about nine years my junior) is the youngest. That means all eight of us are within a decade of each other.

We remember being children together, piling into our parents’ cars and jostling for space. We recall being teenagers and going through goth or grunge or rave phases. And now as adults, we go out to dinner together or visit each other’s houses or do other respectable grown-up things that would have amused us to even contemplate back when we pulled each other’s hair or stole one another’s CDs.

We are not as close as we used to be, which is inevitable in even the tightest of families. But we see each other, in various combinations, when we can. And our spouses have become de facto cousins, and the children are our collective nieces and nephews (again, we don’t keep track of all the “second cousin, twice removed” jargon).

This is not to say that everything has gone smoothly for all eight of us, or that feuds haven’t erupted along the way, or that some relationships are at this point, more tangential. But for the most part, we pretty much like each other, which took me a long time to realize is a rarity in American life.

I’ll profile each of the cousins in future posts. Suffice to say, I’m grateful that in one respect, at least, we were raised old-school Hispanic style – you know, like a family.

Chris Rock once said that whenever he hears about a horrible crime on the news, he braces himself for the revelation of the criminal’s race. To paraphrase him (because I can’t find the exact quote), Rock said, “I say to myself, ‘Don’t be black, don’t be black,’ and if the guy turns out to be black, I’m like, ‘Damn it!’”

It works the same way with me. Whenever I hear about a murder, rape, or anything more severe than a hubcap getting swiped, I listen to see if the guy is called Gonzalez or Sanchez or Espinoza. If he is, I’m like, “Damn it!”

There is palpable relief on my part (and probably with other Hispanics) if the guy is black or, even better, white. At least then we don’t have one more dark-skinned guy confirming negative stereotypes.

It’s important to point out, of course, that with the notable exception of the Virginia Tech shooter, the bad guy never seems to be Asian. At least this is true in America, because plenty of Asians in the governments of China and Mynamar and North Korea are absolute motherfuckers. But that’s another story.

In any case, I doubt that white people ever steel themselves for the description of a criminal’s race. It simply doesn’t enter their minds to do so, and for this, I envy them. As the dominant culture, they don’t have to worry about one sick bastard stigmatizing them. This is just one of the miniscule ways in which people of different races perceive the world in different ways. 

The association between race and crime, of course, goes back to our cultural foundations, and it is hard-wired even within minorities. It leads to a million miscommunications, faulty assumptions, and outright attacks.

It can even lead to issues where people are not consciously aware of the dangerous conclusions that they are drawing. In a future post, I will go more in-depth with this concept by looking at racial microaggression (and won’t that be fun!).

In any case, wish me luck. After posting this missive, I’m going to gamble by reading the newspaper. You’ll find me there, flipping through the pages, holding my breath, hoping that Jose or Pedro or Julio hasn’t messed it up today for the rest of us.

The ideal location for a date varies, of course, depending upon the couple’s taste and motives. Maybe your perfect date setting is an upscale restaurant or a tropical beach or the backseat of a 1998 Dodge Neon. It’s up to you.

Coming up with an event for a double-date is naturally more complex. And where it really gets cumbersome is the rare, even mythical, triple-date. But if you and your loved one find yourselves hanging out with two other couples, I have a suggestion: the Hollywood Bowl.

A few years ago, my wife and I went on a triple-date to see the Buena Vista Social Club in concert at that California landmark. We were grooving to the Afro-Cuban jazz beats when I noticed that all three couples consisted of a Latino male and an Anglo female.

Now in Los Angeles, the Hispanic-white combination is not exactly the most exotic. Still, it struck me that all three of us were officially interracial. My observation was seconded later in the evening when one of the women (not my wife) said, “It’s the white girls with their hot Hispanic studs!” She perhaps had a sipped a little too much wine by that point.

But it’s not like she was lying.

In the 21^st century, a trio of Latinos can meet up with cute white ladies and jam to tunes from the motherland, and only an obsessive-compulsive blogger will even notice (at least until the alcohol kicks in). Now that’s progress on the road to racial harmony.

As it turned out, two of those couples (including of course, my wife and me) wound up married. The third couple broke up a few months after the concert and then had guilt-ridden sex semi-regularly until they finally got sick of each other.

She’s now married to a white guy, and he’s single.

When I was 24, about a decade ago, I finally changed my name.

For those of you who have done this, you know that it is not a decision to made lightly. Issues of identity, psychological comfort, aesthetics, politics, and a hundred other variables are wrapped up in how we refer to ourselves. Plus, it’s a logistical nightmare and financial burden to make the change.

It’s little wonder, then, that even people with positively wretched monikers will cling to them and endure a lifetime of snickers and befuddled looks. I knew a guy named Peter Creamer who never considered changing his name, even though one could not have come up with a better gay-porn alias.

So why did I do it?

It wasn’t because of any issue with my first or middle names. Indeed, those remain unaltered from my birth certificate.

No, it was my last name, which for the first two dozen years of my life was a monosyllabic horror so bland that I am convinced it actually made me duller.

But my innate dislike of the name wasn’t enough. As I mentioned in a previous post, my mother raised me, and I never felt connected to my father’s name (but let’s not get too Freudian or whiny here). I adopted her maiden name as my legal signifier as a sign of respect to her. 

That remains the primary reason. But there is, of course, a supporting factor. My birth name is Anglo, a brief English-Irish term that simply does not line up with my obviously, shall we say, ethnic appearance.

In truth, I didn’t like the name because it was too white. It didn’t fit me. Perhaps I was being overly political or confrontational or sensitive or aggressive. But I have to admit that I always wanted something that indicated my heritage, or that at least didn’t stand out from everyone else in my family (I’ll post more about the crazy cousins in the future). And I was tired of people finding out my name and saying, “That doesn’t seem right.”

They were correct. It wasn’t right.

So when I moved to New York City, I found a quick and easy way to change my name (everything in NYC involves a middleman who will handle things for a fee).

At my job, when I announced that my name had gone from something Anglo to a moniker with more of a Latino flair, a co-worker asked, “Doesn’t it usually work the other way around?” In other words, it’s more common for a Guillermo to become a William or a Morales to become a Madison and so on. He was right, of course.

But I had already possessed an Anglo name. It was time for something new.

Certain cultural differences in behavior frustrate our attempts to explain them, especially if the behavior is, shall we say, less then desirable.

Why are most serial killers white? Why do black teenagers get pregnant more often than other adolescents? And why do gay men have such horrific taste in music (I can’t prove that with stats, but you know I’m right).

Still, a new study purports to show that when it comes to negative behavior, Latino teens are in a reckless class by themselves. According to the researchers, Hispanic students are more likely to attempt suicide than their black or white peers are. They are also more likely to ride with a driver who has been drinking alcohol and more likely to drink booze on school property. As far as drug use, they were more likely to use cocaine, heroin or ecstasy, and they were more likely to be offered or to sell narcotics. Finally, they were more likely to skip school because they feared for their safety.

This is a catalog of cataclysm. Apparently, the only reprehensible behaviors that Latino teens are less likely to indulge in, when compared to blacks and whites, are smoking cigarettes or watching excessive amounts of television. Well, I’m sure they also shop at Abercrombie & Fitch less and attend fewer Tyler Perry movies, but the researchers didn’t ask that.

When asked to explain why Hispanic students are so messed up, the researchers gave a concise and very scientific answer of “Fuck if we know.”

I must admit that I too can’t explain why Hispanic teens are more likely to be depressed, high, or rolling around unbuckled with drunken drivers. Even my personal experiences don’t help clarify matters. At one point, of course, I was a Latino teenager. And like all teenage guys, I had the occasional run-in with alcohol, fast driving, and cute girls. But I don’t recall ever selling cocaine or dropping E during class or being terrified to go to school.

There seems to be a cultural disconnect, fueled perhaps by America’s de facto segregation. Or maybe it is the desperate need that afflicts too many minority kids, which is to be street and keep it real (even if that so-called real behavior is simple idiocy). Regardless of the reasons for this societal freefall, Hispanic parents might want to take a moment to talk to their kids, rather than just assume that they’re experiencing things that all other teens have to endure. Clearly, they’re not. 

Neither my wife nor I watch a lot of television. However, one of her TV vices is the show “Top Chef.” The other night, she was tuning in to see which of her favorites will make the final cook-off or bake sale or knife fight or whatever, when I overheard an especially astute comment.

Apparently, this episode was set in Puerto Rico, and the chefs’ challenge was to create an island feast. They were required to use pork in their entrees, inspiring one of the judges to say, “It’s just not a party in Puerto Rico without a pig.”

Well, I could have told you that.

The appeal of pork to Hispanics, and to Puerto Ricans in particular, is well-established. It’s like the Irish with beer, and the Filipinos with rice, and the fundamentalist nutjobs with child brides. Some things are just ingrained.

For proof, let me tell you about one of the first times I brought my girlfriend (now my wife) home for Christmas. The feast was held in the house of my cousins who are half-Puerto Rican, where they lived with their hardcore Puerto Rican father. My wife, a borderline vegetarian, was amused, then perplexed, then disconcerted as it was proudly pointed out that we had three different kinds of pig to choose from (roasted pork, glazed ham, and some fried-porcine dish that intimidated me). Her request for a veggie option, or at least a different kind of meat, was met with baffled stares. How could she not want to devour pig? And we had three different types tonight! As I recall, she ate a lot of salad that evening. What can I say, I liked the ham.

Going back even further, when I was a kid, the term “pork chop” was a derogatory term for Puerto Ricans. This short-lived and ineffective taunt subsided as more colorful words emerged – and also as pissed-off Puerto Ricans kicked the shit out of anyone who called them that. I do not recommend bringing back the insult.

In any case, I compliment the producers of “Top Chef” for recognizing the cultural allure of cooked pig to Latinos.

Of course, I’m sure there are Hispanics out there who hate pork, and probably a Latina vegan or two. Nevertheless, I have to think that if Puerto Rican producers ever get the rights to the “Babe” franchise, (so far consisting of “Babe” and “Babe 2: Pig in the City”), they will develop a sequel where Babe gets roasted, served up with plantains, and chased down with mojitos – all under the title “Babe 3: Pig in My Stomach.”