Hispanic Fanatic

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the Brown Invasion. No, I’m not talking about all those Latinos stealing our jobs, selling our kids drugs, and hooting at our wives.

Hey, that’s old news. Even right-wingers are tired of peddling such fictions.

I’m referring to the recent study that showed ethnic minorities are no longer content to live in barrios and inner cities. For example, “metropolitan New York is being rapidly reshaped as blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants surge into the suburbs.”

Yes, my friends, it’s a damn surge out there. Watch out, suburbia.

I used to live in NYC, and my neighborhood, although primarily white, was decently mixed. The same is true of the LA area in which I live now. It’s one reason that I’ve loved both neighborhoods.

However, I have never lived in a suburb, nor do I have any desire to do so. Every time I visit a friend who has bought a house on a cul-de-sac, I get a little jittery, like the 1950s are going to suddenly explode all over me. I expect to look over a manicured lawn and there, in the distance, see a nuclear family in black and white, playing croquet and drinking lemonade.

But that’s just my hang-up. As much as I love living in cities, it would be a sad commentary if every Hispanic thought exactly as I do. By all means, if the Rodriguez family wants to take the commuter rail, I say enjoy the ride.

Still, it’s not like Latinos are blending in effortlessly with their suburban compatriots. That old barrier — segregation — exists even when Hispanics leave the big bad city behind. Latinos tend to be “typically clustered in ethnically or racially monolithic communities,” even in suburbia. So Wally and the Beaver won’t necessarily be hanging with Juan and Maria.

But perhaps that’s in the future, and maybe there are other positive developments yet to come. For example, suburbanites may have more diversity at their key parties someday.

And perhaps the whole concept of suburban angst will have to be redefined. Maybe a couple named Hernandez will feel ennui for once.

This opens up exciting possibilities. Perhaps a Hispanic director will remake “American Beauty” or “The Ice Storm,” but with Latinos in the lead. And of course, maybe someone can take another shot at “Revolutionary Road.”

If so, can we talk Kate Winslet into playing a Latina?

Yes, I still have a monster crush on the woman; sue me.

I never get tired of writing about Hispanic culture. But I have to admit that certain related topics have started to wear on me. Check that — one subject has pummeled me into stunned disbelief and ulcer-causing frustration.

Yes, once again, I have to grit my teeth and pound the word “Arizona” into the keyboard. It wasn’t enough that the state passed SB 1070, the most overtly Latino-hostile piece of legislation in modern history. Nor was Arizona satisfied when it banned ethnic studies in high schools, under the guise that kids who learned about Cesar Chavez would get riled up and burn down Tucson.

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Like you, I receive a lot of strange requests via email. Thus far, I have resisted invitations from strangers to take part in their pyramid schemes or to meet them for illicit affairs or to order pharmaceuticals by the truckload.

But I recently got a missive that captured my attention. I have been asked to join a pokatok league.

A natural question, of course, is what the hell is pokatok? Well, I didn’t know either.

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It’s good karma to thank one’s internet friends, so let me give a quick shout out to Pete and Raul for their recent comments on my posts.

Speaking of amigos, a friend and I met up for dinner recently. For some reason, we started talking about shitty jobs that we’ve had in the past. Between us, we’ve had some pretty horrific gigs, but one of hers in particular caught my attention.

My friend used to be a personal assistant for a minor celebrity here in Los Angeles. One of her duties was to take the celebrity’s mother out to lunch. Yes, Hollywood types really do pay people to perform such tasks (I’m glad I could confirm your justifiably low opinion of them).

In any case, my friend was doing her job, listening to the celebrity’s elderly mother drone on over lunch, when the old lady stopped talking. My friend looked up, concerned that her client’s mom had just suffered a stroke on her watch.

But the celebrity’s mom was staring. My friend noticed the unmistakable flitting of anger cross the lady’s face.

“Look at them,” the celebrity’s mom hissed.

My friend turned around to see what the offense was. As you can imagine, the object of scorn was a Latino family.

The celebrity’s mom launched into a diatribe about how Hispanics were taking over and how they were “stealing my benefits.”

The exact nature of these benefits was not made clear. In fact, my friend briefly considered telling the old lady that any privileges she had accrued were because of her majority status in the culture — that and the fact that her daughter had once starred in a hit TV show. It wasn’t because the old lady had actually worked hard for anything.

Nor did my friend learn how a normal-looking family out for a meal was really a front for stealing the old woman’s “benefits,” whatever those were. In fact, as my friend explained, “I’m not even sure everybody in the family was Hispanic. A couple of them looked Middle Eastern.”

In any case, my friend endured the diatribe about “sneaky Mexicans” and escorted the old lady out of the restaurant. The benefit-stealing family of possible Hispanics remained oblivious.

My friend quit the job soon after this incident. Cut off from the entourage, she never heard from the celebrity again. It’s just as well, because her old boss is now an ex-celebrity who hasn’t worked in years. In all likelihood, she doesn’t even have a personal assistant anymore.

Who knows, maybe the celebrity has to suffer the indignity of taking her own damn mom out for lunch.

I didn’t fly anywhere for Thanksgiving. This was obviously a good thing, as incessant news reports have informed me that TSA agents are groping Americans nonstop.

Really, it appears that this has become the civil-rights issue of our time. Citizens are up in arms that their privacy is being violated, so we have people opting out or showing up in bikinis or clamoring that TSA agents have literally squeezed the piss out of them.

And don’t get me started about the dreaded full-body scanners. We’ve heard that they cause cancer or melt your keys to your leg or instantly post images of your naked body to Facebook. At the very least, you never know if some Al-Qaeda operative is going to pick the moment you get scanned to detonate a terrorist photobomb.

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Here’s a quick thanks to Festina, Juan, Jenn, Millie, and the always amazing Ankhesen Mie for their recent comments on my posts. Also, thanks to Pete for commenting on my post about wine tasting… which reminds me.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, people who drink wine tend to be healthier than abstainers. This means that I am encroaching on invincibility, because in addition to my love of vino, I am most positively Hispanic.

Yes, on the heels of the Immigrant Paradox, we have the even more perplexing and intriguing Latino Paradox. It sounds all twisty and stuff, doesn’t it?

This term describes “the surprising health of Latinos in the United States” who “are less likely to have health insurance … go to doctors less often and receive less in the way of hospitalization or high-level care when they are sick. Yet they … have lower rates of heart disease, cancer and stroke.”

For some reason that doctors, researchers, and healthcare experts can’t explain, we Hispanics are generally healthier and tend to live longer than our white or black brothers and sisters. On a purely anecdotal level, I can back this up.

My grandmother is pushing ninety and suffers fewer physical ailments than some people half her age. Indeed, members of my family usually have long lives, as long as they don’t get shot (but that’s another topic).

So what is the basis for the Latino Paradox? Well, among the guesses are concepts that I’ve discussed before, such as the fact that “Latino culture is particularly family-oriented; there also are strong community and neighborhood networks.” In addition, we Hispanics “eat somewhat more healthfully, with higher consumption of fruits and vegetables” despite the fact that “white adults know more about nutrition than Latino adults.”

To really pile it on, the stats show that “pregnant Latino women are less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs or have sexually transmitted diseases than American women as a whole,” which probably explains our “lower infant mortality rates, and quite probably health later in life.”

Clearly, we Hispanics are one beneficial gene mutation away from becoming completely bulletproof.

But it’s not all good news. And as I’ve written before, getting Hispanics to have regular medical checkups can be a challenge. Furthermore, the researchers found that “although Latino children who immigrate to the U.S. with their parents have lower rates of obesity than their U.S.-born peers, their risk of obesity increases the longer they live here.”

In other words, the more time Hispanics spend in the United States, the more likely they are to become fat, sedentary, and artery-clogged Americans. The Latino Paradox holds that “acculturation to the American way of life may worsen the health of Latinos, especially when combined with lack of access to medical care.”

As such, the lesson of the Latino Paradox is obvious.

I hate to break it to certain political leaders, but if we really want to reduce the cost of healthcare, and help Americans of every race to live longer while we’re at it, it’s clear what we have to do:

Everybody has to become a little more Hispanic.

I’ve mentioned before that one of my vices is alcohol, specifically wine. And yes, people in wine shops are not always delighted to see me.

In any case, I’ve also mentioned that my wife and I like to go wine-tasting, which is about as “boogee” (as Cousin #1 would say) as it gets. I mean, it’s not exactly keeping it real in the barrio to say things like, “The tannins on this zinfandel give way to notes of chocolate.”

But as I‘ve also stated, a person can get drive himself insane by measuring every decision or preference against the ever-shifting and amorphous concept of “authenticity.”

So I’m not going to apologize for the fact that we like zipping through the California countryside and sampling the vineyards’ vino.

When we first started doing this, my wife and I were among the few Gen Xers who showed up in the tasting room. Lately, however, we’ve noticed that more people are our age. Perhaps it is a truism that individuals develop more sophisticated palates and upscale tastes as they get older. Or maybe my peers have realized how depressing keggers are when you’re pushing forty.

Regardless, I’ve also noticed that I’m no longer the sole Latino at such functions. In the past, the only Hispanics I ever saw were the laborers in the fields. Indeed, this agricultural industry is one of the top employers of Latinos, and several Hispanics have worked their way up to management or even ownership positions — something highly rare in corporate America.

In the tasting room, however, it’s still been mostly white people — at least until lately. So what should I make, if anything, of the observation that more Latinos are joining me in swirling around a glass of syrah?

It’s probably nothing more profound than the fact that, even in these horrific economic times, the demographic shift underway in America continues. And it won’t be long before every aspect of upscale U.S. culture — from country clubs to executive boardrooms — gets an ethnic makeover. It is inevitable.

However, it also means that whenever Hollywood gets around to remaking Sideways (every movie get remade, sooner or later), they will probably replace Paul Giamatti with someone who is, shall we say, a little swarthier.

It came from outer space.

Well, not really, but that’s what a lot of people think.

The chupacabra, as you may know, is a Latin American legend. He (it?) is a vampire-like creature that attacks animals (primarily goats) and sucks their blood and/or internal organs out. He’s one scary badass.

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One of my favorite words is “internecine.” Of course, I don’t admire the concept (i.e., hostility or conflict within a group). I just like the sound of its syllables clanging together.

In any case, “internecine” describes the situation whenever ethnic minorities beat up on each other. It’s most famous application is “black-on-black violence.”

I have yet to hear about brown-on-brown violence, but perhaps it is only a matter of time. For example, a few months ago in Staten Island, a Mexican immigrant became one of the borough’s recent victims of a hate crime.

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Whatever happened to the controversy over bilingual education? I don’t mean that the topic has gone away or been resolved.

However, with all the hysteria over immigration and assimilation and undocumented Latinos stealing our jobs… well, it just seems like the debate over the best way to educate immigrant children with poor English skills has been rendered quaint.

Perhaps this is because English-immersion appears to be the de facto winner. Teaching immigrant kids in their native language seems to be a 1970s concept — like gun control and no-nuke rallies — that failed to accomplish much.

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