Hispanic Fanatic

In a previous post, I mentioned that my grandmother makes the best pupusas in the history of Western civilization. It is best not to argue this point with me.

The pupusa, for those of you who don’t know, is more or less a tortilla stuffed with meat, cheese, and/or beans that is then fried. There are numerous variations. I’ve heard it compared to the meat pies of Great Britain, but I reject this characterization on the grounds that English food sucks.

In El Salvador, November 13 is National Pupusa Day, which gives you an idea of how seriously this dish is taken in that culture. It also shows how people who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving still want something to fill that calendar void before Christmas.

Years ago, one of my friends was so taken with my grandmother’s pupusas that he attempted to make them himself. He is a male who cooks, which would incense my grandmother (see my previous post for her opinions on guys in the kitchen), and the fact that he is white gives him a theoretical disadvantage in making a Salvadoran dish. But he is a Yale graduate and a pretty quick study, so I believed he had as good a chance as anybody at mastering exotic cuisines. In addition, he has spent so much time with my family that my mother refers to him as her other son, and I must admit that his Spanish is possibly better than mine. So he’s pretty much an honorary Hispanic.

So my friend strapped on an apron, which must have been comical because he’s a towering man who played college football, and set to work slapping patties and cooking chicharrones and scooping queso. Everything seemed to be going well, right up until the moment the first charred pupusa set off the smoke alarm. Alas, things did not improve after that, and the resultant mess of crumbly dough and gooey innards could hardly be called authentic pupusas.

I give my friend credit for expanding his cultural horizons. But in the end, this highly educated, muscle-bound man had to admit that a 90-pound octogenarian had him beat.

If you are bold enough to think you can outcook my grandmother, by all means, give it a try. Here is a recipe for pupusas. If you really want to do it right, sprinkle them with some curtido. If, as I suspect, you fail miserably at this culinary endeavor, head to a Salvadoran restaurant, which are in every major city. Order a pile of pupusas, and tell them the Fanatic sent you.

Among my numerous flaws is the fact that I’m not very charitable. Yes, I give money to worthy causes and all that, but I’m stingy with my time. My wife does volunteer work, which is one of the eight thousand things that I admire about her. Still, I’ve never found the energy to join her on her endeavors or to paint a dilapidated inner-city house or to devote a holiday to working in a soup kitchen or to do something else community-driven and altruistic.

My reluctance may be due to laziness or cynicism. Or it could be that my youthful stint doing volunteer work in the barrio of my hometown was less than satisfying.

I was a teenager, and I accompanied my mother on her rounds giving food to poor people. Again, I went not because I was bursting with the milk and honey of human compassion, but because my mom told me to. She needed someone to lift the heavy bags of donated foodstuffs, and I was informed that I was this person. So we drove around town, and I lugged clunking sacks up flights of stairs, entering each family’s hovel with the slump-shouldered, sullen indifference of the American teenager.

The families were overwhelmingly Hispanic, most of them recent immigrants who were still struggling with English. The land of opportunity was a lot harsher than many of them thought it would be, and they were, without exception, grateful for our help.

In fact, they were excessively grateful. I was hugged numerous times, and more than once a weary-looking Latina mother would burst into tears or repeat, “Gracias” over and over again.

This was not a moving experience for me. On the contrary, I got embarrassed. I didn’t like people falling over themselves praising me, especially when all I had done was carry some groceries. Plus, none of this charity work was my idea and all of it was against my will.

But still they went on in rapid Spanish, until my mother interrupted them to hand over the bill. You see, the food was free – but it still cost something. The price for being fed was a lecture.

The lecturer was my mother, and the topic was birth control.

My mother and I had noticed that most of the households were overrun with shrieking children. The Latino obsession with family (which I have addressed in these posts more than once) was in full flower. This was one of its negative outcomes.

So my mother tried to explain to these destitute women that they didn’t have to keep cranking out babies. She pointed out the obvious – more children meant more mouths to feed – and she tried to convince them that in America, they had freedom and choice and other abstractions that didn’t exist in their home countries.

But the lectures were not popular with the receipients. Many of the immigrant mothers were mystified about basic birth control, as if my mother were trying to convince them to buy a magic talking chimpanzee. It was just that exotic.

Those who knew about condoms and pills and IUDs usually dismissed them out of hand. It was against God, they argued, by which they really meant it was against the Catholic Church’s teachings. This showed me at a young age, as if I needed any further proof, that religion can do more harm than good and that people will abdicate responsibility for their own personal disasters under the guise of being holy. It also convinced me that Hispanics will never improve their quality of life as long as they remain fanatically devoted to the pope (see my earlier post on this).

Other excuses popped up. Some women implied that it was their culture’s way to have lots of children, oblivious to the fact that they were in America now. At least one woman said that her husband refused to wear a condom because it wasn’t manly. This was a special moment when my mother translated this particular item for me (and not awkward in the least!).

In any case, many of the immigrants had come to expect my mother’s sermon. They had to choose between having their belief system questioned or receiving those enormous rectangular cubes of cheese that exist solely for poor people’s consumption. It was their Sophie’s Choice.

So they listened, and then they said, “Gracias,” and then we left to repeat the whole futile process again.

And that’s why I don’t volunteer anymore. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

As I’ve mentioned before, my family emigrated from El Salvador. But I have never set foot in that country.

The nearest I have come to this familial motherland was when I was fourteen, and my mother took me to Nicaragua. As part of the trip, we climbed to the edge of a volcano (yes, my mom took me cool places when I was a child). On the climb down, my mother pulled me aside and pointed to some verdant mountains in the distance.

“That is El Salvador,” she said.

This glimpse is the extent of my first-hand experience with my family’s birthplace.

A natural question is, why did my mother and I stop at Nicaragua? Why didn’t we keep going into El Salvador?

The answer is simple: We didn’t want to die.

At the time, (circa 1985), my mother was on a Salvadoran government hit list. If she exited a plane there, she would be shot. Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating doesn’t realize how ruthless and bloodthirsty the junta running El Salvador was at that time. My mother was a rabble-rouser in the United States, and she spoke out against the Salvadoran government (see my previous post on this). This got her noticed in her homeland. They certainly weren’t going to send some international assassination squad after her in the Midwest (it’s not a Bruckheimer movie for damn sakes), but my mother found out through her friends in El Salvador that she was on the small list of Americans who would be quickly picked up if she ever returned. Two of her siblings had already been murdered (see my previous post on this as well), so this was no joke.

For this excellent logistical reason, we were not going to El Salvador any time soon. The war has since ended, of course, and my mother has returned a few times. But I haven’t yet made the trip.

Time, money, and the myriad responsibilities of adulthood have prevented me from packing a suitcase and yelling, “Next stop, the tiny village of San Vicente.”  In fact, although I’ve lived in several cities and seen more of America than most people have, my international jaunts are limited. Besides that journey to Nicaragua, I’ve been to Mexico (which will be the subject of a future post) and traveled about nine feet into Canada once. I finally made it to Europe a few years ago, where my wife and I hit London and Paris. And that’s it.

But with all the dream destinations in the world that I have yet to conquer – drinking wine in Italy, diving off the coast of Australia, trekking to the North Pole – why am I hung up on visiting a tiny country best known for warfare and which my family abandoned a generation ago?  

After all, few people go to El Salvador unless they have family there. I suppose there are those mega-travelers who hit every nation no matter how small or impoverished. But aside from that, people generally don’t get any closer to the place than the rainforests of Costa Rica or the beaches of Belize.

However, for those of us who are first-generation, there is always the pull of a land that we have never seen, the place where our parents come from. Their memories and stories have not been decayed by time, and we feel irrational nostalgia for a place barely removed from us. We ponder how we would have turned out if we were born and raised there (I have since found out that this is metaphysically impossible… but that’s another post or maybe even a different blog altogether).

This yearning for a lost homeland is not shared by most Americans. For example, my wife is descended from German immigrants who came over so long ago that she has no idea when they arrived or what their names were. Her desire to visit Berlin is roughly equal to her interest in roadtripping to Delaware. In contrast, one of my best friends is first-generation Serbian, and his life was incomplete until he walked through Sarajevo.

Similarly, I want to see the place where my mother and aunt grew up, and the nation where several of my cousins were born, and the focal point of so much joy and misery in the history of my family.

And of course, I have more incentive to see El Salvador ever since Cousin #8 moved back there (this will be the subject of a future post).

So I hope to someday go beyond the fleeting image of that landscape I viewed from a distant vantage point when I was a teenager. For all I know, it might be decades from now, when I’m an old man doing some kind of crazy circle-of-life final journey. But I will stand on top of that lush mountain that I saw long ago and say, “Damn, I finally made it.”

In Europe during the Middle Ages, lepers and vagrants were often assumed to have nefarious supernatural powers. The thinking was that too much exposure to the riff-raff would cause your hands to fall off, or your baby to die, or your wife to go mad. And if the local burgermeister couldn’t get it up with his mistress-wench, it must have been because that withered crone who begs outside his door had placed a hex upon him.

The reason for this odd logic, according to some historians, is that as cities grew, a permanent underclass developed that freaked out the respectable people. The upper classes feared these cretins who dressed in rags, and to deal with this dread of the unknown (or to assuage their guilt for not helping those less fortunate than themselves), they claimed that the wretches only appeared weak. So the myth grew that some manic with no teeth and gangerous limbs could take you out if you weren’t careful.

We’re much more civilized today, of course, and we don’t blame the poor for our calamities – well, except for all those homeless guys who are making downtown unsafe… and the welfare recipients who continue to sponge the system… and those illegal immigrants who are stealing our livelihoods… and…

Wait a minute.

Yes, we do indeed go after those who can’t possibly compete with the middle and upper classes. If we’re fortunate enough to achieve a certain level of comfort, but that final rung on the economic ladder is too slippery to grasp, we blame our distress on the equivalent of Middle Age witches.

This blaming necessitates the really nifty trick or assessing that someone has no power, and therefore won’t fight back, and then ascribing enormous power to them. The tactic is especially common in prosperous societies, where people have more possessions and, therefore, have more to lose.

A crazy homeless guy ranting about God reminds us of our potential to bottom out more than it would in say, Sierra Leone, where poverty is a widespread fact of life.

Similarly (and most importantly from this blog’s perspective) a team of illegal immigrants clambering over the neighbor’s roof, laboring mightily in the summer sun, invokes a fear in middle-class Americans that these hard-working strangers are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead – and that means they’re coming for our nice cars and fancy televisions and 80GB ipods and crème brûlée torches (by the way, this last item is real and exists solely for people who have way too much disposable income).

It’s been pointed out that immigrants are often the boogeyman for societal problems. Just look at Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” to see how despised the Irish were.

So now it’s the Latino’s turn to be scorned and feared.

Naturally, there are clear objections to the idea that illegal immigrants are modern-day scapegoats. Foremost among them is that undocumented workers are not cost-free to the economy, nor are they incapable of criminal behavior. In other words, negative reactions to illegal immigrants are not solely based upon made-up superstitions.

However, the depths of hatred for these individuals, and the vast influence ascribed to them, boggles the mind. Any sensible discussion of immigration reform is doomed once it’s declared that a guy making sub-minimum wage who lives in constant fear is really the secret strongman.

So do we go on blaming the powerless?

Personally, I’m going to try to take more responsibility for my issues – unless of course I can turn this around and blame someone much, much more powerful than me, like the government or Big Oil or the Bavarian Illuminati.

OK, now I’m on to something.

Football season began this weekend, and like millions of other people, I will spend far too much time over the next few months getting emotionally attached to meaningless events beyond my control. My mood on certain Sundays will depend on whether or not an enormous, steroid-enhanced millionaire in a bulky uniform can catch a weirdly shaped spinning object.

There are, of course, few Hispanics who play professional football. Genetically, we tend not to be that big, which is a serious disadvantage in a game based on brute force. Once you get past Tony Gonzalez of the Kansas City Chiefs and a few diminutive place-kickers scattered around the league, the NFL isn’t exactly awash in Latinos. Still, we will soon have at least one honorary Hispanic take the field.

Chad Johnson, a receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, has legally changed his name to Chad Ocho Cinco. For those of you who passed freshman Spanish, you know that “ocho cinco” means “eight five.” It’s a reference to Johnson’s jersey number (eighty-five), although strictly speaking, he should have changed his name to Ochenta y Cinco.

He first slapped “ocho cinco” on the back of his jersey in 2006, when the NFL celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month (which, by the way, is in September). He wore it for pregame warm-ups, but had to remove the moniker for the game because the NFL pointed out that it wasn’t his real name. Well, it is now, and his jersey will indicate as much while we hear the pleasing baritone of sportscasters intone, “and the pass is complete to Ocho Cinco.”

As someone who also changed his last name to reflect Hispanic heritage, I can understand Johnson’s… I mean Ocho Cinco’s decision. Why not choose a name that better reflects your personality, and that has the added benefit of paying tribute to an oft-marginalized culture? And really, how attached could the guy be to the name “Johnson” anyway?

There are a couple of differences between me and Mr. Ocho Cinco, however. First, I’m truly Hispanic, and he’s not. Actually, I don’t have to enumerate any other points besides that one. But I will add that I chose my mother’s maiden name as my new surname, bypassing the megalomania inherent in picking a random number that celebrates just me and my greatness.

In any case, Ocho Cinco joins the very short list of celebrities who have changed their names to something Hispanic or, at the very least, expressed a desire to be Latino. It’s further proof that our hipness level is slowly, incrementally rising.

I am not a Bengals fan, but I hope Ocho Cinco does well this year. After all, if he sucks, we’ll hear, “He was pretty good, until he decided to get all Hispanic on us.”

I’ve been on this kick lately about the importance of children in Hispanic culture. I’ll complete my trilogy of rants on this subject (for now) by pointing out that while the overall national rate of teen pregnancy has declined, it has actually increased among adolescent Latinas.

One supposed reason for this is the tremendous grip that the concept of family has upon Hispanic culture. Young Latinas are apparently so baby-crazy that they just can’t wait for something as trivial as, say, a high school graduation before they get to reproducing.

Along those lines, I’ve heard the excuse that Latinas skip birth control because they believe it implies children are not important or that taking the pill means that they’ll never become mothers.

“Girls hear that they shouldn’t have kids, and they interpret it as a rejection of their goal to be a parent,” some earnest sociologist proclaims.

This rationale presupposes that a teenage Latina cannot comprehend the difference between such basic concepts as “now” and “later.” I would argue, however, that nobody is that stupid.

So what are the real reasons for the overactive ovaries of Hispanic teens? I certainly can’t answer that definitively.

I have some educated guesses however. I would argue that the importance of family and children is indeed a factor (as seen in my previous post). But there’s more to it.

Higher rates of poverty, which still afflict the Hispanic community more than other groups, are often correlated with teen pregnancies.

Old-world thinking from immigrant parents also plays a part. If mom and dad had their first kid at sixteen and cranked out twelve babies, then waiting until eighteen seems positively nun-like. The subtle, and occasionally overt message of many immigrant parents is that there is nothing wrong if little Maria gets knocked up.

And let’s not forget the influence of the Catholic Church, with its strong hold on Latino culture. Religious dogma can easily convince some pent-up adolescent that condoms are Satan’s Isotoners.

All of these reasons are not as blame-free or reassuring as the lame excuse that teen Latinas are simply confused about when to have babies. These reasons are part of the culture, and until they are changed or at least addressed, Hispanic girls will continue to answer to “mami” far too often.

A few years ago, I ran into the sister of my childhood friend (a guy who I briefly thought was my cousin, but I was confused) shortly after his wedding, where I was a groomsman, but he doesn’t have children yet, and…

Let me start over.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Hispanics are more likely than many Americans to back up the phrase “family values” with something approximating an actual valuation of family. This is in contrast to the way the term is usually employed, which is as political code for “I don’t like gays.” As I also mentioned in that post, there are positive and negative aspects to the Hispanic prioritization of family.

For starters, Latinos tend to have more kids, although the rate has started to decline and line up with other ethnic groups in America. Still, Hispanics are well-known, even stereotyped, for having bigger families than most Americans. This tendency to be awash in newborns has been brought up in debates about illegal immigration, studies covering teen pregnancy, and news reports regarding America’s changing demographics.

But are Latinos actually more obsessed with children than other subsets of our culture? Or is the higher birthrate just a fluke of statistics? I can only speak from personal experience. As such, I offer the following anecdotal, completely unscientific evidence.

Some time ago, I was at an ATM when a woman tapped me on the shoulder. Let’s call her Monica. When I was a kid, I was friends with her brother, a guy I’ll call Nelson. They were related, through their father’s marriage, to some of my cousins (see my post on “Cousin #1”). Using child logic, I figured that made us family. They were Puerto Rican, so we certainly looked related.

The last time I had seen either of them was at Nelson’s wedding, about a year previously. To my surprise, Nelson had asked me to stand up at the ceremony, which was odd in that we had barely seen each other since adolescence. He was clearly feeling nostalgic and/or needed another guy to even out the bridesmaid count.

In any case, after the reception, I immediately lost contact with him again. So I was surprised when Monica approached me.

I asked her how Nelson was doing in his new marriage, and a dark frown crossed Monica’s face. I expected her to say that they had separated or the wedding had bankrupted them or they had both gotten into heavy drugs. At the very least, I thought she would say they had gone on a cross-country bank-robbing spree (as young lovers are prone to do).

But Monica just shook her head and said, “Well, no children yet.”

I waited for her to go on, but this was the extent of her update. The status of their marriage could be summarized in this one statement, and this single sentence was also the reason that Monica looked so dour.

There were no children yet.

The guy had been married a year. But so far, he had not knocked up his wife, and this caused his family extreme agitation.

I could not relate to this, so I just nodded in sympathy as if Monica had said, “They were lost at sea.” Our conversation ended, and I walked away, wondering if I would ever see them again or if Nelson was – even at that moment – impregnating his wife in accordance with all good and proper Hispanic social mores. I still don’t know if he ever punched it through.

There are myriad reasons why the Latino drive to reproduce seems to outpace that of the general population. Perhaps I will address the cultural, religious, and sociological reasons for this in a future post.

But for now, I’ll just mention that I don’t have any kids.

My friend Nichole has again captured haunting imagery that depicts… well… something about how Hispanic culture continues to thrive in America.

This gargantuan fellow was spotted outside a Mexican restaurant in a mall. He was busy promoting the “Corona lifestyle” – which sociologists have theorized is identical to the “Budweiser lifestyle,” but with little slices of lemon thrown in.

The restaurant promised “authentic Mexican food.” I have to agree that there is no better way to promote one’s authenticity than by dragging out a huge dead-eyed mariachi with a symbolically tiny trumpet, strapping him into a walker that implies he can shuffle around the mall at will, and placing him in front of the establishment to surprise, delight, and/or terrify first-time customers.

Actually, that all sounds more like the Dos Equis lifestyle.

In any case, I encourage you to bring any other oddball pictures or images that say something about Latino life to my attention. It doesn’t matter if they’re offensive, deluded, self-righteous, insane, creepy, or bizarre. I just want to hear about them. So comment on this post, or send images to hispanicf@gmail.com with the heading “Fanatic image.”

Otherwise, I will depend upon Nichole to come though with more shots. She obviously has an eye for such things.

Even here in America, much has been made of the fact that Muhammad ranks second only to Jack as the most popular name for British newborn boys. According to many commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, Muslim immigrants are taking over England and will soon replace the Union Jack with a crescent symbol.

The U.S. version of this paranoid fantasy is that two of our largest states, California and Texas, have a high percentage of infants with Hispanic first names. The thinking is that these states are becoming excessively Latinoized – meaning that Hispanics are (say it with me…) taking over the place.

What do the actual numbers say about this apparent cultural sea change? Well, in California, the most recent stats (for 2007) show that among the top ten names for newborn boys, three are definitely Hispanic in origin. These are Angel (number three), Jose (number nine), and Diego (number ten).

Texas also has three Latino names cracking the top ten, including the number-one name (Jose). The other popular monikers are Angel (number five) and Juan (number nine).

In any case, none of these Hispanic names ranks in the top twenty for the United States as a whole, indicating that California and Texas are indeed a bit loaded with babies saddled with vowel-heavy first names.

“Ah-ha!” says the jingoist. “I told you these states were being overrun!”

Let’s assume that the data backs up this contention. We’ll even go farther and say that California and Texas will eventually be so loaded with Hispanics that mariachi bands spontaneously flower on every street corner.

The question then becomes… so what?

Some will say that the fear of Hispanics becoming a majority is an understandable reaction to illegal immigration. The problem with this argument is that if little Jose is born in California, he is a U.S. citizen. One presumes he will grow up to be a proud American. That is, unless one assumes a proud American cannot also be a Latino (now there’s an interesting topic for discussion…). These newborns are Americans – not illegals, even if their parents are – so that issue becomes irrelevant.

Is it because as California and Texas become more Hispanic, the residents will clamor to become part of Mexico or independent countries? I have already pointed out the reasons this is just not going to happen, so this far-fetched scenario can be dismissed at once.

So this isn’t concern about the influx of immigrants straining our social services, which is at least a debatable point, or anger that San Diego will become the capital of North Mexico.

Rather, this is the sweaty-palmed, lip-biting, eyebrow-furrowed fear of many whites that they may not be dominant cultural force anymore. And you know what? That may be true within just a few decades.

If that bothers people, they may need to examine why it’s so hair-raising. I’d be interested in hearing a rational reason.

Ultimately, we may need to reconsider exactly what an “American name” is. Most of our traditional names are originally Jewish. Apparently, biblical names are acceptable American monikers. So Jews can rest easy. They can be counted as real Americans. I’ll look forward to the day when Hispanics get the same luxury.