Hispanic Fanatic

One of my original goals for this blog was to serve as a conduit to Hispanic artists, writers, and general mover-shaker types who might otherwise be overlooked. So far, alas, I have been largely remiss in addressing this goal.

That’s why I’m pleased to have discovered the art of Gabriela Gonzalez Delloso. Her paintings were prominently displayed in a gallery that I wandered into, and they immediately caught my attention. Although her work is not explicitly about being Hispanic, her images (to my untrained eye, at least) carry the weight of the Latino experience.

A bride gazes longingly at a pair of red shoes, and I think of my cousins’ quinceneras. An abuela-type figure presides over a table of food, and I remember random feasts that brought my family together.

Of course, none of this would work if the images were wrapped in sentimentality or cliché. But the artist avoids such traps. In addition, she sets her pieces in the smoky realm of the old masters, as if Rembrandt were Latino. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen, and I encourage you to check it out.

The email was unexpected, even alarming.

It read, “I book guests for an Hispanic television show. We’re taping a program on Latino bloggers, and we’d love to have the Fanatic appear. Please let me know if you’d consider being a part of this show.”

Obviously, I replied that I was interested. What red-blooded American living in our reality-show culture of a society could pass on the opportunity to appear on television, which is the very pinnacle of existence?

In truth, it should be clear to everyone that if I really wanted to be a celebrity, I wouldn’t be a writer. I would be a rock star or, at the very least, a pathetic hanger-on to some washed-up actor (whichever is easier).

So it wasn’t about my getting my fifteen minutes. My only motivation was to publicize the blog.

I agreed to talk to the booking agent to see if I was a good fit for the show’s topic. After speaking with this very nice, albeit fast-talking woman from New York, I found out that I would appear as a panelist on the show, via satellite no less. I would debate, banter, cajole, and confront the other panelists on live television. It sounded good to me.

Later, I did some research on the show. The publicity for the program refers to the hosts as “multicultural journalistic powerhouses,” which sounds pretty damn cool. Of course, it also sounds like the hosts are Latinos who have been exposed to excessive radiation.

In any case, I was excited to appear on the show. This would be my television debut, unless one counts the myriad times when I was a teenager that I snuck into the background of a hapless reporter delivering an on-location news story. This time, I had no plans to stick out my tongue and wave rabbit ears behind someone’s head. Otherwise, my maturity level would probably be identical.

Alas, the producers decided that my blog’s subject matter didn’t quite fit the show’s theme, so I won’t be appearing. They broke the news to me via another unexpected email. In less than twenty-four hours, my small-screen debut went from genesis to untimely death. After my brief flirtation with fame, it is indeed a bitter pill to go back to a life where I cannot introduce myself with the phrase “as seen on tv.”

Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before some other television program recruits the Fanatic. And when that day comes, it will be a foreshadowing of my future multimedia presence, when I’ll be exchanging bon mots with Jon Stewart, snipping with Bill O’Reilly, and slapping high-fives with David Letterman.

Can’t you just see it? I know I can.

I was nine, maybe ten years old. Our class fieldtrip was to see some play downtown.

The performance was, in retrospect, a heavy-handed piece about the importance of respecting your elders. The plot centered on a teenage Latina who has to adjust to her grandmother coming to live with them. The grandmother was very old-world, and spoke only Spanish. This led to numerous scenes of the grandmother struggling to communicate, which often ended with the girl storming off the stage in frustration.

The play was aimed, perhaps even conceived, for the audience that watched it: first-generation Hispanic children who had forgotten their Spanish and squirmed when their relatives spoke English in thick, embarrassing accents.

We watched as the grandmother and the teenager slowly bonded, and we laughed at their trip to the zoo, and we cried (well, I didn’t, but the girls in my class did) when the grandmother inevitably suffered an offstage fatal heart attack. The play ended with the teenage girl giving the eulogy for her beloved, Spanish-speaking abuela.

At the curtain call, the performers received the polite applause of children who knew they had seen something entertaining, but remained mystified over why they saw it or what it had meant. Regardless, the minor characters got a steady clapping, the parental figures garnered a bit more enthusiasm, and the teenage girl got a hoot or two of approval.

And then the grandmother stepped out for a bow.

The result was immediate. It was thunderous. It was bedlam.

The applause erupted so that everything that came before seemed like a whispered sigh at midnight. The decibel level ratcheted up to sheer din levels. Shouts and shrieks of approval washed over the stage. Many children leapt to their feet, although no adults had asked them to do so. Indeed, the teachers looked around, stunned, as their bratty charges slapped their hands together and whistled and stood on their chairs, aiming their affection at the grandmother.

I was unfamiliar with the concept of a standing ovation, and most likely so were the other kids. Neither had we been instructed to clap harder for the lead actress or informed what constituted a stellar performance or told to cheer. In fact, even we seemed shocked at our level of appreciation for the old woman.

It was like Charlie Chaplin at the Oscars.

For her part, the grandmother was amazed. She stepped back in surprise, looking more embarrassed than touched or flattered. She nodded quickly and tried to leave the stage, but the teenage girl grabbed her hand. The grandmother held hands with the other actors and took a bow, then she rushed off the stage as our applause continued, unabated.

To this day, I have no idea what provoked our outpouring. Maybe she reminded us of our own grandmothers. But more likely, she was the kind, wise, exuberant abuela we all wanted but didn’t have.

Most of our grandmothers were cranky old women who were bitter about leaving their homelands. They complained about the cold weather and immoral American culture and the lack of good flour tortillas available in el norte. They dragged us to church and threatened us with eternal damnation if we didn’t pray to Jesus every day, and they bellowed that their grandsons were perezoso brutos and their granddaughters dressed like whores.

But here was this friendly, patient grandmother who put up with a teenager’s outbursts. She passed along cultural traditions without ramming them down our throats, and she didn’t complain when we played new wave (it was circa 1980, after all) at top volume. I mean, how cool was she?

I don’t know the name of the actress who played the grandmother. She was old decades ago, so the odds are pretty good that she is no longer with us. But I’d like to think that when she looked back at her acting career or hobby or however she viewed performing, she remembered an auditorium full of children, all cheering her on.

Recently, I was introduced to the art of Martin Ramirez. His strange and twisted life story can be summarized as follows:

A young Mexican man comes to the United States in 1925 to find work. Years later, the Great Depression hits, he winds up on the street, and he gets picked up the cops. He is thrown into a nuthouse in California, where he lives for the rest of his life. Over the course of his 32 years in a mental institution, he creates some of the most stunning artwork of the era. With no formal training, and often, without any art supplies beyond stray objects that he found in the building, he creates mesmerizing images that address immigration, poverty, and insanity. He has public exhibitions of his work, and critics hail him as brilliant. Yet his schizophrenia is so severe that he rarely speaks to anyone, and he never comprehends that his pictures have provoked such adoration in the outside world. He dies, still insane as fuck, in 1963 at the age of 68.

If he had been a crazy Brit or a mad German, would his treatment in America have been the same? Might his genius be better recognized and nurtured today, rather than shut off in a padded cell? And what of our social services that took care of an immigrant instead of chucking him back across the border? How would that work in the current political climate?

These are all valid questions, but all I can offer in this post is a gateway to his art. Looking at his work makes you feel like you’re taking a warped train ride (one of his favorite reoccurring motifs) through a tortured imagination, destination unknown or even irrelevant. If you get a chance, check out a Ramirez exhibition, and let the Fanatic know what you think of it.

My cousin loves the music of Tom Waits. I never saw her more excited on Christmas, in fact, than the year her sister gave her a copy of Big Time as a gift.

My cousin can groove to any tunes she wants to, of course, because she’s a Latina. It’s one of the few times that it’s advantageous to have a fuzzier, less-distinct cultural image.

If she were black, for example, exclaiming an admiration for Frank’s Wild Years would cause perplexity, and possibly outright hostility. Similarly, white people are given wide latitude in what they listen to, but if they get too far into hip-hop it comes across as slumming or co-option or a grotesque absurdity that makes all of us nervous (spare me your exceptions).

But an Hispanic can crank anything and it fits. I have another cousin who admires Johnny Cash, another who blares Ministry, and another who only listens to extended DJ remixes of techno blips and beeps (which are sounds that I’m sure will replace waterboarding as an interrogation technique).

All of it lines up, but none of it does too. So bring on the classic rock or blare some jazz or trip back to disco, because everything is equally representative.

The few Hispanic artists out there don’t present a unified front. I grew up listening to Carlos Santana, but his music is no more or less Latino-centric than Daddy Yankee, who is, of course, quite a bit different stylistically. You can go old-school with Tito Puente or Celia Cruz, but by their very nature, these artists bring up images of foreign lands and warm climates that our ancestors left behind to come to America in the first place.

So there is no music specifically associated with the Hispanic American, like hip-hop with black people or, I don’t know, The Carpenters with white people. But is this such a bad thing?

Truth be told, it’s a relief to have one aspect of life not subjected to the whims of cultural categorization. And if this is one of the few ways in which Hispanics have it easier than other ethnicities, I’ll take it. Plus, it makes it a lot easier to explain the diverse and occasionally embarrassing contents of my ipod, should it ever fall into the wrong hands.

But writing about this got me thinking about Darius Rucker. I always felt bad for the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish. It was all over for him, culturally, the moment he strummed an acoustic guitar and began getting all James Taylor on everybody. He became a curiosity, even a freak. That never would have happened if he had wised up and claimed to be a very dark Cuban.

Last week, scientists announced that they had finally cracked an Aztec math code. It took the researchers 30 years of work to decipher what the ancient inhabitants of Mexico meant when they wrote equations with symbols of hearts and arms and arrows. Apparently, it was an elaborate setup for a dirty joke involving a high priestess named Txchotl…actually, it wasn’t, but wouldn’t that have been cool?

No, the Aztecs had the same concerns as everybody else. They kept financial records to make sure nobody was ripping them off. The coded entries referred to land transactions, tax assessments, and the like.

It’s discombobulating  to realize that, hundreds of years ago, these fierce warriors took breaks from pillaging villages and throwing virgins into volcanoes to handle the red tape of government bureaucracy. The Aztec version of the IRS must have been murder.

However, the mundane solution to the mysterious code doesn’t address a larger question. Namely, why would academic researchers spend decades trying to figure out what long-dead Latinos had recorded?

Perhaps it is because the Aztecs, along with the Incas and the Mayans, continue to tantalize the imagination, centuries after their extinction. They remain the Big Three of original Hispanic culture.

I’ll talk more about the reasons for this fascination in later posts. I’m just pleased we finally know that, according the Aztecs, a bone equals one-fifth of a rod… and suddenly we’ve lapsed back into that vulgar joke.

Thanks to Latino Pundit for bringing this up.

Apparently, there is a duende, a South American spirit, wandering around Argentina, scarring the shit out of jumpy teenagers. That’s not the real story, however, because the thing is so obviously a hoax that it doesn’t merit further analysis.

No, what I find interesting is that Wonkette, who more or less broke the story in America, introduced the piece on her website by referring to illegal “Mexican Argentineans” – a description so contradictory, insulting, and bizarre that it leaves the reader baffled. One would think that a person devoted to discussing political subtleties would understand the difference between undocumented immigrants in the United States and South American citizens in their home country.

To be fair, Wonkette might have meant it as a joke – something so obviously wrongheaded that it supplies its own sarcasm. But if that was the intention, it sailed right over the heads of the people who posted comments to her, none of whom seemed to notice the inaccuracy…save for one very pissed-off Argentinean.

With her intentions unclear and the significance vague, I’ll withhold further condemnation. So fuck it. Here’s a video of a duende:

Yesterday, I posted about a bar that advertised its drink specials by slurring Hispanics.

Since we’re on the subject of sensitivity, let me ask about this year’s Oscar winner for best picture, No Country for Old Men. It was released on DVD this week.

If you haven’t seen it, you can believe the hype. It really is that good and deserves its acclaim. But I’m not going to go on about the film’s white-knuckle tension or thematic subtext or challenging conclusion. I’m not even going to dwell on Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning performance as an unstoppable hitman (except to say that the guy is doom personified).

No, what I want to address is the fact that, in a movie with plenty of Latinos (a rarity in film), every one of them is a drug runner or cold-blooded killer or sleazy operator of some type.

So how do the Coen Brothers get away with this?

Have we given them a pass because the film is of such high quality? Or is it because most of the characters, regardless of race, are so vile that it all evens out? Perhaps it is because the movie is true to its tone and setting (drug deals on the Texas border). Or is the mere presence of artistic ambition enough to quiet rumblings of stereotyping? It’s the Coens, after all, not some schlocky exploitation artists.

Maybe it’s all of these things or none of them.

What are your theories? How does the film dodge the bullet of racism? Or does it not succeed at this, and I just haven’t noticed?

First, Rob has added to the discussion under “Defining My Terms.”

Second, Keg has contributed an interesting, and rather dark, insight to my previous post (“My Master Plan Revealed”).

Third, I have to apologize for this post in advance – not because it is offensive, but because I am giving free publicity to idiocy. I had planned to ignore it, but I’m going to risk granting attention to these individuals because it illustrates an important principle.

Here’s the back story: Recently, a bar in Pittsburgh promoted its midweek special by advertising the event as “Wetback Wednesday.” When several groups and individuals pointed out the undeniable racism of the term, the bar owner insisted that it was all just a joke.

Yes, it’s quite the chiste. I’m sure we all laughed far into the night.

I look forward to Jigaboo Thursdays and Gook Sundays. And I’m sure we can get much more derogatory, all in the interest of a chuckle.

Berkeley Breathed (creator of Bloom County and other comic strips) coined the term “offensensitivity” to connate getting riled up about nothing. That’s certainly a problem in this country, and too often we see people getting incensed about harmless jokes or cutting observations.

But it’s clear that if there are ever grounds for getting somewhat peeved, it’s when a term that exists solely to denigrate a group of people is blithely and proudly displayed in public (to advertise fun and good times, no less). At the very least, it has to actually be funny and/or insightful to be defensible. And really, lazy alliteration with no context beyond “drink here” doesn’t cut it.

So let’s assume, and the proposal seems reasonable to me, that people aren’t being hypersensitive in this case when they object.

As such, there are only three possible ways an individual can explain putting up such a sign:

1. I am a racist and am being overt about it
2. I am a racist but know it is socially unacceptable, so I’ll hide behind the lamest joke of all time
3. I am not a racist and made an honest mistake while trying to be funny

I do not know what was going through the bar owner’s mind when he put the sign up. In the news story, he is identified only as Mark (I’m going to presume that his last name is not Gonzalez). But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he is number three (not a racist).

As such, here is a quick education. “Wetback” is a stunningly insulting word to Hispanics, comparable to the dreaded N-word for blacks (and I notice that this phrase does not have its own nightly drink special at the bar). The chief competition for word most likely to get you thrashed by a Latino is “spic,” which I also highly recommend that you avoid.

Using these words is not edgy or blackly comic or un-PC or a victory for the First Amendment. It’s just idiotic.

When people object to such slurs, they are not (as a mocking sign at the bar later insisted) being “easily offended.”

Rather, they are pointing out that if you’re the majority culture, you already run everything. You don’t get to tell minorities how they should refer to themselves. It’s even dicer to tell them what they should find funny. To scream that this is unfair is, well, pretty damn ironic actually. But it’s still not witty.