Hispanic Fanatic

Eventually, every kid wants to know the answer to the big question. I don’t remember when I first asked about it, but I’m sure my father supplied me with some vulgar hypothesis.

For Cousin #5 (one of the youngest of us) the question bolted out fully formed almost thirty years ago. She was a little girl, and we were riding in my mom’s car (probably on the way to church) when she blurted, “Where do babies come from?”

I was surprised at her inquiry, and as a teenager I had no idea how to tell a pixyish girl the traumatizing answer. I looked at my mother, who was driving. I expected her to say something like, “Your mother and father love each other very much, and one night…”

But instead she smiled as if she had been waiting all day for just the opportunity to talk about sex with a kindergartner. Without hesitation, she gave my cousin an honest answer steeped in rigorous scientific principles.

“Babies are made from flour, mixed in a bowl, and baked in the oven like cookies,” my mother said.

My cousin nodded at this. It made sense, of course. But a moment later, she upped the ante.

“But why are we different colors?” Cousin #5 asked.

Now we were on to racial issues.

Even Hispanics fall into the trap of thinking there are no other skin tones besides black and white. The history and clear dichotomy between those two colors supersedes everything else. So how was my mother going to explain our burnt-sienna existence now that she had committed to the cookie theory of creation?

Again, she smiled and spoke without pause.

“Babies are cooked at different temperatures for different amounts of time,” she said. “White babies aren’t in the oven too long, so they come out light. Black babies are in the oven longer, so they are darker. It depends what the mother and father want.”

Cousin #5 brightened at this perfectly logical explanation, and her enthusiasm increased when my mother added, “You are brown, so you were cooked just right.”

In one effortless movement, my mother had tackled existential quandaries, explained basic biology, bridged the racial divide, boosted a little girl’s self-esteem, and came up with one hell of a concept for a cooking show.

To this day, I’m still impressed.

In a previous post, I wrote about how I have often been mistaken for Asian, specifically Japanese. This doesn’t offend me (why would it?), but it has been the root of some odd, even repulsive interactions with strangers.

For example, the sole time I have ever been to a country club (it was for a work function), an elderly man tapped me on the shoulder. He personified old white privilege, and he positively beamed as he said, “You know, young man, the club is now accepting more Asians.”

I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected – probably enthusiasm, gratitude, or at least a request for an application. But all I could offer him was a curt “I’m very happy for them,” which provoked the old man to scowl and walk away.

But that country-club gentleman, despite his obliviousness and condescension, was at least not openly hostile. The same could not be said of the previous time that my Hispanic nature was mistaken for Asian subterfuge.

I was an undergrad, walking down the street in my uber-liberal college town one night. Approaching me were three or four highly inebriated frat boys, baseball caps backwards and Greek-letter sweatshirts prominently displayed. They exchanged exuberant, random high-fives and called each other “Fag!” in an affectionate, yet unmistakably homophobic way that called into question if at least one of them was secretly gay (but I’ll refrain from further analysis).

I had seen guys like them before, and I always wondered how they wound up at a lefty campus where hippies were still a cultural force and the term “PC” was not an insult. But here they were, and I was about to pass them on the street.

I walked by, and one of the frat boys (it was impossible to distinguish among them) whipped his head around and shouted, “Go back to Japan!”

It took me a second to realize that he was talking to me. They kept hooting and hollering down the street while I thought, “Japan? I’ve never been to Japan.”

Then I realized that I had been officially slurred. I looked back at the frat boys, but they were down the block and looking for a woman to grope or a black guy to punch or a homeless person to set on fire or something, and so they were long gone. I decided against pursuing them to clear up their confusion, and I walked on, wondering if I should be pissed off or not.

I came to the conclusion, and for this you may call me old-fashioned, that if you racially slur someone, you should at least get his or her ethnicity correct.

It’s only common courtesy.

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.”

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.

For years, the diversity at my job consisted of an Asian woman and me in a sea of 40 white people. A few months ago, everyone got excited because it seemed that we had hired our first gay employee. But as it turned out, he was merely effeminate and not so exotic after all.

So we were all disappointed.

Still, we recently added a woman who is half-Mexican, so the Hispanic population has doubled. Or to look at it another way, because we are both half-Hispanic, between us we add one Latino to the staff. This is progress.

The lack of Hispanic representation in the so-called respectable professions (often defined as those that pay a decent wage to fuck around in a cubicle) is stunning. Aside the time I spent toiling in fast food as a teenager, I’ve usually been the only Hispanic at a given job. I’m used to it, and it’s never been an issue, at least not in the sense of overt hostility. Confusion, however, is much more common.

On occasion, I’ve worked with people for years who are surprised to find out that I’m a Latino. Perhaps we’re making small talk and I’ll mention that my grandmother speaks only Spanish or that my last name has its roots in El Salvador or that I know what “puta” means (hey, it comes up). Then I’ll get this strange look as if I’ve been hiding a secret life or pulling an especially egregious fast one on them.

“Are you Hispanic?” they’ll ask in perplexity. And when I confirm it, they’ll frown or shrug or cluck their tongues with the peevishness of the mildly deceived. They appear to want to follow up with “And when were you going to tell me this?”

It’s not that they’re closet racists. It’s that their worldview has been altered abruptly. What have they believed to that point? I can’t say for sure, but the thinking seems to be, “He’s sort of white, but not really. He’s clearly not black. If he’s not one of those, but still does white-collar work, he must be Asian. Probably Japanese.”

I had one co-worker who wanted to know if I had any female relatives I could fix him up with because, as he stated, “I’m into Asian girls.” He was heartbroken to find out I could not help with his cause, so I refrained from pointing out how painfully common his fetish is among white men.

In a future post, I’ll have more on people’s frequent insistence that I’m really Asian (it’s ranged from comical to combative). But for now, let me return to my original point, which is that very few Latinos read “Dilbert.”

In fact, the only other Hispanics I usually see in an office building are the guys mopping the floor, and they often give me quick, embarrassed smiles as if to say, “Sorry I don’t make you prouder” or “Aren’t you afraid they’ll catch you impersonating a white guy?” Otherwise, we avoid eye-contact, because the Latino janitor is probably thinking that I look down upon him, while I’m super-conscious of the fact that I don’t want to appear like I’m looking down upon him. Perhaps we should engage in a moment of solidarity, or I can emphasize the importance of education so his children can go farther than he has, or we can snicker and say, “How about those Anglos, huh?” But we do none of this, because the class difference between us is vaster than the racial similarities that bond us. I feel that I should say something to the guy, but no words of wisdom, in either English or Spanish, arrive. So I keep walking, and I hit my cube, and he keeps scrubbing, and I’m sure that no one thinks for a moment that he is Asian. 

It was asking too much for the person I elbowed to be a meek librarian or a rambunctious brat or an elderly tourist from Iowa. I should have considered my odds before foolishly stretching my arms on Venice Beach, home of the largest conglomeration of weirdoes, miscreants, and thugs in Southern California. When I stretched on the crowded boardwalk, I simply had to whap some colorful local character who was likely to bludgeon me.

My elbow struck the hard, sinewy back of a muscular Latino. He was bald and short, and the tattoos covering his torso proved that this was a joven who wore a shirt only if forced to. This was not one of those times, and he turned slowly to face me, his pics and biceps already flexing. The guy was pissed.

I knew he didn’t give two shits about our shared heritage, so I calmly looked at him, raised one hand in casual appeasement, and said, “Lo siento.” I added a nod and maintained eye contact. He glared at me for another second or two, then scowled and nodded back. He slowly turned his back on me, content that I was neither a threat nor a worthy challenge to his SoCal cred.

I resolved to never again move my elbows more than two inches from my ribcage in public.

I had defused the situation in the only way possible. I made clear to the vato that I meant no disrespect. It was an accident.

But neither could I display any fear. To do so was to risk being perceived as weak. Worse, I may have come across as judgmental, which is the worst thing one can do, because the object of your scorn will inevitably turn homicidal out of annoyance that you’ve stereotyped him as, well, dangerous. It’s either a self-fulfilling prophecy or murderous irony.

In any case, I handled the situation with my intimidating compadre well, and I was vaguely pleased with myself. Then I mentioned it to an Anglo friend, who cut off my anecdote and said, “You apologized but didn’t show fear, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I mentioned the incident to one other person, a black friend who also interrupted me to say, “And you let him know it was your fault, but you didn’t look scared either, right?”

“Right,” I said.

Suddenly, my quick-thinking settlement of a potentially violent conflict just looked like fucking universal knowledge. Most of us, it seems, come equipped with a high degree of so-called street smarts. For the most part, it’s just common sense mixed with a tough façade, and to my horror, it is not a special privilege of people with darkened hues.

For decades, Hispanics have been told that, “Yes, you are economically and politically disadvantaged, and you may very well be a cultural afterthought with no real pull for the entirety of U.S. history. But damn it, you’ve got street smarts! And those rich white people will never have that.” This message was even the subject of a “Chico and the Man” episode, for damn sakes. Would Chico lie to me?

Refraining from panic when you bump into a thuggish minority is hardly the essence of urban cool. In fact, it is arguably racist to assume that a tough-looking Hispanic guy will kick your ass for flinching at him. Would I have acted the same way if I bumped into Marge Henderson from Nebraska? (I don’t know if Marge exists, but she works here as an effective archetype). It’s doubtful, and in any case, I would probably scare Marge into apologizing to me first.

So maybe I am not so wise in the ways of the hood, or perhaps mass media and well-established social cues have ingrained a level of awareness in all of us, and pulling off a barrio vibe is just matter of watching the right movies and keeping your cool.

Still, if you ever bump into a tat-heavy, muscle-bound freak who looks like he means business, take my advice and apologize with a calm smile. Then go about your business, content that you are secretly the baddest motherfucker on the planet.

Cinco de Mayo is here, and I have one simple question for the Anglos out there: What does this day signify? I mean, what historical event does it commemorate besides the advent of the two-for-one margarita special?

I do not mean this to be bitchy or accusatory. I may be playing a subtle game of racial gotcha, it’s true, but what’s wrong with that?

To be fair, I myself never heard of Cinco de Mayo until I was a teenager, which was perhaps a decade before mainstream America started celebrating diversity in sloppy, albeit sincere fashion. This eagerness to let other ethnic groups know that they are almost, very nearly American has lead to people wishing me a “Happy Independence Day” months before July 4. It’s sort of like those school holiday programs, where the Jewish kids get one verse of “The Dreidel Song” in the midst of nineteen Christmas carols.

Again, I appreciate the effort. But for starters, I am not Mexican (Cinco de Mayo is, strictly speaking, only relevant to Mexico). Second, May 5 is not Mexican Independence Day (that would be September 16). And lastly, one listen to my flat, Midwestern accent should let you know that any Latin American holiday has about as much significance to my life as Oktoberfest does to a sixth-generation descendent of German immigrants… actually, maybe even less, because Oktoberfest features beer, which is most tasty.

My chief memory of Cinco de Mayo, in fact, is from 1998, when a ditzy California blonde broadsided my brand-new car. I don’t know why I continue to associate the day with this event, but now it is stuck in my head… Damn.

In any case, Cinco de Mayo will not find me marking the day in any special manner, nor using it to justify guzzling egregious amounts of alcohol. It’s just another evening to me, thank you very much.

But I do not want to leave you without concrete information (news you can use, as it were) in this post, particularly if it will help you break the ice with that cute girl at the end of the bar. So here are some facts about the significance of Cinco de Mayo, which you can mention tonight in between ordering rounds of tequila for that special someone. You can thank me later.