Hispanic Fanatic

Yes, you’ve heard the code phrases.

People often disguise their prejudices by explaining that they’re not filled with fear or hatred toward a particular group; it’s just that they want that group to act, you know, more “normal.” In this context, “normal” means avoiding any behaviors that indicate different perspectives from the majority culture.

For example, we hear a lot about Hispanic immigrants assimilating. As I’ve written before, this can be an admirable goal…or it can imply that something is fundamentally wrong with Latino culture.

More than anything, Hispanics are not to flaunt their ethnic identity. There are, of course, a host of behaviors that draw attention to a Latino identity. Potential offensive behaviors include everything from speaking Spanish in public to bringing up the complexities of Latino healthcare.

Committing such sins can lead to serious disapproval.

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First off, I’ve been remiss thanking people for their comments. So let me give a quick shout out to Cousin #7, David, Ankhesen Mie, Tara, and Raul for their feedback. I truly appreciate the feedback.

Second, let me tell you about my recent field trip.

I landed at Phoenix airport with more than a little trepidation. After all, we’re talking about Arizona here — the land of SB 1070, hardcore anti-Latino sentiment, general nuttiness, and a strain of social conservatism so intense that anyone to the left of John Boehner has been known to shield his eyes from the xenophobic glare.

According to several Hispanic organizations, I shouldn’t have even been there. The movement to boycott Arizona and everything related to it has been constant and loud.

But I was scheduled to be in the state for all of six hours. My latest client, a company that hired me to rewrite its web content, asked me to fly in to their Phoenix office to get a quick overview of the organization.

Considering that it was a reasonable request, and a good-paying gig, I was hard-pressed to say no. Plus, they were covering all my expenses and paying my hourly fee even while I was sitting on the plane, playing Angry Birds and running up their tab by ordering those little bottles of overpriced wine from chipper flight attendants.

In addition, while I have been ever so antagonistic toward Arizona lately, I never said I was boycotting the state. For starters, I think most such efforts are noble but doomed to failure. More important, however, I’ve always wondered if such a tactic nails innocent bystanders (e.g., Latino business owners) more than it does the powerful instigators of the conflict.

Perhaps this was just self-serving justification, however, so I resolved not to spend any money while I was in the state. This turned out to be pretty damn easy, considering I went right from the airport to the company’s offices and back again, with no chance to stop anywhere to buy anything. How’s that for preserving principles?

Regardless, I am pleased to report that everyone I interacted with in Arizona was perfectly nice to me. Granted, I spoke to only five or six people at my clients’ office and a few more at the airport. But no one in this tiny sample seemed like a fire-breathing racist to me.

As such, maybe even in a place as certifiable as Arizona, the majority of people are reasonable, friendly individuals who don’t seek to harass others just for being different. Perhaps even in this place — the sun-baked ground zero for American rage and fear — there exists a surplus of decency that gets drowned out by the sheer intensity of a self-righteous faction.

I would like to think so.

In any case, it was a bit eerie to finally see the land I had written so many words about, and upon which I had heaped so much mental energy. Yes, I had driven through Arizona twice as an adult, and I spent a couple of days in Tucson when I was a kid.

But this was my first time since all the craziness went down that I trod upon its streets and breathed in its superheated air. I was there, among the cactus and not far from Jan Brewer herself. Now that’s a creepy feeling.

And despite the fact that everything went smoothly, and even with the fresh memories of all the nice Arizonans I met that day, I have to admit that I was happy to leave and get back home.

As we all know, Hispanic culture has contributed much to the United States. A quick glance at the artistic, political, and social makeup of the nation confirms that Latinos are prime instigators when it comes to plotting the direction of the country.

Many of our new values have their roots in Latin America. However, there is one concept from the old world that should not be welcome here. Ironically, it is U.S. powerbrokers — people unlikely to be Latino — who are most clamoring for it to gain a foothold in this country.

I’m talking about the encomienda system, which hasn’t formally existed for hundreds of years, but which has never really gone away. Briefly, the encomienda system was set up by the Spanish Conquistadors, who divided Latin America among themselves. An encomienda was a land grant that gave a Spaniard property rights over Indian labor. Basically, the conquistador got a hacienda and indentured servants to make him rich.

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I’ve written before about my family’s roots in El Salvador. I’ve also written about how I have never been there, but hope to go someday.

Well, it looks like I sure can pick lovely vacation spots. A recent report pegged my family’s homeland as the most dangerous country in the world. The homicide rate is 71 per 100,000 inhabitants — the highest rate on the planet.

For the sake of comparison, such terrifying places as Colombia (35 per 100,000), South Africa (34 per 100,000), and Haiti (22 per 100,000) all register at less than half the homicide rate of El Salvador.

I am less than thrilled to hear this, if for no other reason than Cousin #7 now lives there, and I am naturally concerned about him. But I also don’t like hearing that one of the few countries I really want to visit someday has so many murders that you have to wonder if the babies carry handguns.

The culprit, as it is in much of Latin America, is the out-of-control drug war. El Salvador had actually gotten on the right track after its gruesome civil war ended in the 1990s. But the cartels and their bloody business model have wiped out the nation’s meager improvements.

I suppose I can use this new information to create some kind of tough-guy origin myth. I mean, how many Americans can say that their family emigrated from the most dangerous country in the world? Come on, how badass are we?…

Actually, that’s not very satisfying, and nobody’s impressed anyway — so skip it.

By the way, the United States clocks in at 5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, which is a pretty good number compared with the rest of the planet. But if you really want to feel safe, go to Iceland, which has the lowest crime rate in the world and a murder rate of zero.

Think about that — nobody gets killed in Reykjavik. The same cannot be said of El Salvador.

Here in Los Angeles, we’re relieved that police have arrested the thug who beat up a San Francisco Giants fan outside Dodger stadium (yes, I know the suspect is innocent until proven guilty, but let’s just say for the sake of this post that he did it).

As you may recall, on Opening Day in LA, a man dressed in Giants regalia, Bryan Stow, was jumped by a pair of angry Dodger fans, who beat him into a coma from which he may never wake up.

These boosters of the local team were supposedly pissed that a San Franciscan was on their turf. The real reason, of course, is that they were moronic hoodlums.

Because the main assailant was described as a Latino, Hispanics had time to brace ourselves for this latest ethnic embarrassment. Indeed, the suspect, Giovanni Ramirez, is described as “a stocky 31-year-old with a head shaved bald” who is a “documented member of [a] street gang,” and has “at least three prior felony convictions.”

In other words, he’s a cliché. But he’s a particularly lethal one.

I’ve written before about the frustration that Latinos feel whenever a Hispanic person commits a high-profile crime.

It’s an unpleasant sensation that doesn’t afflict members of the majority culture. For example, I doubt many white people cringed when Jared Loughner’s race was revealed (although we all winced upon discovering how easy it was for a psychotic to get a gun in this country).

Ramirez is just the latest living stereotype to make us all look bad. He’s one of the reasons why people frequently conjure up imaginary Latino assailants when they’re trying to conceal their own criminal behavior.

Recently, for example, a Canadian man named Robert Spearing lied to his wife about having tickets for Oprah Winfrey’s star-studded, mega-hyped, our-messiah-is-ascending final show.

Who knows why Spearing told this blatant fib to his spouse, but regardless, they drove all the way to Chicago before the guy realized, “Shit, I better make up some reason why I don’t have tickets.”

So “just before showtime, Spearing — bleeding from the forehead and his hands badly scraped — filed a report with cops claiming he had been mugged and the tickets stolen. He said two men — one African American, one Hispanic — had attacked him on the street.”

I suppose this can be viewed as an egalitarian approach to ethnic profiling. It wasn’t two black guys or two Latinos — it was one of each!

Of course, the cops quickly uncovered the fraud. Perhaps they realized that if anybody was going to be mugging people for Oprah tickets, it wasn’t going to be two guys (of any race). It was going to be distraught suburban women clutching copies of O and shrieking about Dr. Oz.

With hope, both Ramirez and Spearing will get their comeuppance. Their penalties will look very different, and their crimes don’t compare. But they share a mindset: They both believe that Latino men equal violence.

The fact that one of them is Hispanic just makes it all the more pathetic.

A while back, I wrote about the tragic death of Brisenia Flores, the little girl murdered by right-wing nuts in Arizona.

As I stated, what made the story even more grotesque (if such a thing were possible) was the national media’s virtual silence about her murder. Well, I’m happy to report that journalists have learned their lesson, and thus humbled, are back to covering the news that matters.

Yes, of course, I was only joking there.

How else can one explain the news blackout over the death of Jose Guerena, a former U.S. Marine who was gunned down in his home a few weeks ago? Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq, was shot more than sixty times when he grabbed a rifle and tried to defend his home against invaders.

The shocking nature of his death should warrant a mention in the mainstream press. What makes the tale even more interesting, however, is that the invaders turned out to be a SWAT team. They were executing a search warrant, but “no drugs, cash, or criminal evidence of any kind were found in the home. Neither Jose nor his wife Vanessa has a criminal record.”

Also intriguing is the fact that the SWAT team fired more than seventy times at Guerena, who died without releasing the safety on his rifle. And we should mention that, despite a quick call being placed to 911, it took “about an hour for waiting medics to know what happened, and the man is dead before fire crews are allowed into the home.”

And we should also point out that law enforcement keeps changing the story about what happened. Furthermore, “details of the search warrant have not been made public, and deputies would not comment.”

As a kicker, and you must have seen this coming, the shooting took place in everyone’s favorite state: Arizona.

Now I understand that the national media has important things to cover, like whether an ignorant blowhard who has no chance of ever getting elected president decides to run or not. And there are fast-breaking items about pampered British royalty to write, and catfights on one of those 6,308 Real Housewives spinoffs to cover. Yes, I feel for those overwhelmed journalists.

But is it too much to ask that they notice when, for example, a decorated Marine, who was resting after a hard day’s work, winds up getting shot five dozen times in his kitchen by cops? Maybe they could get curious in light of the fact that hostility toward Latinos is sky high in a state where tragic shootings are alarming frequent.

No, I guess not — nothing to see here, folks.

Of course, we have no idea how this story will turn out. Maybe it will come to light that, despite appearances and all indications so far, Guerena was a notorious criminal.

Actually, now that I think about it, that might be the only way to get the press to pay attention.

The only game I have on my computer is chess, so I can’t procrastinate on work by playing Gears of War or Dead Space 2 or some other time killer. Taking a break to play chess isn’t such a temptation.

I’m not a bad player, but there is a whole group of kids out here in California who could trounce me faster than you can say, “Bobby Fischer was an anti-Semite.”

I’m talking about the state high school chess champions from Mendota, a “Central Valley town of stilled machinery and packinghouses surrounded by industrial agriculture” where “unemployment hovers around 45 percent.”

Every player is Hispanic, and the teens come from a poverty-stricken area that is “the kind of place that requires durability just to survive. Out here, even sunlight seems hard.”

The team placed first in the Premier Division at the CalChess State Championships, going against kids from rich suburbs and players who had private tutors. So how did this group of Hispanic teens, living in a place where the food bank does booming business, conquer this most intellectual of games?

For starters, “without many chess books or easy access to computers, team members turned to each other — rehashing games, comparing strategies, playing endlessly.” They were also coached by “a black man who doesn’t speak Spanish. When the 100% Latino team acts up, he yells in French.”

Who knows why that tactic works? I guess if someone yelled at me in French that I left my rook hanging, it would get my attention. By the way, the coach is a bit of a redemption story himself, coming across as an African American version of Dennis Hopper’s character in Hoosiers, but with knights and pawns instead of basketballs. He says the kids have inspired him.

In turn, the coach “chooses the team’s captains, based not on ability but on what they need to learn.” This approach at character building seems to have worked. In his nine years of coaching, just two of his players have failed to graduate, astounding in a town where “only one in ten people has a high school diploma.”

And this year, the team won the state championship. Indeed, “for people who live in the world of packing houses and field labor, the town’s success in a game of intellect and imagination has resonated.”

By the way, the kids themselves include the bounced-around foster kid, the insecure teenager, and the overwhelmed immigrant — characters who will only make the feature film version of this all the more poignant.

Of course, if they ever made a movie about the all-Latino chess champions, they would cast half the team with blonde, blue-eyed actors, throw in a car chase, and have the climax feature a player yelling, “Checkmate, bitches!” while a cheerleader jumped into his lap.

I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen here.

A couple of years ago, I had to a take a brief hiatus from the blog because I was recovering from eye surgery.

After my eye healed up, I foolishly thought that I would not have to worry about my vision until I was well into a bitter, memory-addled old age where everything on the body starts to go and I begin ranting about how kids today are disrespectful brats who don’t wear any damn clothes.

But that was before I found out that eye surgery weakens those orbs floating in your head. As such, your odds of suffering something as random and bizarre as say, a retinal detachment, greatly increase.

And so when I started seeing floaters and bright blue flashes, I figured that it was not God passing along visions and premonitions to me. It was indeed my retina detaching.

My surgeon says that I caught it in the nick of time. Apparently, I was about two days away from going permanently blind in one eye. If I were a traditional Latino guy who never went to the doctor, that would have happened.

But I seem to have gotten it fixed. It’s too soon to tell, but the prognosis is good.

In any case, my retinal detachment is the reason why the posts may become more irregular over the next few weeks. I’m hoping to maintain a regular schedule, but I can’t promise.

At the very least, my misbegotten retina has prevented me from attending local Latino happenings. For example, I was going to write a truly witty and insightful piece about the National Pork Board’s recent contest, where several Latino chefs got together to dazzle epicureans by showing off everything they can do with pig.

I was invited to cover this event, but I declined because I had a checkup scheduled. My doctor wanted to see how the retina was healing up, and we spent time reminiscing about how he stuck needles into my eye — good times.

So all I can tell you is that the post covering the contest would have been full of insights about the importance of food in Hispanic culture, and loaded with funny and/or poignant quotes from the winner, and layered with Seinfeldian jokes about how much Hispanics love pork. Oh, and there was going to be this truly amazing metaphor that would have singlehandedly gotten me shortlisted for the Pulitzer. Trust me, it was gong to be spectacular.

Instead, I missed it, and I’m stuck squinting at the computer.

Damn my eye.

Recently, I received some hate mail from a white supremacist (see previous post). It’s a rare, but not unprecedented occurrence.

Her sentiments were ignorant and bizarre, of course. And clearly, they in no way reflect the opinion of most Americans. I wondered, however, how many individuals would agree with one of her statements, which was that white people are being oppressed.

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It’s been a while since I shared the contents of my reader correspondence with you. I’m not talking about the comments that my posts receive. You can see those for yourself on this site, on the Huffington Post, at Being Latino magazine, or at whichever outlet is running my rant.

No, I’m talking about the emails that I get from readers who simply don’t want to be confined to the comments section. These emails usually offer praise, issue constructive criticism, or request help with some Latino-centric cause. All of those are legitimate reasons to reach out to a blogger.

But some of my readers’ emails get my attention for very different reasons. They are so colorful that it makes me wish I could be on their holiday card mailing list.

For example, there was the person who insisted that, because I was not an illegal immigrant, I had no right to blog about illegal immigration. The writer then went on to slam undocumented individuals as parasites on society and subhuman scum. The writer added, almost as an postscript, “By the way, I’m illegal myself.”

I set aside the Freudian implications of his self-loathing and moved on to read missives from right-wingers who insisted that I was a delusional idiot. One angry man disputed my conclusion that Latinos were poised to become a political force. The writer said, “Hispanics just aren’t smart enough to get organized.”

Well then, I guess the Republican Party has nothing to worry about.

But lest you think it is only social conservatives who hate me, let me point out that one furious leftist accused me of painting the Hispanic community in a bad light. The writer said that he was “going to do some digging” and expose me as a fraud. I’m indeed curious what his digging will uncover (maybe I’m secretly Italian!).

But my favorite email is one that I received in response to my piece about tribalism. The writer began her email with the ultimate rhetorical question:

“Are you retarded?”

Without waiting for my response, the writer pointed out that “White people took over this country fair and square. It’s not our fault we had the will, adventurous spirit, and superior weaponry to expand our territories.”

Clearly, this was a fresh perspective on history, as was the writer’s insistence that slavery was “a small price to pay for blacks getting to live around whites.”

However, the writer added that white people are not perfect. Apparently, they made a mistake putting Native Americans on reservations instead of “killing or deporting all the Indians after we kicked their asses.” The writer then asked, “Why do whites suffer the curse of compassion?”

That is indeed a stumper. But the writer apparently isn’t letting the mistakes of the past hunt her. She advised me that I “better shut the hell up and listen with respect when you are in a nation that was created by whites.”

She summed up her correspondence with the assertion that “this entire goddamn country is ours from sea to shining sea” before signing off with the identifier “White Woman.”

Although I thank everyone for taking the time to write in with his or her thoughts, I have to admit that White Woman made the most vivid impression.

Yes, it looks like I have a new pen pal.