Some of you may know that my academic monograph is forthcoming in January 2021. You can preorder now from the OU Press website and it will be shipped in early January.
At only $24.95, it’s an incredibly affordable monograph.
Here’s the link: https://www.oupress.com/books/16122730/homeland
You might have missed it, given the state of the nation and world, but George Lopez released a stand-up special at the end of June on Netflix. “We’ll Do it for Half,” the title of the special is an allusion to a controversy that Lopez was involved in, a joking tweet about a rumored bounty on Trump issued by Iran.
Lopez continues to be one of the most famous Latino actors and comedians, who has used his celebrity to weigh in on politics. The titles of his stand-up specials alone indicate this, “America’s Mexican,” “Tall, Dark, and Chicano,” and “The Wall.” “Tall, Dark, and Chicano” in 2009 was released during Obama’s presidency, but revealed the cracks in the purported era of post-racial America. Lopez was coming off his sitcom and was angry about the comedic, directorial, and content concessions he had to make appeal to white audiences in order to be “mainstream.” No longer under the constraints of media whitewashing, he was a dark Chicano and he had something to say.
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I’ve had the opportunity to write for Sojourners lately. I’ll be posting the articles I’ve written for them over the next weeks.
Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.
– Samuel P. Huntington
The first cast in the ochre light of the dawning sun is a morning prayer, filled with hope and faith that ceremonies sought in earnest will feed the soul. I reel dutifully, waiting for a faint tap on the end of my line. My father stands at the front of the boat, scanning for ripples on the water in the low light. “Wachale!” he exclaims in joking Spanglish as he reels in the first largemouth of the day. Two Mexican-Americans bass fishing in Texas. This is the face of the Reconquista.
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Guest Contributor: Aaron E. Sanchez
#ChicanoDadProblems are real. For some reason my kids run away when I try to read them Pablo Neruda poems. They’d rather listen to the Frozen soundtrack than Chicano-inspired Son Jarocho.
They showed no interest when I tried to read them Fidel Castro’s obituary at the breakfast table years ago. When my son was little, the violin in Mariachi music made him cry but the fiddle in bluegrass cheered him up.
Now that they’re back in school, there are only more #ChicanoDadProblems to deal with.
Here are a few.
1. Trying too hard to make people know your mixed-race kids are Chicano.
Larry McMurtry once concluded that nearly all of Texas literature was minor and sentimentalist. Writers like J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb mourned a Texas that had been dead for nearly half a century by the time they published their paeans to the open plains, cattle drives and an untamed nature. For most of the male authors that dominate the state’s literary canon, including John Graves and McMurtry himself, the defining features and forces of Texas’ past have been masculine. “The frontier was not feminine, it was masculine,” was McMurtry’s explanation for why men were so often the central characters in Texas fiction. But something changed by the 1950s and 1960s: Texas had become urban. “The Metropolis which has now engulfed [the state] is feminine…” McMurtry concluded somewhat begrudgingly. In his view, women and cities had unalterably changed the character of the state and the characters of its fiction, and not necessarily for the better.
Contemporary poet Analicia Sotelo has a response for McMurtry and his ilk: “The virgins are here to prove a point. / The virgins are here to tell you to fuck off. / The virgins are certain there’s a circle of hell / dedicated to that fear you’ll never find anyone else.”
Juan Gabriel passed away yesterday. Just like Latinas/os across the world, and his non-Latino fans alike, I felt a deep loss. And, just like millennial bicultural Latinas/os in the U.S., his passing felt deeply personal. JuanGa and his music were uniquely familiar—his music was connected to certain people and it was interwoven in our homes. I know I am not the only one who remembers cleaning their house on Saturday or Sunday morning to Juan Gabriel blaring.
For me the music of Juan Gabriel is deeply tied to my mother. She was a fan since she was young, a founder of an early Juan Gabriel fan club as a teen in El Paso, Texas. She went to so many of his concerts I lost count, in places like Juarez, El Paso, even Tacoma, Washington. (where she last saw him). She had all his records and then had them on CD. Even now she has the digital copies of his albums.
As a child, I was a fan too. One of the first songs I learned was “Querida,” which my mom had me perform for all her friends. I would repeat “dime cuando tu” over and over to their laughter. And, just like many millennial U.S.-Latinos, I know that I’m not the only one who as they grew older began to push away from their Latino culture. By middle school, I no longer performed “Querida.” I was listening to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and early ‘90s grunge.
When I stopped listening to Juan Gabriel’s music in my early-teens, I also started to push away from my mother. The distancing was similar. I stopped listening to him, in the same way I stopped letting my mom hold my hand in public. I pushed away from his music, a little embarrassed, like when my mom tried to kiss me in public. At home it was one thing, but in public, it was another.
Readers, thank you for all your support. I have not posted in a while, but only because recently I have had great opportunities to publish with NPR’s LatinoUSA and LatinoRebels.com.
Back on February 17, 2016, I explained the bizarre exchange between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Rubio managed to get under Cruz’s skin with a comment about Cruz not speaking Spanish. Cruz, an award-winning debater, broke character and engaged Rubio. The exchange between two Cuban-Americans trying to explain who was more draconian in their immigration policies in Spanish was the collision of two competing strands in the GOP. I outlined this for NPR’s LatinoUSA. You can read the story here.
On March 7, 2016, I examined the New Yorker’s recent coverage of Latinos in U.S. politics for LatinoRebels.com. While the New Yorker has covered many issues in Latin America and has also featured Latin American authors, it has struggled with its U.S.-Latina/o coverage. While the writing was good–the signature style of the magazine–the framing was rough and uneven. You can read “The Talk of the Brown” here.
On March 14, 2016 for NPR’s LatinoUSA, I explained why the eighth Democratic debate was a historic event. For two hours that evening the seismic shift in American culture was on display and the debate was at its epicenter. Latinos tried to turn their social presence into political power that night. The debate showed that “English Only” was not a realistic policy or possibility. For two hours, Latinos showed their adeptness at linguistic and cultural code-switching. For two hours, Latinos turned Spanish into the official language of American politics. You can read my analysis of the cultural and historical importance of the debate here.
I will continue to blog right here and will continue to publish with these top-notch outlets. Keep checking-in for more commentary and cuentos.
Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is slated to host Saturday Night Live and Latino groups across the country have organized to protest the show. For those who want SNL to rescind the offer, Trump is the symbol of a resurgent and unapologetic nativism and racism that is directly aimed at Latinos. The show’s uneven history with diversity also points to the problematic issue of representation and white privilege. The fact that a show which refuses to acknowledge its own institutionalized racism is joining forces with a personality who is quite comfortable with his public bigotry highlights the built-in nature of racialized power in this nation. It is the institutional equivalent of the statement, “I’m not racist but…”
Trump’s appearance on SNL is not inconsequential. Comedy has, in many ways, replaced journalism as the primary institution that keeps politics honest. Today, journalists that ask difficult questions are forced out of press rooms and criticized by their peers for being “activists.” Satire like The Daily Show, Colbert Report, The Nightly Show, and Last Week Tonight have revealed nightly news shows and newsclips to be absurdist performances that operate outside of the confines of truth or policy. It is a dangerous moment when comedians are more interested in uncovering the truth and journalists are reduced to framing an unmoored “story.” What happens when our politics become performance? Trump happens.
It is no longer surprising to find Latinos in the news. Fluctuating demographics and Republican rhetoric regularly bring attention to the fact that Latinos are part of a changing nation. It is rare, however, to find Latino newsmen as the topic of headlines. Recently, the two of the highest-profile Latino newsmen have made the news themselves—José Díaz-Balart and Jorge Ramos. Díaz-Balart’s MSNBC show, The Rundown, is set for cancellation as the network makes more room for Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe. Ramos garnered immediate attention for his exchange with Donald Trump in Iowa, where he was forcefully removed and told to “go back to Univision.” Later, in the hallway, a Trump supporter would tell Ramos to “get out of my country.” Ramos, a U.S. citizen, tried to explain that he was in his country, but the supporter refused to acknowledge that fact.
The coverage of the exchange moved away from Ramos’ engaged insistence that politicians tackle immigration reform, toward Ramos himself. Terry Gross had Ramos on Fresh Air, where he acknowledged she would not have him as a guest if it was not for the episode. The New Yorker wrote a feature on him, calling him “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down.” The altercation even garnered international attention, acclaimed Mexican journalist, Carmen Aristegui, commented that “[Ramos] is controversial and some think that he is too aggressive, but I think he is a valuable journalist.”
Mexico celebrated its 205th year of independence with the traditional grito. Yet, on the 16 of September 2015, some wonder whether Mexico has anything to celebrate, whether the people of the nation are independent or free. Under the current president, Ernesto Peña Nieto, politically-expedient disappearances have increased in the nation. In the case of the forty-three disappeared school teachers, multiple mass grave sites were found—none of which held the bodies of the teachers and instead brought to light the murder of so many unknown and unnamed people. Drug violence continues, political corruption is endemic, and popular political disaffection continues to spread. Political disenchantment on Independence Day is common, a day that begs for introspection and remembrance. On the same day in 1918 a Mexican journalist, suffering from the same disillusionment wrote, “the 16th of September… will be a day of pain; for the inhabitants of the biggest cities of Mexico it will be a day of desecration.” He continued, “This is not the time to sing, nor the time to give in to vain laments. We must prepare to return to our land; we will restore profaned altars; we will recover our country.”
Interestingly, the author of the article was not writing from Mexico City, or the industrial cities of the North. He was writing from San Antonio, Texas. He was part of an elite exile class living in the United States, displaced by the radicalism and violence of the Mexican Revolution. Of course, journalists and rich businessmen were not the only ones who fled to the U.S., both then and now. Millions of Mexicans made their way northward and between 1920 and 1930 the ethnic Mexican population in the U.S. grew over 100 percent.
