Hispanic Fanatic

In an earlier post, I introduced my cousins. I plan to profile each one of them on this blog, not only to give you a fuller picture of Hispanic Americans (beyond my neurotic persona), but also to verify to myself that the cousins are indeed reading my posts like they claim they are.

I will profile them in birth order, and for that reason and to preserve their anonymity, I’ll just refer to them by number. Cousin #1 is the second oldest, after me, and therefore is the first up.

In brief, she is the most popular introvert the world has ever known. Cousin #1 seems to be friends with everyone in our hometown, despite the fact that she would rather chew glass than call attention to herself. How then does she build this social circle?

For starters, she has an absurd amount of faith in the concept of humanity. She makes jaded vatos, stressed single moms, and nonplussed grocery clerks feel like they are the most fascinating people to cross her path in eons. This interest cannot be faked, and indeed, it isn’t.

She came to visit me once when I was living in LA. She took a Greyhound bus in, which anyone can tell you is routinely filled with the most deranged, shrill, deluded, and unstable individuals from the lower forty-eight states who can scrape together enough cash to attempt a new start in Southern California. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to take the bus, but she insisted. When I picked her up in downtown LA (itself a hotbed of shady individuals and wild-eyed schemers) Cousin #1 hopped off the bus with a broad smile, hugged one of her fellow passengers goodbye, and told me that she had “met many friends” on the journey. I thought she was insane for even talking to the assortment of thugs, drunks, and crazies who had hitched a ride with her.

Cousin #1 plays violin, and is by far the most musically talented member of our family. In fact, as a teenager, she performed a concert with our hometown’s symphony orchestra after being identified as one of the city’s promising young musicians. In her adolescence, she could be found intently practicing Mozart, although she was just as likely to be blaring KMFDM and Ministry from her bedroom.

Cousin #1 was a social worker for years, and she often went door-to-door in poor neighborhoods, checking in on recent immigrants and third-generation welfare moms to see if their children’s basic needs were being met. She put people in touch with the right agencies or translated documents or just listened to them whisper about how America was a much harsher place than they had been led to believe. In one especially tough neighborhood, she was robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight.

She doesn’t eat in Spanish restaurants because of the conquistadors’ cruelty to the El Salvador natives. And it takes little prompting for her to show off the huge Mayan warrior eagle tattooed across her shoulders. It is an inky proclamation of Latina identity and pride that forces those who see the tattoo to consider it a living entity rather than a mere design.

Because of her chronic compassion, the harshest insult she hurls is “boo-gee,” which she applies to items that strike her as inane in their bourgeois popularity. She is often caught between her fierce desire to solve all the world’s problems at once and her drive to accommodate others.

Cousin #1 is, in many ways then, your typical Hispanic, violin-playing, tattooed social worker who effortlessly makes people happy.

In the park where we gathered each July 4 when I was a kid, my family was just one the groups who turned the area into a smaller, less-bloody reenactment of one of America’s numerous land rushes. Each clan’s blanket on the bumps and dips of the main lawn signified sovereignty, at least for the day. Grills were stoked and coolers were stocked, while people lounged in the sun and blared radios that were tuned to salsa or Sousa or “Casey Kasem’s Top Forty.”

Virtually everyone in the park was an immigrant or first-generation progeny – thousands of people in one place at one time to laud an adopted country. It was as if some immense Latino family reunion were taking place, cordoned off from the rest of the state. The newest arrivals celebrated America’s founding with the zealous belief that each subsequent generation could never appreciate the nation’s charms as much as they did.

Scores of teenagers huddled in packs organized by gender, scouting for patrols of the opposite sex. The adults were less mobile, and they laughed and ate and yelled, “Ai ya ya” after gulping what they promised would be their final Tecates of the afternoon.

Old men sat in lawn chairs between fluttering American flags and smaller, but still majestic, banners of Mexico or Puerto Rico. The men spoke about the United States with such fervor that it was as if they could account for all of the country’s previous 200+ birthdays.

Until dusk, kids ran around the park, gathering together at random to see things explode into bright shards. The powerful firecrackers we lit would horrify modern parents, but these were the days when infants bounced around in station wagons without car seats and teens went for afternoon-long bike rides (sans helmets) and children played king of the hill on mounds of rusty, jagged-edged trash in the local junkyard. By contemporary standards, it’s amazing that anyone came out of this era alive.

When the fireworks started, hundreds of children scrambled for their families’ blankets. The initial salvo was always a surprise, which was inexplicable in that it was the most eagerly anticipated sight of the weekend.

The fireworks popped off one at a time, with up to a minute between each burst. An explosion in one of a dozen different styles lit up the evening, and a second or two would pass before the boom thundered upon us.

One year, we brought our new cousins – all young children who had come from El Salvador – to see the fireworks. They either watched in stunned disbelief or cringed in outright terror. As we discovered later, putting on a pyrotechnics show for children who had escaped war and witnessed horrific firefights was not the sharpest move. It was, to be blunt, a fuck-up. We had to coax one of my cousins out from under a blanket. But by the second year, with their Americanization in full force, they cheered every supersonic outburst of color in the sky.

The finale was majestic, and as the final rumbling echo rained over us, flames in the shape of an American flag erupted over the water, and the audience cheered its birth.

The crowd stretched to its feet like a great cat awakening. The adults scooped up their blankets and coolers and backpacks. The colossal American flag smoldered in the pond, and the last cloud of smoke faded into the night.

The following is an unaltered photo taken by my friend Nichole. We were, as is often the case with us, out drinking. This banner was hung near the bar area.

The words it so prominently displays, “Happy Fiesta,” literally mean “Happy Party.”

You’re no doubt familiar with this phrase. Many times, I’ve walked into a celebration and been greeted with the shout “Happy party! Happy party!” And then everybody hugs.

Actually, it sounds like something that drunken foreign businessmen yell at their American counterparts during visits to strip clubs.

As I looked at the banner, I wondered why someone in a position of authority at the bar would say, “Let’s have a Spanish word or two printed in bright, block letters a foot high and strung over the bar. And I won’t even bother to check if the phrasing makes sense.” I further wonder if the printer who created this banner said, “What the hell?” as he fulfilled this Spanish equivalent of “All your base are belong to us.”

By the way, there was no Latino theme to the bar (and we’re well past Cinco de Mayo). In addition, drinkers were handed fake Hawaiian leis, further adding to the incongruity. So I have no idea why the bar’s management thought this would enhance the atmosphere.

To be clear, I wasn’t offended by the banner, just perplexed. After all, we’re not talking about creating signs in an obscure African language or translating from Middle Ages Gaelic.

This is basic Spanish, which as been stated (more than once) to be taking over the country. You would think that if Latinos are indeed running roughshod over the land, the first item on our agenda would be forcing rudimentary Spanish on the populace.

But I do thank the bar’s owners for providing my friend Nichole and me with an existential quandary as we downed our beers. We asked each other if one can have an unhappy fiesta, and if so, what that would look like. Alas, we didn’t drink enough to come up with a definitive answer.

The rumors are true. I can now be found at the Huffington Post.

I’m very pleased with this development, even though it has meant the revelation of my true identity, which until now has been shrouded in myth and legend. It turns out, however, that you can discover my real name and even see what I look like by clicking here to read my initial post for Huffington. And so one more secret internet alias is rendered obsolete – alas.

The first post for Huffington is a reprint of my original post for this blog, but it’s just as relevant as it was all those many eons past (ok, three months ago) that I wrote it.

Check it out and give me a Buzz Up vote (which increases the likelihood that the editors will continue to ask me to contribute) and sign up to get email alerts or become a fan… it’s a very odd thing, I just realized, to ask people to become your fan, but that’s what blogging has reduced me to.

Also, as much as I appreciate your comments on this site, I would appreciate it even more if you respond to the Huffington pieces. My hope is that you’ll overwhelm the site with so much praise that the Huffington servers crash, and the editors shake their fists in rage while screaming, “Damn you, Hispanic Fanatic!”

I think we can all agree that this would be a pretty cool scenario.

Short of that, just check out the Huffington Post. I’ll still maintain this site, but I’ll give the editors first crack at new stuff.

By the way, I can also be found at TC Daily. So there’s lots of ways to find out who’ve I’ve pissed off recently.

Thanks in advance for your support.

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.”

First off, thanks to Eddy for commenting on my post “Witnesses Described Him as Brown…” He supplied one of the best, bravest, and most poignant comments that I’ve received.

Thanks also to all who have commented on “From the Motherland,” the post about my mom. Most of the comments have been via email or verbal, but it’s still good to know that certain pieces resonate.

Along those lines, I will continue with the theme of family by introducing you to the cousins.

Let me be clear that I’ve never related to the the whole concept of extended family. I don’t have distant relatives I’m forced to visit or creepy old uncles who make everyone uncomfortable or anonymous children who just show up at Thanksgiving.

Rather, I have the cousins. There are eight of us, and we were basically raised as siblings. Growing up, I thought it was normal to see your cousins at least once a week (usually more) and go to stay at their houses for days at a time and share inside jokes and get into fights about what TV show you were going to watch.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and talked to other people about their childhoods, that I realized most Americans think of “cousin” as that weird kid they saw at funerals or the exotic older relative who bought them beer.

It wasn’t like that for us.

Perhaps this is because in Hispanic culture, valuing family is not just lip service. It is a hardcore component of life. There are good and bad aspects of this principle, which I’ll address in a future post. But regardless of its consequences, I can verify its existence and strength with Latinos.

Among the cousins, I’m the oldest, and my brother (about nine years my junior) is the youngest. That means all eight of us are within a decade of each other.

We remember being children together, piling into our parents’ cars and jostling for space. We recall being teenagers and going through goth or grunge or rave phases. And now as adults, we go out to dinner together or visit each other’s houses or do other respectable grown-up things that would have amused us to even contemplate back when we pulled each other’s hair or stole one another’s CDs.

We are not as close as we used to be, which is inevitable in even the tightest of families. But we see each other, in various combinations, when we can. And our spouses have become de facto cousins, and the children are our collective nieces and nephews (again, we don’t keep track of all the “second cousin, twice removed” jargon).

This is not to say that everything has gone smoothly for all eight of us, or that feuds haven’t erupted along the way, or that some relationships are at this point, more tangential. But for the most part, we pretty much like each other, which took me a long time to realize is a rarity in American life.

I’ll profile each of the cousins in future posts. Suffice to say, I’m grateful that in one respect, at least, we were raised old-school Hispanic style – you know, like a family.

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.