Hispanic Fanatic

I’ve always had issues with the guy.

I know his good qualities outweigh his bad ones. After all, he’s smart, crafty, occasionally funny, and in his own way, even heroic.

But he’s a thief. And he’s a filthy rodent, which is hard to overlook.

So what do we make of Speedy Gonzalez?

Let’s not get all freshman term paper here, but there are obvious cultural connotations to the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Like every piece of art, they reflect the society and times in which they were created.

The only Hispanic character, to my knowledge, was Speedy Gonzalez. He was a leading man whom kids were supposed to root for. And he always won the day due to his bravery and quick wits.

But the symbolism is inescapable: He was a sneaky mouse determined to steal cheese. I might add that all his friends were lazy cowards. And if the connotations weren’t clear enough, how about that time the mice were trying to sneak across the border?

To be fair, Latinos actually come off better in the old Merrie Melodies than do blacks, Asians, or Southerners. The animators seemed to have special disdain for the French, whom they personified in Pepe le Pew – a rude, oblivious, dimwitted sexual harasser who reeked (and he wasn’t funny either).

They were ahead of their time when it came to gays, however, unless you think it was a coincidence that Bugs Bunny was always cross-dressing. Somebody on that writing staff was just dying to out himself. But I digress.

In any case, the creators of Speedy Gonzalez were, I believe, trying to be positive. They just couldn’t get past the stereotypes. And they were also culturally confused when it came to Latinos. After all, why else would the king of Spain have a Mexican accent (as displayed in the immortal line, “It’s flat like your head”)?

By the way, if anybody knows if they still air Speedy Gonzalez cartoons, let me know. It would be a shame if the kids of today missed out on him… or maybe it wouldn’t, I’m still not sure.

Only once in my life have I thought, “This is a sitcom moment.”

It was the time I wound up on a stranger’s fire escape, peering through the window at a topless woman armed with knitting needles.

This is not an advisable position for anyone, especially for Latino males, who have been known to provoke white women to rush into traffic just by making eye-contact.

I was on the fire escape that evening because my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were celebrating one year of living in New York City. We had grabbed a bottle of cheap champagne and went up on the roof of our Manhattan apartment building, which offered a great view of the city.

Right after walking onto the roof, I turned to her and said, “Don’t let the door close because…” The words “it locks automatically” were subsumed beneath the sound of the door clicking shut.

So now we were trapped on the roof late at night, six stories up. It was obvious what we needed to do.

We drank the champagne.

With that accomplished, we began the perilous climb down the fire escape that led to a suitably grimy NYC alley. To say the descent was difficult is not an exaggeration. New Yorkers have such little space that fire escapes often become extensions of their apartments. So we had to sidestep around furniture, bike racks, and whole gardens clogging the metal stairs. If the building ever had a real fire, dozens of us would die in the impeded scramble to safety – either trampled to death by our neighbors because we couldn’t move quickly enough, or asphyxiated as we lay tangled in someone’s improbably located azalea bush.

Still, I reached the bottom level of the fire escape, where I saw that I had two options. I could drop the remaining fifteen feet into a pitch-black alley that was strewn with trash (my imagination insisted that broken syringes and rusty metal pipes glistened in the dim light) and then I would have to hobble on my twisted, gashed ankles to the end of the alley and climb a tall fence topped with razor wire.

Or I could simply knock on my neighbor’s window. The woman, with whom I had a nodding acquaintance from sharing the occasional elevator, was home but had not noticed my presence on her fire escape.

I peered into my neighbor’s apartment. Then I turned and told my girlfriend that she would have to tap on the window.

“She’s lying on the couch and wearing only panties,” I said. “I don’t think she wants a brown-skinned guy knocking on her window in the middle of the night and demanding to be let in.”

My girlfriend acknowledged this logic. So she approached the window while I retreated up a flight to safety.

“And she’s knitting, with big needles,” I said as my final piece of advice.

A moment later, after what was surely the most awkward request my girlfriend has ever made of a stranger, the window opened. I climbed back to the roof, arriving just as my girlfriend opened the door to let me back in.

“My feet barely hit the floor of her apartment,” my girlfriend said. “That woman just grabbed me and pushed me toward the lobby.”

But we were saved.

Because the whole thing was such a sitcom premise, I thought about pitching the incident as the pilot episode of “The Wacky Latino,” a heartwarming, life-affirming, knee-slapping show about the adventures of a klutzy Hispanic. But then I remembered that there are no shows about Hispanics on television, and I abandoned the idea.

Sure enough, a year or so later, an episode of “Friends” had a subplot where Ross and Joey get trapped on the roof and have to shimmy down the fire escape. When I saw it, I said two things to my girlfriend: They stole our plot, and our version was funnier (no topless female knitters appeared on that show).

And now that I think about it, I feel doubly ripped off because two white males co-opted a moment that rightfully belonged to a Latino male and a white female. There is clearly no end to the oppressive hegemony.

In any case, even a decade later, I still have no answer to the question that haunts me to this day: Who the fuck knits while topless?

My wife and I are geeky enough to watch dog shows on Animal Planet. Go ahead and pass judgment, but if last month’s Westminster winner, Stump the Sussex Spaniel, didn’t charm you on some basic level, I’m not sure that we can be friends. 

It seems like many of the handlers at dog shows are Latino. Certainly many more of them are Hispanic than black or Asian. For me to even notice this means that it’s, well… noticeable.

I’m not sure why Latino handlers are so ubiquitous. I’d like to think that it’s because Hispanics have a strong bond to the animal kingdom and a healthy respect for nature. That’s nice to think, especially as I hear about dogs running wild in the streets of Latin America and the Amazonian rainforest being slashed and burned.

Certainly, it’s not a cultural thing. I can’t imagine a less likely goal for a kid growing up in the barrio than to hope that someday he can escort a Pomeranian in Madison Square Garden.

My best guess is that this oddly specific “sport” is for all those Hispanics with a competitive streak who aren’t interested in baseball. There are few other sporting outlets for us, after all.

For the most part, we’re not big enough for football or tall enough for basketball. And as for hockey… well, let’s just say that ice-focused endeavors face an uphill climb in Latino culture. Soccer is big in Latin America, of course, but in the United States it appears to be the strict dominion of pre-adolescent suburban girls.

So if you’re a Latino who can’t hit the slider, but still want to win at something, it seems to come down to golf, tennis, or dog shows. I’m not sure which of those I would pick, but I understand the appeal of the latter. There’s no sweat involved, and your teammate will always have your back.

My wise old grandmother used to invoke the Spanish phrase, “When money is tight, a nickel isn’t worth a dime.”

Actually, that’s not a phrase in Spanish (I think it’s Yogi Berra). And my grandmother has never passed along anything resembling sage-like insight. She’s much more likely to complain that young people don’t wear enough clothes.

The point is that we Latinos don’t have any special wisdom for dealing with this economic disaster, which has become (say it with me) the worst crisis since the Great Depression. In fact, the statistics indicate that Hispanics are ill-suited to weather this financial maelstrom.

Looking at one specific economic indicator, the almost laughably bad housing market, we see that Latinos have the highest foreclosure rate of any ethnic group in the country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. In addition, Latinos tend to spend more of their income on housing than other demographics do, and we are more likely to have firsthand experience with the horrific phrase “subprime mortgage,” which has supplanted “Bush-Cheney administration” as the scariest word combo in America.

The Pew Hispanic Center goes on to say that over a third of all Hispanic homeowners are worried that their house may go into foreclosure, and that over half of foreign-born Latino homeowners share this fear. The Wall Street Journal adds that “In U.S. counties where Hispanics account for more than 25% of the population, banks have taken back 6.7 homes per 1,000 residents since Jan. 1, 2006, compared with 4.6 per 1,000 residents in all counties.”

Of course, the collapse of the housing market has become the prominent symbol, main indicator, and root cause/boogyman for the financial shitstorm raining down upon the nation. As a Latino who bought a house near the peak of the boom (my first house, thank you very much), I was surprised to learn that my home has dropped little in value since I signed on the dotted line. Nevertheless, at this point, I’m calling for a cyber show of hands from all those who miss their old apartments.

In any case, besides carrying the brunt of the economic blowback, Hispanics also have the burden of getting blamed for this mess. That same Wall Street Journal article points out that “in 2005 alone, mortgages to Hispanics jumped by 29%, with expensive nonprime mortgages soaring 169%.” The article goes on to present statistical and anecdotal evidence that Latinos, more than other groups, got in way over their heads with houses they had no hopes of affording. They then apparently dragged down the market in several regions by indulging in their pesky habit of getting foreclosed on.

To its credit, the Wall Street Journal does not explicitly claim that too many Latinos buying too many houses caused the market to collapse. After all, doing so would be both morally dubious and an extremely shaky economic hypothesis. But some obvious questions arise.

Who was soliciting all those optimistic dreamers, who were often less educated individuals or recent immigrants unclear on the concepts of their new country’s system? Who thrust documents at people who had been fed the American Dream, telling them that despite their rational hesitations, everything was going to be fine because trained professionals said that they could afford the house? More specifically, who marketed housing materials in Spanish, then performed the closing in English?

The answer ranges from sixth-generation Americans with a lot of money to Latino politicians trying to score some cheap points. Of course, some flat-out greedy Hispanic homeowners share the blame. But the bottom line is that Hispanics, as a group, are more likely to be kicked to the curb (possibly in a literal sense) because of system-wide epic stupidity engineered by people who should have known better.

The details of the Obama plan to help homeowners are still being worked out, so it remains to be seen if more Latinos can hold on to their houses. The only thing we know for certain is that once this plunge bottoms out – and it will eventually – many Hispanics will hesitate before applying for mortgages. They will wonder if they once again being lied to, and they may decide that the ideal of owning a home is some absurd fantasy that they would be better off ignoring.

How can that possibly be good for them, or for America?

As a rule, I don’t follow news stories that contain any of the following elements:

• Celebrity misbehavior
• Fashion do’s and don’ts
• Golf
• Young, pretty white women who go missing

I have to make an exception to this last category, however, by mentioning the Chandra Levy case. There are two reasons for this.

First, I have an odd personal connection to the incident. No, I never met the woman. But I vividly remember the day that she disappeared, in early 2001.

I was living in Los Angeles, and my wife and I had dinner plans with a co-worker who I thought might become a friend. But I clearly didn’t know him well.

The guy, henceforth called Crazy Eddie, was an acquaintance of Chandra Levy. But one would have thought that they were Siamese Twins by how much he played up the closeness of their relationship. Over dinner, he talked of nothing else but her disappearance, and he did so in a freeform, rambling manner that overwhelmed my wife and me.

I soon realized that what I had thought were Crazy Eddie’s good qualities at our job (ie, unlimited energy, passion for his work, extreme attention to detail) were actually the symptoms of a cackling mania. The guy couldn’t shut up, and he hatched conspiracy theories and metaphorical meanings and personal reflections that all centered on Levy’s disappearance, then swirled around each other and overlapped until none of us could figure out his original point.

It was, understandably, the only time my wife and I socialized with Crazy Eddie, and we vowed to never again dine with a madman. The last time I spoke to him, shortly before I left LA, he tried to enlist me in his scheme to fly to Washington DC and investigate Levy’s disappearance personally. He insisted that, with my help, he could find out what happened to her. I politely declined and then fled the state.

The second reason I’m thinking of Chandra Levy these days is because police apparently cracked the case last week. The alleged murderer is… yes, Latino… in fact, he’s an immigrant… from El Salvador, my family’s homeland… fuck.

This creepy guilt-by-association feeling is what I wrote about in a previous post. We have enough cultural baggage to carry without some moronic thug fulfilling stereotypes faster than Bill O’Reilly can spew them.

It is, of course, completely selfish to dwell on what this means to me and other Hispanics. But seriously, of all the imbecilic criminals to become national news, did it have to be the Salvadoran immigrant rapist-murderer?

In any case, I’m glad that Chandra Levy’s friends and family can find some comfort that her killer has been nabbed. But I have to wonder if, somewhere in LA, my old friend Crazy Eddie is babbling in his apartment, desperate to find a new outlet for his amazing powers of insight.

“I will not celebrate meaningless milestones”

Bart Simpson 

Yes, just a few months ago, I reveled in the fact that I had reached one hundred posts. And now here I am, once again accepting cyber slaps on the back and toasts of virtual champagne.

You see, today is the one-year anniversary of the Hispanic Fanatic. In that time, I have written 123 posts, received over 200 comments, and deleted 17 quadrillion pieces of spam from the site. My readership has gone from the low single digits to… well… let’s not talk about how high it’s gotten – just know that it’s gone up.

Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting over the year. I hope to make the second year even more fanatical.

There will be no new posts for about a week, while I briefly escape the clutches of a Midwestern winter for a quick trip to Los Angeles. Yes, I will be staying near the Kodak Theater, where they hand out the Oscars (see my previous posts on this). The irony is nice, but the warm weather will be nicer.

As usual when I take a break, I offer you a clip appropriate of nothing (or everything, depending on your adherence to Buddhist principles). Here is a video of military recruits (country unknown) who perform the worst set of jumping jacks in history.

See you soon.

When my wife and I were married over a decade ago, we had the ceremony at a Methodist church. That we had it in a church at all was more about practicality than an indication of the depth of our religious feelings. A couple of hundred guests weren’t going to fit into an outdoor tent or in some other preferred secular location. So we went with my wife’s childhood religion.

This logistical decision did not go over well with some of my distant relatives. They were older and had been raised in the Catholic crucible of El Salvador, and their opinion of the ceremony was summed up by their non-attendance. I found out later that one great aunt said, “If they’re not getting married in a Catholic Church, they’re not really getting married.”

While my relatives’ reaction may have been extreme, it is not rare in Latino societies.  Hispanic culture and Catholic dogma are so intertwined that it is often difficult to separate them. If you haven’t noticed, this has become one of my favorite themes on this blog.

There are good explanations why Latinos are fanatical about the pope.

The historical reason is because the Spaniards brought their religion with them on the point of a sword when they colonized Latin America. Natives who knew what was good for them quickly abandoned their old gods and hailed Jesus. Over the course of a few generations, this forced conversion morphed into sincere belief.

The contemporary reason is that the Church serves as a bridge for immigrants to their new country, a way for them to ease into assimilation and carry some of the traditions with them. Even for first- or second-generation Hispanics, the church often serves as community foundation and social epicenter in a way that is rarely seen anywhere else in this country (with the possible exception of Baptists in the Deep South).

But there are problems with the Catholic Church’s hold on Latino society. For starters, any culture that emphasizes religion so much is bound to be less interested in more secular matters – such as the importance of education or the value of political clout or the practicality of having many children.

In addition, Hispanic Catholicism has a strangely fatalistic viewpoint, seen in the mindset of many Latinos who think that being poor is their destiny and that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. Believing that God will take care of everything is one of the chief reasons that Latin American countries, and immigrants from those countries, have such a high tolerance for being pushed around.

There is also the weird disconnect between real-world behavior and Church priorities. In Hispanic culture, the mere act of stepping into the Church is often sufficient to prove one’s moral standing. Growing up, I knew gang members (or at least wannabes) who were praised as “good boys” solely because of their attendance at Church. Their presence, of course, was mandated by their parents, who cared little about what their kids did at other times of the week, as long as they were in the pews on Sunday.

Of course, there is one more negative consequence of Catholicism’s hold on Latino culture. Apparently, every painting by a Hispanic artist must have, at minimum, three images of La Virgen de la Guadalupe (seriously, is this a law or something?).

Despite these issues, however, Hispanic Catholics are not on the same theological plane as heavy hitters such as Christian fundamentalists or Hasidim Jews or Islamic theocrats. Latino Catholics are, for the most part, able to acknowledge the outside world and at least tolerate others.

As for those relatives who boycotted my wedding, they have gone about their Church-centric lives. They still attend Mass so frequently (i.e., at least once a day) that they have earned the Spanish appellation of “las cucarachas de la iglesia.” This is a poetic way of saying that even cockroaches don’t live in the church pews as much as they do.

I presume that the originator of the phrase was Catholic. Also, he apparently didn’t attend a very clean church.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I want to give a shout out to all those Latin Lovers… Actually, let me stop there. What the hell is a Latin Lover anyway?

Whenever I hear the phrase, which has actually been pointed at me a couple of times, I think of some confident guy who charms roomfuls of women but regularly loses tracks of how many ladies he’s slept with that week. This is not me, by the way.

Other images come to mind. Is it the guy who snaps his heels together, plays flamenco guitar, and presents blushing ladies with roses? Or is it the player who flashes devilish smiles, tells oily lies to naïve women, and dumps trusting females eight seconds after ravishing them? Or is the guy who is open and expressive, has a sensitive-artist vibe, and respects women as well as lusts after them?

All of these images have, at one time or another, been presented. By the way, other Latino male archtypes – such as the uber-macho hombre, the mama’s boy, and the barrio thug, among many others – don’t traditionally fit the category of Latino Lover. So let’s leave them alone, for now.

Of course, there is also a female version of the Latin Lover. These are usually exotic beauties who beguile (what a great verb!) respectable, rational men. The guys are helpless in her presence, even though she inevitably is either poor, crazy, or up to no good – probably all three.

Regardless of gender, the Latin Lover is usually presented as, at best, a fling of simple passion. They really don’t have any emotional states beyond getting aroused and flying into jealous rages, and as such, they’re poor choices for long-term companionship.

In worst-case scenarios, the Latin Lover is an obstacle to the hero or heroine’s true love. Under such circumstances, the confused woman or blinded man eventually returns to his/her stable partner, kicking the lothario to the curb or ditching the dark-skinned mistress.

Like every other aspect of our culture, Hollywood has had an influence in shaping the iconography. After the imbroglio caused by my previous posts about Hispanic representation in the movies, I don’t want to get too much into it. Suffice to say that the original Latin Lover was probably Rudolf Valentino, the silent-film star who terrified/fascinated innocent waifs in the early days of cinema.

But Valentino was Italian, which leads to a question: How strict is the “latin” part of that equation? After all, we’ve seen many people of different ethnicities play this role – everyone from Antonio Banderas (a Spaniard) to Selma Hayek (a Mexican) to Johnny Depp (a white guy).

So perhaps being a Latin Lover is more a state of mind than an ethnic identity. Still, its roots in ethnicity cannot be ignored. And this leads to larger questions.

For starters, is the image of the Latin Lover a stereotype? If so, is the modern definition confined to Hispanics, or as we have seen, can Italian or Greek or even hot white people be Latin Lovers?

Furthermore, if it is a stereotype of Hispanics, is it a positive or negative one? Or is the concept of a positive stereotype an absurd oxymoron? Really, how insulting is it – if it’s derogatory at all – to be called a Latin Lover?

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, my future mother-in-law, upon finding out that her daughter was dating a Hispanic guy, famously said, “Those Latins. They love ya, then they leave ya.” I should point out that my wife and I will soon celebrate our 18^th anniversary. So I guess I’m not much of a Latin Lover, at least not according to my mother-in-law’s definition.

So let me ask a final set of questions. Are you a Latin Lover? Are you involved with one? And in either case, is that a good or bad thing?

I’m a little late on this news item, but it’s worth noting.

The University of Texas System has picked Francisco Cigarroa, a transplant surgeon, to be their new chancellor. He becomes the first Hispanic to lead a large public university system in America.

I say congrats to Dr. Cigarroa. It’s always good to erase the phrase “no Latino has ever” from discussions of leadership and accomplishment. The man even had to accept a pay cut to take the job, so he must really want to do it.

Perhaps his appointment is some sort of karmic balancing act that offsets the withdrawal of Bill Richardson (aka, the most famous Latino leader) from Obama’s cabinet. By the way, I’m still not sure what Richardson did that was so egregious, but the convoluted nature of his offense indicates that it was more politically stupid than actively criminal.

In any case, Cigarroa’s new gig represents a milestone for Hispanic leadership. But it is also more than that. The doctor’s quote upon taking the job was telling.

“I believe education is the equalizer of all mankind,” Cigarroa said. “The fact that I am blessed by being Hispanic carries an important responsibility for being a mentor and role model.”

First off, I like the reference that one is “blessed by being Hispanic.” It doesn’t always feel that way.

More important, however, is Cigarroa’s subtle acknowledgement that part of his job is to push Hispanics to take advantage of education’s power. Latinos have lagged behind other groups when it comes to graduation rates, test scores, and advanced degrees. There are several reasons for this, ranging from the travails of immigrant life to overt racism (sorry people, it still exists).

But I’ve always believed that the chief culprit is self-created. The lack of respect, sometimes bordering on disdain, that education receives in Latino culture is alarming. I’ve written about this before, and no doubt will again.

I doubt that one person’s appointment will change the attitude of those Hispanic parents who simply don’t emphasize the importance of education to their kids. But at least one educator recognizes how vital it is. And it helps that he was once one of those kids and knows what he’s talking about.