BOOKS / Gregg Barrios : David Montejano's 'Quixote's Soldiers'

Up from the barrio:
A Chicano son of San Antonio
Reflects on El Movimiento

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2010

See video of Gregg Barrios' interview with David Montejano, Below.

[Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, by David Montejano (University of Texas Press, 360 pp., $24.95, paperback).]

SAN ANTONIO -- In Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, author and educator David Montejano posits that San Antonio local history provides a microscopic look at the Chicano civil-rights movement and the social change it forged.

In the book’s preface he declares: “As a San Antonio native, my narrative explanation has a certain autobiographical quality to it.” Montejano grew up in “a West Side subdivision built in the 1950s, in the Edgewood District, one of the poorest in the state and later made famous by its successful challenge of the state’s educational financing schema. My neighborhood was a poor working class surrounded by poorer neighbors on three sides.”

Still, Montejano’s parents made the decision to send him to Catholic school since it provided a better education. He attended Central Catholic High in the mid-1960s along with George and Willie Velásquez and Ernie Cortés, all of whom later played important roles in the movimiento. While future San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros also attended the Catholic high school, Montejano considers Cisneros a beneficiary but not part of the Chicano movement.

The seeds of Montejano’s activism were planted early on: “The Brothers [of Mary] taught a humanistic philosophy of brotherhood that later became liberation theology.” He was drawn to those teachings with their attention to poverty and social inequality.

His freshman year at then South Texas State University in San Marcos proved important to the young man’s education: He witnessed a clash between a Mexican service-station attendant who had refused to put gas in a car of drunken cowboys and how it was effectively defused. Later, when a caravan of striking farmworkers came through the small college town, Montejano joined them.

He transferred to the UT Austin campus where he became involved in the counterculture, anti-war, and black civil-rights movements and helped collect petitions to get La Raza Unida Party on the state ballot. His activism led to his arrest during a student protest in Austin against service-station owner Don Weedon.

Montejano is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the award-winning Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1936-1986, and the editor of Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century.

Unlike many academic books steeped in jargon, Quixote’s Soldiers is a fascinating look into the making and undoing of el movimento chicano and more specifically traces “some parts and tactics to its history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio.”

Juan Guajardo (foreground) and other Brown Berets leading a march against police brutality, San Antonio, November 20, 1971. Photo from San Antonio Light Collection / UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures / San Antonio Current.

We spoke to Montejano during a brief visit upon the publication of Quixote’s Soldiers.

In the first part of Quixote, you point out how San Antonio’s gang problem in the 1960s wasn’t helped by how it was viewed by the authorities.

There was a real gang problem, but it was exacerbated by the perception by authorities that all the working- and lower-class youth in the barrios were gang members. This included the social scientists that would come from the outside to study the youth. They would come in with this assumption that was an oversimplification and false. But there were gangs and conflicts that were passed on from generation to generation. But when I talk about self-identified gangs, I’m speaking of a very small number, perhaps 10 percent.

Your account of how Mexican-American student activists [many from St. Mary’s University] along with politicized gang social workers mobilized disenfranchised barrio youth is fascinating. And yet organizations like [the Mexican American Youth Organization] and [the Mexican American Unity Council] quickly faced opposition from the Anglo and Mexican-American political elite.

The MAYO leadership and the batos locos of the barrio hanging out truly influenced one another. But once Henry B. shuts down places like [the alternative] La Universidad del Barrios, these young college kids get involved in politics. Symbolic politics. The batos were geared to addressing local issues: police brutality, drug trafficking. If they had remained together who knows how this could have developed.

Where do the Brown Berets fit in the movimiento? I remember there were some Wild West types in the Berets and a few informants as well.

Wild West Side types. The first part of the book deals with barrio youth and gang warfare and how they become involved in the movement and eventually form the Brown Berets. The [academic] literature places little emphasis on the barrio or the batos locos that formed the Berets. The first confederation of the Berets in San Antonio is based on the old gang boundaries and identities.

Did Saul Alinsky’s community-organizing strategy have a bigger influence on MAYO and MAUC than the Mexican Revolution?

The Mexican revolution provided the symbols and the songs [laughs] and the color, but without question, Saul Alinsky. And, of course, the Black Power movement.

Why did the rhetoric turn to the confrontational “Kill the Gringo!”?

Jose Angel Gutiérrez, Nacho Perez, Mario Compean, [and] Norman Guerrero all believed that the only way you could wake up our people was through this confrontational, provocative language. There was an image that we were a passive people, the sleeping giant. Estos batos were going to wake up the sleeping giant through their rhetoric. This scared the hell out of the political establishment -- the Anglo and Mexican-American elite.

You devote several chapters to Henry B. Gonzalez [influential San Antonio politician who served in Congress, 1961-1999], who viewed the Raza movement as racist. Still he was also considered a hero for his liberal stance on issues. Why this division? Was this old crab trying to keep the others down? Political posturing?

That’s a good question. I wrestled with that. Henry B. would say it was out of principle. He opposed any politics based on ethnicity. He thought it was equivalent to corruption. His adversaries believed it was based on his alliance with the [Good Government League], that Henry B. had turned his back on the people who had helped elect him. And so that’s the basis for a lot of animosity between Henry, Albert Peña, Joe Bernal, and others. So was it just principle or was it just money? Was it patrón politics we’re talking about? I’ll let the reader figure that out.

Did the strong showing of Mario Compean [the Committee for Barrio Betterment candidate for mayor in 1969] against GGL incumbent Walter McAllister spark the notion that we could elect our own candidates and create a political party like Raza Unida?

I definitely believe that. It is not just my belief but that of others that I have interviewed -- the fact that CBB was able to place second without any money and just campaigning in the barrios, using mimeograph machines, going to the quinceañeras, clearly a low-budget affair. And they clearly won against the GGL in the West Side. And not by tiny margins; there were some substantial margins. This results in Mario Compean declaring himself Mayor of the West Side.

I was a teacher at Lanier High School at the time. I saw the sense of pride and identity in my students, not only in having Latino teachers, but in the rise of a Chicano renaissance in the arts. While your book centers on the political aspects of the movimiento, I believe both go hand in hand; all art in a sense is political.

It’s true, I do in passing mention the teatros, the art, the flourishing of literature. And the identity formation. Now we are Chicanos, Chicanas. That’s a new vocabulary. A new identity. And all of that is buttressed by this cultural renaissance. There is no question about that.

Was José Angel Gutiérrez’s strategy of building the Raza Unida Party county by county instead of running candidates in state elections ultimately the road that should have been taken?

In hindsight it would have been the better alternative. At the time we wanted everything and we wanted it now.

But were we prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with those victories?

We were young. We were 20-something. We were naive. We didn’t know a lot of these things, we just wanted someone elected. And in many cases we didn’t know what to do afterward. We had no plan other than that it might lead to some sort of liberation.

What is the lasting legacy of the Chicano movement?

Certainly the opening up of universities in the creation of Chicano Studies, because that is where we get our history, our art and literature. And in San Antonio, the establishment of UTSA might be considered a logro for us. The changing from at-large electoral politics to single-member districts was a very important change. The building of our political and community capacity by grassroots organizations -- COPS and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Bless Willie [Velásquez] and Ernie [Cortés].

They increased the political capacity of these barrios and the result of all that in tangible, concrete results are parks, housing, flood control, drainage. Those are some of the accomplishments. And I think besides the election of Henry Cisneros in 1981 that symbolizes the changes.

The other major change is the emergence of Chicanas in leadership positions. I mean visible leadership, no longer being in the supportive background but now being upfront, leading the organizations, holding the press conferences, running for office. That to me is an important change.

U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, D-TX, during campaign for U.S. Senate, 1961. Photo by Grey Villet / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

A few wrong turns

In one of Quixote’s Soldiers’ most interesting and bound to be controversial chapters, Montejano focuses on three individuals as examples of failed leadership. Fred Gómez Carrasco, Ramsey Muñiz, and Henry B. Gonzalez dominated media coverage in Texas in the 1970s -- representing a “Mexican” voice or presence to the larger public.

Montejano writes that some may question his selection of these three men as arbitrary and unreasonable:

The first was a convicted killed and drug dealer, the second a fallen political star, and the last a respected liberal congressman. [F]or better or worse, they represented different paths leading up and away from barrio poverty and isolation.

Fred Gómez Carrasco, the chivalrous drug "don," had been a major heroin supplier for the barrios and ghettos of San Antonio and other points in Texas. Despite the romanticization of his life as a narco-traficante, Carrasco must be remembered as the genius organizer behind a drug operation that tranquilized and criminalized countless barrio and ghetto youths. In short, Carrasco played a critical part in undermining the Chicano movement in the poor, working-class barrios. Yet his last-minute political testaments, given before his staged death, suggests there could have been a different path.

Ramsey Muñiz, athletic star, charismatic leader, and two-time gubernatorial candidate for the Raza Unida Party, stumbled and then self-destructed, taking along with him the fortunes of the party. What happened? [Muñiz was charged with conspiracy to smuggle drugs from Mexico to Alabama.] Yes, it was a setup by the authorities, but how could Muñiz have walked into it? Was the temptation so great? Was it hubris? Ten years after serving time for his first two convictions, Muñiz was arrested and convicted on a third drug charge. As a result, Muñiz has been permanently incarcerated. The loss is irrevocable. What remains is a memory of those inspiring years when Muñiz moved 200,000 voters to believe in a "united people.”

Henry B. Gonzalez, an American of Spanish surnamed descent who held an idealistic "color-blind" view of the world was so upset with the Chicano ethnic demands that he actively opposed the Chicano movement. He was successful in defunding MAYO, forcing MALDEF to move from San Antonio, and restricting MAUC activities. Was it principle that moved his opposition, personal pique at movement rhetoric, or simply interest in maintaining political control? Gonzalez has been charged with undermining the Chicano movement, yet that responsibility must be partitioned among many.

Montejano concludes:

Perhaps this does lead to a judgmental question after all. Can we judge which path was the most flawed? [W]hich is worse, a flawed journey, a flawed decision or a flawed vision?

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His new book of poetry, La Causa, appears in September and his play I-DJ premieres in October. Gregg wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. This article was also published in the San Antonio Current.]

• Find Quixote's Soldiers by David Montejano on Amazon.com.

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Dick J. Reavis : Texas Monthly's 'Where I'm From'

Erykah Badu (right) at nine years, with her sister Nayrok, six, in Dallas in 1980. Badu contributed to Texas Monthly's special edition. Photo from Texas Monthly.
Signs of a new inclusiveness?
Texas Monthly's special edition

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 25, 2010

The current issue of Texas Monthly, a “special edition” whose theme is “Where I’m From” is worth some reading, some scrutiny, and some thought.

Though the funerary photo of Laura [Eva von Braun] Bush on its cover is an eyesore, its teaser lines carry an eye-raising message. Nineteen contributors and interviewees -- mostly notables and novelists -- are named there: four of them are Mexican-American, two of them black.

With luck, the issue’s inclusiveness forecasts a new and better day at the magazine. It’s as if Texans, and all Texans, could produce a national-class magazine without heavy supervision from the non-Texans who dominate the state’s industry of words.

A few weeks ago, Mexican-American writers chastised the editors of both the Texas Observer and the Monthly for accepting slots on a panel of 11 other whites at an Observer-sponsored “Texas Writer’s Festival.” From the sidelines I assailed them for billing non-Texan whites as homefolk.

But the Monthly’s special edition would have already been at its printer -- outside of Texas -- when the controversy arose, and that might indicate that the magazine, or at least its editor, Jake Silverstein, had already turned a corner, if only for a single issue.

The significance of “Where I’m From,” however, goes beyond questions of color and regional origin. As a commercial product, this artifact is an oddity. Mass-market magazines are generally aimed at prosperous and prospering readers 25 to 40 because that’s the demographic advertisers seek.

The Monthly’s “From” issue mainly carries accounts of life in Texas before 1970, certainly before 1985. In the annals of the industry’s prized readership, anything before 1985 is history, and anything before 1970 is ancient history -- and as Henry Ford long ago told us, for Americans “history is bunk.”


If not many young people will turn the pages of this edition, their parents will, and that probably explains either its origin -- or merely its commercial convenience. The magazine’s paid pages include a 42-page advertorial from institutions of higher learning: private and public colleges alike are seeking students who pay full tuition. The issue is so fat with ad pages -- including eight advertorials, running a total of 78 pages -- that getting to its content is like fighting one’s way through the canebrakes along the lower Rio Grande.

The issue describes Texas through memories of childhood and adolescence, and that’s a relief from the usual definitions: Texas as a cluster of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, or markets, and Texas as a collection of electoral districts, a la Texas Tribune. Sadly, of the 10 shorter pieces in the front of the magazine, in sections entitled “Growing Up,” and “Leaving,” six come from people in the environs of New York City. Those contributors are mainly writers who, because the project of Texas publishing was betrayed, have made their careers in the American industry’s hometown. But even expatriate accounts tell us what Texas is like.

The traditional answer to the question, “What Is Texas?,” as founding writers at the Monthly often noted, was to be found in the pages of Texas Highways: nice people doing nice things, especially in county seats. Though some of the same Pollyanna approach is evident in the “Where I’m From” issue, a few of its accounts get closer to the truth, as I see it, anyway.

My observation has been that, when they are sincere, all thoughtful Texans voice a love-hate relationship with their setting, just as people in Northern Mexico do. The state’s turbulent history and even its terrains, like those of Northern Mexico, don’t offer us much choice: Texas is not Maine or Costa Rica or California North.

By that standard, the prize contribution in the “From” issue is an as-told-to piece from Rick Perry, his recollection of his upbringing on a dry-land North Texas cotton farm. Perry told interviewer Silverstein things like:

[The area around Haskell] could be one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate, brutal, uninviting and uninspiring places … I spent a lot of time just alone with my dog. A lot.

Perry talks about daylight darkness created by dust storms, about bathing in No. 2 tubs, and, as John Kelso has noted in an Austin American-Statesman send-up, mother-made underwear. His tale is truly worth telling as fiction -- in a novel by the likes of Cormack McCarthy.

On the other hand, in an interview with Monthly long-timer Mimi Swartz, Democrat Bill White talks in middle-class truisms, Texas Highways style.

The view of Texas as a locale not merely of nostalgia, but also as a problem or project leaps out, too, with contributions of El Paso historian David Dorado Romo, who finds commonalities in the Texas-Mexico and Israeli-Palestinian borders, and of Erykah Badu, who reports that “…in the late eighties crack cocaine came and everything went to hell” in the South Dallas neighborhood of her childhood.

For Perry, the question “what was Texas” does not draw an idyllic answer, and for both Romo and Badu, what’s relevant is not only “what was Texas?” but “what is it becoming?” That worry should torment both the Monthly and the 25-to-40 demographic in the issues to follow “Where I’m From.”

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator, and author who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. He is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.]

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Arizona's Crackers : 'Illegal is Not a Race'

Image from Reform America.
Arizona’s Crackers:
Jim Crow is alive and well

Maintaining a whip hand, southern politicians once calculated, was the best way to defend white power. The same calculation drives contemporary Arizona politics.

By Char Miller / The Rag Blog / May 17, 2010

CLAREMONT, California -- Standing in the middle of a busy rotary intersection in Orange, California, was a clutch of anti-immigrant protesters; these young white males were demonstrating their solidarity with what they presumed to be embattled Arizonans.

As a steady stream of cars revolved around the circle, they held up hand-lettered signs, the most blunt of which read: “Illegal is not a race. It’s a Crime!”

That is a distinction without a difference in Arizona, however, where being Latina/o has become criminalized. When Governor Jan Brewer signed legislation requiring local and state police to demand identification of those they “suspect” are undocumented, she and the state legislature went on record establishing a two-tier caste system: those who look white will get a pass; those who do not will get rousted. Jim Crow is alive and well in the Grand Canyon State.

Like white Southerners’ intense efforts to segregate public space after the destruction of slavery, contemporary Arizona politicians are determined to define who is “legal” and who is not; who looks like an American and who does not; who can walk down the sidewalk without fear of harassment and who must hide in the shadows.

They have also decided -- as did their white-supremacist predecessors of the late nineteenth century -- that controlling the movement of a suspect people is but one part of the battle to dominate social life. As essential is managing who gets educated and on what terms. In the postwar south this was accomplished through the creation of a flawed and inequitable educational system that received constitutional sanction in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Until repudiated by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Plessy succeeded in deflecting Blacks’ intellectual aspirations, lowering their economic horizons, and shackling their political ambitions.

In Arizona, legislators are just as serious about cracking down on the educational hopes of what is increasingly looking like a captive population. Within days of the passage of the anti-immigration law, another bill swept through the legislature: HB 2281. Its language is disturbing, for it “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that: Promote the overthrow of the United States government. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

HB 2281’s goal is clear -- to tar Chicano Studies programs in state universities and public schools as insurrectionary, denounce them as anti-white, and condemn them as sources of suspicious group cohesion. Its rhetoric may be different from the Black Codes that white southerners once enacted to manipulate former slaves, but the legislation’s desires are the same -- keep the downtrodden down.

Maintaining a whip hand, southern politicians once calculated, was the best way to defend white power. The same calculation drives contemporary Arizona politics. Three years ago, for instance, Tom Horne, the state superintendent of education, lashed out at ethnic studies programs. As author of HB 2281, and now a Republican candidate for state attorney general, he rails against “ethnic chauvinism” to scare up voters. More inflammatory still is his department’s recent ruling “that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.” In Horne’s Arizona, only whites have the right to be chauvinistic.

We have been here before. In his incisive critique of segregated America, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois recorded the “many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the 20th Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” That same deeply troubling divide, as Arizona has demonstrated, is staining the 21st.

[Char Miller is director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. and is the former chair of the History Department and Director of Urban Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. He is author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas and editor of River Basins of the American West. This article also appears in the Rio Grande Guardian.]

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Dick J. Reavis : Something Missing at Texas Writers' Festival?

"The Texican." Painting © Mike Aston /
mikeastonart.com .
Artaud and Arizona:
Tempest at Texas Observer's writers' fest

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2010

This weekend a startling email come to my inbox and to those of others who are identified with journalism in Texas. Its title line read, “To Liberal Activists Who Happen to be Latina/o/s.” Though I don’t fit either the Liberal or Latino categories, being a nosy former reporter, I read what its poster, antonioartaud@grandecom.net, had to say.

“The revered journal of Texas liberal politics The Texas Observer is having a writer’s festival,” its opening blandly began. “Guess what -- they forgot to invite any Tejana /o/s and African Americans. Impossible, you say. Que fue eso? Did we forget to show our papers? How do we prove we’re Texans too?

“And to make matters worse, they’re in cahoots with Texas Monthly,” Artaud continued. “Almost all the writers invited are either the editor of Texas Monthly or former/present Texas Monthly writers. Yes, the same magazine that has ignored us for over 25 years as personas non grata in their Texas.”

The post closed with an exhortation and a warning: “Cancel your subscription, write a letter, protest the event at Scholz Biergarten, but above all, consider yourself on notice.”

I am told that the author of the post, Antonio Artaud, is a student of journalism at a college in San Antonio. His sentiment was, to use an oldster’s term an Anglo journalist friend applied: “Right on!” Artaud knows of what he speaks -- and what he pointed to is a scandal.

Monday Artaud followed with a post containing messages of support from, among others, the novelists Dagoberto Gilb of San Marcos and the all-around San Antonio wordsmith, Gregg Barrios (who also wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin). Something was building. “Latina/o/s” were, for the moment anyway, rising to protest against business as usual in the circles of Texas journalism.

The hubbub died late Monday or early Tuesday when Artaud sent a third post, announcing that the Observer had agreed to include a Latino writers panel and issue an apology. Better late than never, I suppose. But as always in American history, it appears that no arrangement was made to include blacks.

Before the hubbub died, I did some thinking. Placing myself in the shoes of the editors of the Observer and TM, I asked what might be done to permanently integrate those publications without fundamentally altering anything.

I’d have canceled the Writers’ Festival (or “writers’ festival,” as the Observer’s announcement so graphically put it.) I’d have rescheduled it and expanded its panel to include -- two or three New York Puerto Ricans or Dominicans! After all, Nuyoriqueños are as much Latinos as Mexican-Americans, and many of them are as African-American as anybody in the United States.

If this idea doesn’t make sense, it should: the Texas nonfiction establishment has already applied the same logic to Anglo Texans.

I may get some of the facts wrong because I’ve been outside of Texas for six years, but to the best of my knowledge, the editors of the daily newspapers in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are white non-Texans. The editors of The Texas Observer and Texas Monthly, Bob Moser and Jake Silverstein, fit the same category, even though the general report is that they’ve improved those publications.

I am less sure about the Observer, but at the Monthly, the tally is plain: the magazine has had four editors, only the first of whom was a Texan. My observations, when I was a journalist in Texas, were that at both dailies and elite magazines in Texas, only about half of the editorial staffers were Texans before they became reporters in Texas.

The Observer and the Monthly are, of course, by now “old media.” The most contemporary entry into the ranks of elite Texas journalism is the online daily, The Texas Tribune. I would note that its first and only editor, Evan Smith, is from the city of New York.

A few years ago I put together a still-unpublished statistical study of the Monthly which showed that Texans, 95 percent of the editorial staff at the magazine’s outset, became a minority during the ‘80s, and stabilized at about half during the ‘90s. The Monthly has never hired a Mexican-American staff writer and its one African-American reporter vanished within months of his engagement.

None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. It is accepted wisdom among educated Americans today that class and regional differences don’t count for anything: we live in a placeless, classless meritocracy, people believe.

When Texas Monthly, as today, calls itself the “National Magazine of Texas” it in no way means to imply that it is the magazine of a state which sometimes imagines itself a nation. Instead, it is a magazine of national quality -- which in the publishing world, means “as good as what’s published in New York” -- that, incidentally, happens to be published in Texas.

The sensibilities of the locale mean nothing, the standard of reporting means everything. Journalism is an acultural scientific product, disconnected to land, the past, and tradition. It produces sterile news, cleansed of the smell of the dirt from which it came.

With that as the accepted wisdom, it’s clearly heresy to bring even ethnicity, as Arnaud did, into the equation. Meritocracy knows no gradations, so what difference can it make that the editor of the Tribune is from New York, the editor of the Monthly from California and the editor of the Observer from North Carolina?

I dissent from the accepted view for reasons that are as inchoate and instinctual as sometimes studied and glib. Suspicions haunt me, the latest of them because of the controversy over Mexican immigration in Arizona.

Several years ago Texas was the home to two or three border-control militias, just as Arizona was. I looked into the Texas outfits and found that even though they were led by small-time ranchers whose spreads were near the border, those ranchers -- and most of their lieutenants -- were recent arrivals from the rural Midwest.

My suspicions and speculations tell me that, Arizona being the retirement destination of the Midwest, as Florida is for New York, Arizona’s anti-Mexican hysteria is probably traceable to the state’s non-natives. In a way, it comes naturally to them: Mexico is as foreign to rural
Midwesterners as Iraq is to most Texans.

Anglo, Latino, and African-American natives of the frontera alike have traditionally regarded immigration restrictions as a joke, though in recent years they have become a real annoyance. But inlanders tend to see border walls, passport requirements, and crossing-bridge shakedowns as dignified embodiments of American law.

As reactionary as Texas may otherwise be, its last president, the Islamophobic George W. Bush, made an honest attempt at humanizing immigration law, and the state’s current governor, Rick Perry -- a lifetime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, no less! -- has said that Arizona’s anti-Mexican ethnocentrism is not for him or his state.

I can find no other factor that uniquely explains the “progressive” character of the Bush and Perry stand except this: growing up even as Anglos in Texas, their attitudes towards Mexico and its descendants took a better-than-American form. Neither regards immigration as a merely legal or economic -- or racial -- issue, as most Americans do.

According to the theory of meritocracy common to the American empire, success and placement depend, not upon the question of national or regional origin, but instead upon one’s educational credentials. Other differences between Americans have no place in this scheme.

This is why state-supported universities, for example, conduct national talent searches for almost all faculty jobs. The same placelessness has been at bottom of the selection of editors and writers for the Monthly and the Observer and probably, the Tribune as well. If in Texas we hire editors and journalists who are often non-Texans, according to meritocratic ideology, it must be because competent writers are hard to come by in Texas; if we also wind up with editors and writers who are not Mexican-American or black, why would the same conclusion not apply? The theory that marginalizes Anglo Texans downgrades all Texans, Latinos and African-Americans as well.

In his original posting, Artaud attached a copy of the Observer’s announcement of its bash. I counted 13 panelists. Perhaps because I have been away, I recognized the names of only seven of them, among them one writer from the city of New York. I wondered to myself, “how many of these Texas writers are really Texans?” I do not know the answer yet, but my guess is that it’s more than one. Were the same sort of celebration being staged in New York, I do not believe that a single paisano would be on the billing; more than one -- certainly not! Yet Texas is today more populous than New York.

The Observer, in deciding to heed Artaud’s complaint, at least in regard to Latinos, may have decided at long last to remedy its lack of sincerity and vision -- for a month or two, anyway. But the notion that the self-expression of Texas should be the affair of non-Texans is only an extension of the otherwise-hidden hegemony which skin color makes plain.

Today I was thinking that, perhaps because I’ve been called a “horse’s ass” more than once, I should feel a little bit sorry for horses as well. In the eyes of most of them, I’ll wager, all equine magazines should be written and published -- by equines, not by their riders!

Horse sense tells me that in Texas, whites are riding on the back of a culture that has always included Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, and white non-Texans are riding on the back of the cultural mix that only Texans, of any color or ethnicity, fully appreciate or understand.

[Dick J. Reavis is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

Antonio Artaud passed along this letter, sent to The Texas Observer by UT professor Emilio Zamora:

Editors,

I published a book on Mexicans and the Texas home front with Texas A&M Press and co-edited an anthology on Latinos and Latinas in WWI with UT Press, both in 2009. I have received two awards for the first book from the Texas State Historical Association and the Institute of Texas Letters. Despite this, I was not invited to participate in your writers' festival. This is not the first time that public programs on new books have slighted me, but I have recently discovered that this time you have also overlooked other recently published authors of Latino/a descent. You may have included one of these noted authors, Belinda Acosta, but only after she pointed out the glaring problem.

I should add that Latino and Latina writers are also usually absent from the pages of The Observer and this is not necessarily due to our failure to submit materials to you. A case in point is Professor Angela Valenzuela's excellent review of Avatar which she submitted on February 5, 2010. You have not published the piece nor have you even sent her a note acknowledging her submission.

I cannot help but think that the problem of under-representation and erasure of major portions of U.S. and Texas history (women, minorities, labor, civil rights, for example) in our public school curriculum extends far beyond the Texas State Board of Education. Isn't it really a sorry shame that we should be talking like this among ourselves when major battles for equal rights (with the State Board of Education, for instance) require our undivided attention.

Emilio Zamora, Professor
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin

The Rag Blog

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Racial Profiling : What's Up With the Mormons?

Image from Early Onset of Night.
Mormons for racial profiling?
Unsustainable contradictions in immigration law

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2010

What’s up with the Mormons? Orem, Utah legislator Stephen Eric Sandstrom last week pledged to follow the lead of “my friend” Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce and expand the number of states with show-me-your-papers bills aiming to criminalize, jail, and deport irregular migrants.

Rep. Sandstrom, who is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a former Mormon missionary to Venezuela, takes credit for co-founding a state’s rights organization called the Patrick Henry Caucus.

Sandstrom’s “friend” Sen. Pearce of Arizona, sponsor of the recently signed SB-1070, hails from the Mormon stronghold of Mesa and claims to be the mastermind behind Maricopa County’s infamous Tent City Jail.

For Pearce and Sandstrom, the crucial issue of liberty in the 21st Century would appear to involve the rights of states in relation to the federal government of the USA -- never mind the rights of individual people who reside in those states.

What’s curious about this particular Pearce-Sandstrom movement for state’s rights over individual rights is how it seems to contradict the interests of the Mormon family itself, which has been witnessing an increase in Spanish-speaking congregations.

Last summer, Salt Lake Tribune writer Peggy Fletcher Stack reported increasing fears among Spanish-speaking members of the Mormon Church of Latter- day Saints (LDS) who were concerned about travel restrictions they were facing for missionary work and then-impending implementation of Utah’s anti-migrant law, SB-81. “People are very scared,” said one woman via translator.

“Other than for its missionaries, the LDS Church takes a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ approach toward the immigration status of its members,” reported Fletcher Stack. “But some estimate between 50 percent and 75 percent of members in Utah's 104 Spanish-speaking congregations are undocumented. That includes many bishops, branch presidents, even stake presidents.”

Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank declared that Utah’s SB-81 would require illegal racial profiling, so he openly refused to enforce the self-contradictory statute. Last week Chief Burbank “blasted” Arizona’s SB-1070, telling KSL NewsRadio talk-show host Doug Wright: “This sets law enforcement back 30 to 40 years.”


Mormon Times columnist Jerry Earl Johnston shook his head last year in dismay over the unwisdom of the Utah anti-migrant legislation:

“I can only speak from my own LDS experience here, but I hold Utah lawmakers responsible for breaking up good LDS families and forcing young American citizens out of their native land,” wrote Johnston, predicting that victory would not reward the shortsighted anti-migrant forces.

“I could see these Hispanic brethren were going to win,” wrote Johnston. “I could see their faith, resilience and strength. They wanted to be in Utah more than Utah lawmakers wanted them out. They had weathered tribulations with good humor and without malice toward those who persecuted them.”

Meanwhile, in the Mormon stronghold of Mesa, Arizona, represented by SB-1070 sponsor Sen. Pearce, the number of Spanish-speaking LDS congregations had grown from five to 13 between 2002 and 2007 according to East Valley Tribune reporter Sarah N. Lynch.

Last fall, official LDS printing presses in Salt Lake City ran off an approved Spanish-language edition of the Mormon Bible -- The Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009 (Publicada por La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días, Salt Lake City, Utah, E.U.A.) -- with an initial press run of 800,000 copies.

“It is one of the most significant scripture projects ever undertaken by the Church,” proclaimed a notice of Sept. 14, 2009, posted at lds.org. “The volume contains new chapter headings, footnotes and cross-references to all scriptures used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Announcement of the volume was reportedly shared among “thousands of Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints congregations.”

Mormon political leaders, like everyone else in today’s global economy, are confronting a real crisis in human welfare. Maricopa County in particular is a frontline disaster zone for the crisis in real estate values, mortgage defaults, unemployment, and revenue shortfalls.

“In Maricopa,” according to an April report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Q3 2009 unemployment, “every private industry group except education and health services experienced an employment decline, with construction experiencing the largest decline (-32.2 percent).”

Crisis reveals character. So when Mormon political leaders campaign for agendas of states’ rights according to Patrick Henry rhetorics of “liberty or death,” perhaps their Spanish-speaking LDS brethren can remind them that there are millions of people of goodwill in need of actual freedom-loving legislators in whatever state they have freely chosen to congregate and build up.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

The Rag Blog

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Obama's Mariachi Ad : What Were They Thinking?

Manny Ramirez: The great guapón as Obama spokesman?
Obamarama, Latin Style
By Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez / July 26, 2008

Have you seen the Barack Obama mariachi ad?

It's on YouTube if you want to check it out. [See it below.]

In a word? Ay fao.

Really, it begs the question: What on earth is his campaign's brain trust thinking about Latino voters?

Now, first I have to say I admire the Senator from Illinois. I thought his speech on race in the United States was the finest political speech I've heard in my lifetime. A big part of what I admire about him is that sometimes his ideas are complicated, which is unusual for a político. No tidy 3-second monosyllabic sound bytes here. No "read my lips," no "just say no," no "I'll be back." Though his syntax is simple, he still expects a lot of sophistication from his audience. I even have one friend who is convinced that, if Obama wins the election, Americans will start reading more; he interprets the mass's toleration (and admiration) of such eloquence as a sign that Obama will help the publishing industry rally.

Hmm...

There was another Democratic candidate this campaign season who also has sophistication and a whopping vocabulary, Senator Chris Dodd. But I knew he wouldn't get far in his campaign. His syntax is too complex, which I appreciate, but most don't. And on top of that he speaks English the way a Cuban speaks Spanish, wicked fast. I don't mind that either. I've actually heard Senator Dodd speak Spanish with the same speed and fluency. Amazing. But most people have no patience with language woven into an elaborate web at warp speed, especially when the speaker is very articulate. I think it makes them somehow feel stupid.

Of course, that was probably the appeal of a certain ex-Governor of Texas. No one on the planet could feel stupid listening to him speak. Just maybe a little perplexed. What language does he speak anyway?

Which brings me to this mariachi ad. It's stupid dope tacky, mega rasquache. Zip zero nada in the way of production values. There's this group of musicians, donned in full mariachi regalia, walking down a street in a run down neighborhood, singing a praise song about Obama. Spliced between close-ups of the musicians in action (well, as close-up as the camera can get without clipping their enormous sombreros) are still photos of Senator Obama. The final photo has our hero wearing a ten-gallon hat!

Watching this video, I thought about Jessie Jackson's frustration with the timbre of Senator Obama's approach to some Black audiences, which he considered condescending. I don't know how Senator Obama plays to Black audiences, but if his performance in those venues resembles the mariachi ad's in low expectations about the audience's intelligence and aesthetic tastes, then I think the Reverend Jackson may have a point.

The whole thing is fascinating, really. The core issue, for me at least, is how the Obama camp is conceptualizing discrete audiences. Ultimately, their aim is to "sell" the idea of a President Obama to voters, kind of like convincing people to place a bet on their horse in a race. So they craft different messages to inspire different groups of people to think he can and should win. In the process, it seems to me, they've given the Presidential hopeful a split personality. In English, talking to the "mainstream," he is a sleek Harvard-trained thoroughbred with immense potential. In Spanish, he is a humble little brown burro from TJ.

Please don't get me wrong. I adore burros. Eeyore is my all-time favorite character in the books I read as a child. But I would never ever bet on him to win a race against Seabiscuit.

There is the possibility though that I'm appalled by that ad because I am as much an elitist as any ivory tower academic. But I want to believe that, if the rest of the country is going to move on up the intellectual evolutionary ladder on the heels of Senator Obama's lofty rhetoric and even loftier aspirations for the future, as I cautiously hope it does, Latinos will also be part of it.

Or perhaps this merely points to a bad translation, a failed effort to make a visual and cultural statement that would make this imaginary Latino audience feel good about Obama. Though I think the better strategy would be to find an ally from the ranks of Latin celebrities to speak to this audience, nationally, in Spanish, on his behalf. An ally like Oprah; outrageously popular among all sorts of people, at the top of her own game professionally, whose credentials as the best of the best and perhaps the best ever in a quintessentially American field is beyond a shadow of a doubt.

How to translate Obama into Spanish in precisely that way? That's difficult given the huge diversity within this demographic. But there are heroes in this community whose popularity transcends ethnic, racial, cultural, linguistic and even national borders.

How about Manny Ramírez? The great guapón himself. Everyone loves him, no? He's ever-so-easy on the eyes, and charismatic, and part of the magic that made it possible for the Red Sox to win the world series. He's an all-American hero, Latin style. A trigueño, like Obama, like a lot of us, who represents, like Obama, unlike most of us, an unlikely team triumph for the least likely to succeed.

That's it. Dump the mariachis. Go Little Papi instead! But please, please, please make the ad eloquent, sleek, and hopeful.

Source / Lisa's Blog

VIVA OBAMA 2008


Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

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