Författare: xikano_2

1970 – Diana vs. State Board of Education of California – Spanish speaking children were placed in classes for children with mental retardation on the basis of individual intelligence tests that were considered culturally biased.

We all remember that afternoon. The clouds hung at an uncomfortable low and the heat made the humidity stick. It was then the town council in all its wisdom had decided to pass a non-bilingual bill, despite the majority of the town’s opposition to it.

What hurt more was councilman Richard Rodriguez vote. He, raised amongst the locals, turned his back against his own folk.

– “Why, just last night he come over to take a’drink wit me, that bastad!” lauded Tauwny.

Tauwny was an immigrant from French Guyana and appealed most fervently of all for the dual capacity bilinguals have only to fall into deaf ears. The future couldn’t look bleaker for him. He had two sons and every February the third made a curios display of patriotism by taking out a flag no one but him knew where it came from. The vote had barely passed by a slight majority, and as the crowd gathered in front of the municipal building, the politicians where getting ready to read a statement to announce the town’s continuance of a monolingual policy for all.

Albert Villahermosa had been ambivalent throughout the debacle. His forefathers had moved from the city of Torreón in the state of Coahuila to what is now known as the San Joaquin Valley in California but then just another town in Alta California, not long before the American invasion of 1848 led then by Commodore Stockton. His great grandmother, or bisabuela as he would know her, would tell him “not to many freckled faced boys roamed the streets yet back then.” He was a fluent mexican spanish speaker but barely had need to use it except at family gatherings where he would endure a host of questions regarding his “Mexican-ness”.

He looked on the mass of people, wondering just what was he doing there amongst the throngs of angry people demanding that the city council reverse its vote. English after all, he thought in the back of his head, was what united everyone. It was the bridge that made this multicultural town what it was.

He headed homewards. That night, Angela, his wife of three years, had made a special dinner, mole, a chocolate spice sauce dish that Albert loved and as he readied himself to sit comfortably in the dinner table he heard on the radio that a protest had turned into a scuffle and Tauwny had been arrested for punching Councilman Rodriguez in the face. He could distinctly hear Tauwny’s voice in the background, yelling “traitor, traitor!”, as he was being dragged on while the radio reporter continued to report live from City Hall. Angela could be heard saying a few pity words for Tauwny but not much that moved Albert into a civic mood to go and demand Tauwny’s release, although the issue of bilingualism had slowly crept into his mind as the night passed on.

The next morning proved decisive for the whole town, during the course of the night many residents had gone out and held a vigil for Tauwny. They nearly broke the windows of Councilman Rodriguez car, had it not been for Sheriff Gonzalez timely intervention, although many would later wonder maliciously where had he been at the time of the punch that gave Councilman Rodriguez a black eye. A few had ventured to suggest that it was because he too had been on the pro-bilingual wagon but others spoke out plainly that it was because it had more to do with his insurance business where Rodriguez had recently taken out a policy insuring the 1956 Desoto he owned.

On the way to work, Albert met with disgruntled and sleepless neighbors who wondered where had he been all night while the town’s very essence was at stake. He shook his head in bewilderment at the utterance of those fancy words unable to answer quite right until he met his cousins walking by.

– Hey! Wuz up cuz? Were where’ya last night? Thought you be ‘round but I never caught sight of you …
– I went straight home from work, I was tired.
– Yeah, well, tomorrow were gonna be at it again till they change that fucking law, are you comin’?
– Don’t know, well see.

He never really understood his cousins; they didn’t even speak spanish although they belonged to the 1848 Committee. A group that demanded that the lands he grew up in be given back to México. As he walked by his neighborhood, he pondered what it was to be bilingual. Though he didn’t come to a clear conclusion as to its significance or its bearing to his town or himself. Worse yet, he was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the whole idea of this discussion coming up so high as the to waste precious council time and taxpayers money on such a, what he considered to be, trivial business.

He pondered about the language he first heard at home, the one that nurtured him and the one language that soothed him so much whenever he came home from school. His mother tongue as it were. It was the language of the house, the one mama and papa spoke. The one he discovered the world with, the one that first made him cry and the one that first made him laugh but also the one language that left him so many scars. He remembered all too well how his teachers would chastise him whenever homely vowels blurted out of his mouth but that were foreign to the teacher: “greasy language” the teacher would decry. At one point he adamantly refused to speak that wretched language. A choice that only brought him acrimonious chastisement closer to home and in the streets, the children would call him “beaner” and make him feel a stranger in the only land he ever knew.

– “Spanish has been nothing but trouble for me and I don’t want that for my children, that’s for sure”, he thought.

At work there weren’t to many bilinguals so the topic never really came up and the day proceeded as normal until the waterman came by.

– Hey Albert, how is it going? Heard what happened last night?
– Yeah, pitiful ain’t it?
– What?! You mean you stand by those crooked gringos ese?
– Well, not really, well…, I don’t really know you see …
– Well would you look at’cha! You’re the only mexican here and yet you wonder, how cozy homes! Meanwhile, us little guys who’ve been here before these gringos ever came to run our lives and are now telling us how to speak have to fight for our very existence.

Albert just stared; it never occurred to him that he was being run over by people who until this time had been his co-workers, neighbours, friends and associates. Albert didn’t have any more strength to continue the conversation and walked away from the water fountain leaving the waterman shaking his head. That the whole issue had come to his work was more than he could tolerate and made it a point to get the issue out of his head for the rest of the day.

Then, it dawned upon him. The division of the town was the division he had so long felt within himself. Never really belonging here or there, always having to choose sides. Yet essentially, whatever it was that made him who he was, a straddler, a walker of in-betweeness, a hyphen between the anglo and the mexican and the rest of the world, it was also happening out there in the streets. He walked back to his office shaken by the realization. All along, since he was a child, translating for his mother, speaking for his father whenever they went to shop or do some business with the rest of the community he had to be the middleman between two worlds in his town. Now he understood what it was the throngs that so baffled him were all about. He thought pensively for the rest of the day and decided to take a stance.

On his way home, the issue of bilingualism had died down, the city council had backed down from its stance and Tauwny was free. The town went about its business in a regular fashion and Angela awaited to tell him of the funny language his son uttered, a mixture of English and Spanish, they called it spanglish. Albert now stood feeling better about his new identity. His new self to the point of considering running against counculman Rodriguez only to later recant, “one step at a time” he thought, looking outside the window of his house as life returned to its normalcy to his beloved city.

Well ex-Q’s-me. Off course there is a difference and off course it’s divisive.

And that fact that Real Americana star spangled Chicanos don’t wanna take issue with the question at hand shows that it has been decided for us Tijuana Xicanos, citizenship, apparently, doth seems to matter.

Oh, like you didn’t know Lalo Alcaraz was from Tijuana and that Luis Urrea too and let’s not forget George Yepes.

Hence, I reiterate: does citizenship matter to be a Xicano?

For those new to the argument I would like to point out that I claim that Tijuana is Aztlán too. I’ve argued for it in spanish as well as in english that this is so the case.

Well, many would say, it isn’t certain, Mr. Martí­nez, because at this stage, any decent spanish speaking, english talking Xicano would have its fists up in the air by now, and abandon altogether the more familiar Julio Sueco nickname, to argue with me about the current kerfuffle.

The question pertains to the realms of Aztlán.

Within Aztlán, does citizenship matter?

I haven’t checked the state of the xicano blogsphere and I frankly don’t have the ganas. The fact of the matter is that we are different. I have mexican values ingrained in me like a tattoo in my nalgas. Though I harbour gringo values in my xicano DNA the fact that am not an american citizen sets me apart like a ten feet pole does whenever you don’t want someone around.

Citizenship does matter. And even though you hear that xicanos are discriminated chicanos themselves discriminate against those that are not American citizens. This fact has always permeated the Xicano ens and it will continue to no end forever and ever until people start talking about it. Does citizenship matter to be a Xicano?

Personally I think that citizenship should not matter. Though we are with our families our illegal alien cousins, nuestros primitos mojados, make us forget the obvious: there is a difference. We say it in many ways. One of them is markedly shutting them out from our hip lives.

I always used to hate it when my gringo not chicano cousins born in the USA distanced themselves from the kind of activities I pursued. Their enlgish speaking I have mexican parents but don’t speak Spanish friends always came first, the hip of the hip and the real beaner left out, yeah, that was me.

Amongst chicanos speaking Spanish can be a detriment or a plus. Some chicanos even look upon us in a condescending way as if it were a pest of sorts. I know a little Spanish as if solidarity meant to feel sorry for one for being so different ….

The sun is shining in Sweden. This means lots of welcomed warmth. Please, allow me to expound, the sun is actually heating up the surface. Yeah, no big news round the world but here in my corner of the earth this is like a million bucks. So you’ll find many swedes basking in the sun before their snow-filled yards. You read right, there is plenty of snow to make a snowlady.

Two more months and it will mark my 9nth year in beautiful Scandinavia were nothing but pretty white people live.

I don’t know, I have been thinking about it lately, what have this long stay in Sweden given me besides buckets of bitterness? A language, check. A new culture, check. A new citizenship, check. A profession, check. Tortillas and refried beans? I wish.

So I suppose that growing older ought to smooth out the edges and this will eventually turn out to be a not-so-bad expierence. I still long for Tijuana though and given the right circumstances am willing to drop everything and head back home. Am ready. Off course, that will take a little matter of around the sum of a million bucks or so to persuade me to head back home. My telephone bill assures me am a long way from reality.

At least the sun shines today and I have a Czech beer by the computer.

I stood in shock and speechless at the very image that was unfolding like a motion picture right before my eyes. I understood the power of cultural shocks, the power of cultural encounters and the power of feeling superior right after the incident. I know how to eat an avocado, un ahuacatl, and my swedish suegro, my father in-law doesn’t. I was with him last night. We were sharing a meal and I brought some vittles. I slid the kitchen knife smack in the midle of the aguacate, and cut it in half. The one half retains the big seed and the other shows a perfectly shaped half hole, un hermoso huequito. At the same time he asked me what that was, perhaps enticed by the glowing fresh and en su punto green color of the fruit, he picked it up and began to cut a wedge much as you would cut it from a lemon. I saw aghast that he did not take the peel off as his hand promptly placed the verdura in his mouth. The reeling of the movie was almost life like to be true, wait, it was life like, I kindly told him not to eat the peel. He didn’t, he said ok in a non-chalant manner, not noticing perhaps that this was the first time he ever tried the sacred fruit that brings so many memories of an ancient civilization to my mind, soul, the Aztecs.

I realized then how superior can one sometimes feel over other people. I felt pity for my father in-law for not knowing how to eat an avocado. Maybe it’s a mexican thing. On after thought it is also a sign that he has stopped seeing me with those eyes of his that always saw strangeness in me. The differences of another culture that popped, oozed out me, after 9 years, doesn’t seem to bother him anymore and perhaps he is more ready than ever to start trying the very things my strange culture has to offer. Maybeso, who knows. But I still feel sorry the poor lad was about to eat an avocado peel had I not stopped him in his tracks….

My fellow citizens in Tijuana are a wad unawares of world affairs.

This tends to irk me like a rash on my thighs. WTF? It totally escapes them that having one of the most powerful naval fleets in the world next to them is, least to say, important.

The security apparatus must be mind staggering. Yet no second thought on the issue is given at all in no discourse whatsoever or the secretive nature of mexican talk escapes me in an ineffable manner.

I put three articles by Stratfor, or rather snippets thereby, of security issues concerning the mexican border on my spanish blog. This helped me gauge the issue amongst the blogotees in the Tijuana sphere who tend to give me a read. They have no idea what am talking about.

Let alone deduct conclusions.

One is left but to wonder if they are just wary and hence silent on the matter or they are really not interested in world affairs.

I have always found spanish media a tad cumbersome. They inform the public, period. Rarely do they call to agitate. Tijuana spanish media always has this ‘miralos, miralos, pinches gringos, ya ni la chingan’ attitude. Probably party line stemming from Mexico City. It is inherent in our society to have echelons. So this is also plastered in the news. Hence nothing ever gets too out of proportion.

Most spanish newspapers go from the perspective that people are just plain dumb altogether. There is a sense that they are doing the people a favor. But let me back up some. When I say they inform I mean they pass on the information as if it had nothing to do with the community. It is always somebody else doing the action, unknown actors so far removed from the community as posible that it bears no resemblance with us to the extent that they even seem unmexican. Stories also tend to have no secondary sources or opinions being consulted to confirm or back up the ‘truth’ of the story. One must wholy rely on the integrity of the reporter that tells of the news, reports it. That is it.

A newspaper has so many facets. So I am just gonna be referring to a greater extent to the news that concern border issues which often tend to be matters of state. This in turn always leads to finger pointing of the worst kind at all levels of government administration. Just as well, rarely or seldom at best, is there a public reaction to anything, the San Andreas Fault could come loose and tijuanenses would be the last to know. There is no sense in the population to bring accountability to the powers to be . This goes back to the echelons I bespoke of before. Power stems from the top down and not the other way around.

Tijuana is a city populated by immigrants, which at any given time, constitute the majority of the population. So the spanish media more often than not has to address this crowd, not the native population. The latter has to do with second rate publications, plain old gossip or look to San Diego or L.A. for deeper analysis that concerns their region. The immigrant population tends to also be less educated than the native tijuanense. Immigrants have different customs and traditions. They come with a sense of human relations that is almost alien to the native tijuanense.

Immigrants tend to respect those in power. They revolve around power like sycophants. Immigrants tend not to question authority [feeling of not belonging what not] and those in power are looked upon as a hierarchy that is unremovable, except, off course, every three years which is when Tijuana has to go to the polls to elect a new mayor. This explains rather well the misunderstood feeling that native tijuanenses feel every three years.

It is not that there is apathy running amok in the city. It is the general lack of interest for the city as a whole. Tijuanenses in general do care for their city but because immigrants carry with them this sense of feeling that Tijuana is not their city and that they will not be staying in Tijuana too long no matter what, [they are just passing by] why vote. If they do vote it is so because they get something in return. It gets them something that puts food on the table. Immigrants outnumber tijuanenses and politicians understand this very well and fully take advantage of it. But I digress.

People born or raised in Tijuana tend to have a higher degree of education not because they attend institutions of higher education in masse but because we are bombarded day in and day out with all sorts of information from two language sources. Sadly enough there is also a brain drainage from the city. Educated tijuanenses are ill understood because we do not have the more mexican accepted customs in our sociological view of the world. This tends to askew the mexican view of how the world ought to be and which thereby tends to loath independent thinking. This makes for poor readership and least to say, leadership. This makes the many educated and well raised look elsewhere for a better future for themselves, for their personal development and their own good. Forget about the mexican diaspora, what about the tijuanense diaspora? Lalo Alcaraz, Luis Humberto Urrea, beisbol players, arquitects and a whole lot of other people that are later ‘forgotten’ by the city’s leaders or populace because they left the city. They may have left the city but the city never left them. They proudly say where they come from. But I digress once again.

On the other hand, whenever I read American anglo newspapers detailing news of Tijuana one is often struck with a sense of awe at the portrayal of heroism that a few mexicans seem to acomplish, read: it is laudable to be able to see ourselves in the mexican character because someone did something Anglo America can identify itself with which in most cases tends to mean progress. Progress is always a headline whenever Tijuana or México are talked about in the San Diego news media. It is news whenever we seem to be moving forward. The kind of ‘forward’ anglos seem to be abe to relate to.

News articles about Tijuana, or México, are designed to make us english speaking mexicans feel good. We like to hear and read about the bastards down in México, who did us wrong, get in trouble. They also tend to be articles that cause ‘indignación’ that is, these pieces of information are made to cause public reaction. Speacially concerning border issues. They agitate, they are a call to do something about the current situation at hand and that will inevitably affect the lives of our people for generations to come.

This has very much to do with the anglo American sense that Washington just can’t get away with anything it wants. It must have and does have opposition to its will. There is a price to be paid for messing with public opinion not so in Tijuana, México.

So this tends to create more news. This off course has more to do with the ‘business mentality’ of our gringo neighbour than anything else. More news means more stories, which in turn means more readers and more newspapers being printed and sold, so these articles tend to be follow-ups which in turn creates a loyal and interested readership. Everybody loves a good a fight specially when the big guy is getting knocked down.

This ‘indignación’ is far different than that from mexicans that are not from Tijuana where ‘indignación’ is often toothless and damped with a sense of resignation and powerlessness. The articles tend to be more informative with third party involvement. They are often small pieces of investigation, or so it would seem, though I suspect this is more rutine than ‘investigation’. The difference is a legal one. In Anglo America they are afraid of being sued for libel, so they have to get their facts straight. Besides, at the local and civic level, the code of ethics is much higher in San Diego than in Tijuana. What matters is to get to the truth regardless of who is affected by it. In México, people can also be sued for slander and libel as well but differently.

I imagine it is very hard to get people to talk or express their opinion or professional opinion on any matter that may affect them because they fear retaliation.

Some rather interesting blogs are beginning to surface, for example, Xicano Militant Califas Xicano. This guy is giving out the word on other aspects of xicanismo, streetwise. He has been at it for a year now and the writ stuff is golden. His kind of xicanismo is one that I no longer associate myself with but one that I can certainly relate in many respects.

His semiotics deal a lot with aztec/mayan lore. I have long distanced myself from such mythology to associate my xicanismo with because of where I come from: Tijuana/San Diego. [for the unknown reader: I am not a US citizen, I am from Tijuana] I long ago concluded that while the aztec/mayan lore has nourished my soul it is the indian tribes of my birthplace [Kumai, Pai Pai, Navajo, Apache, Msyo, Yaqui] that are closer to me rather than the aztec or mayan brethen.

Either way, Xicano is a fine lad. There is enough dosis of self doubt to make it worth your time. I say go give him a read.

Giving a go to his blog I think that xicanismo and blogging is the very push that xicanismo needs to move on. I think that it is good that we write our own, independent thoughts about what we think xicanismo is, we are defining ourselves and that is muy bueno ese.