Författare: xikano_2

I haven’t the slightest idea who came up with such a catchy name but let me tell you, it ain’t good. It is supposed to resonate in the mind of the gringo and it probably will.

I can imagine some republican speech writer coming up with it in some smokey republican board room saying it in a very zealous and outloud voice ” I know! Let’s call them Barrio Warriors!

The fact is it also smacks of some FBI or Home Guard sting to root out potential Aztlan fervents outthere who might be ready to pull a Reies Lopez Tijerina on the Southwest.

Hopefully it will just stay as a dirty campaign trick from the part of Republicans, wait Julio, you’re not making any sense now, Oh yeah, I do have some readers don’t I? Sorry about that.

It turns out that while minding my own Xicano business and pleasantly enjoying a nice Sunday morning here in Sweden, all while enjoying as well that fine fine internet Aztlan newspaper of Califas, La Prensa-San Diego, with a cup of coffee, like any good hearted citizen of Aztlan would, I read the Xicano spiritual voice of Tezozomoc.

It nearly yanked my quetzal colored eyes out of my sockets.

It turns out that the dirty campaigners of the Republican party are getting help from the Schwarzenegger campaign staff. Remember how they used the Raza word to decry our culture habits as racist? Well the Republicans are sending little chain letters to each other stating the following:

Democratic Presidential Candidate Senator Edward Kerry and his wife, Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry are supporting the “Barrio Warriors” a supposable radical Hispanic group whose primary goal is to return all of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico!

So I did a little googling and put the words Barrio Warriors in the search field; heck, the pachyderms are at it again. It looks like a little anthill of comments all whispering and telling each other about how Teresa funds Barrio Warriors. Just the thought that anyone in the R camp is buying this makes my faith in Republican intelligence somewhere there I last had my faith on the Christian God, next to zilch. If that’s what they do to their own ….

Want to read more about it? You do the googling, it’ll come up, I promise you.

Whether Xicanismo likes it or not there is a latino force outhere to be reckoned with and it must embrace it. I say this because I have just been listening to Pepito for the past two days, an SF based band with ties to my birth city of Tijuana and a lad from Cuba. And I mention Xicanismo because Xicanismo/Chicanismo is impregnated with nationalistic hues albeit our nation in the green fields of our collective imagination.

However, the very same force that drives regular citizens away from patriotic jingoisms is making Xicanos of all walks of life turn their sights away from the entrappings of the cultural narcisstic mirror that Aztlán represents; there is a sense that latinos, as a major umbrella which encompasses all spanish related roots in the american culture, are becoming more the norm than the exception. This force must coalesce in order for it to become the norm, so that we Xicanos stop being an unknown force America.

Curiosly enough just as poverty is the hallmark that makes one nostalgic for Mexico, La Causa, immigration and the illegal alien is hindering xicanismo from becoming more mainstream if you will. We cannot see beyond those two issues hence the different types of Xicano that makes up the lot we are. Pochos, Chicanos, Mexican-American, Wetbacks and all that are but an expression to break lose from the chains that bind us to our past; there is no expression of xicanismo without the latter mentioned. Is there Xicanismo without immigration? Is there Xicanismo without la Causa? Does one exist as a Xicano in the everyday life? What does it mean to live a Xicano life? I dare not say lifestyle. Yet one must take into account that if culture is a mass product then we consume culture habits. Does listening to xicano music, Xicano rap and salsa makes one a Xicano? Do I choose to live a Xicano life and if I do is it a preference one can choose away? Apparently so because in our culture lingo there is the dreaded pocho, the dreaded soldout label.

Therefore the gains in latino preference, even our good friend in Chicago, Sandra Cisneros calls herself latina, and even I, have expressed this sentiment as well. In the bigger picture we must become a force within the emerging force of latinos. However, to answer myself the questions posed earlier as to whether I choose to be Xicano or not I believe that for me it represents more of an affirmation. I do not live in Aztlán proper. Like mexicans who live Aztlán and who long after México I yearn after Aztlán due to my exile. It affirms to me that I am a Xicano because I have so much of it and it delights me to read, see and hear Xicano matter. I do not represent your average Xicano. I am far from the marketing kingpins who appeal to the fibers of the Aztlán nation with their gimmicks. So there is no such thing as a Xicano lifestyle, however, I suppose there are xicano-philes.

And we must embrace the latino force in the US. However let us not be deceived as to what latino implies. There are those who will argue that latinos are the white upper class of hispania. When I say latinos I mean latinos in the senseit is used in the US. Latinamerican.

Despite my seven long years in Sweden am still surprised to find myself smiling and waving at people I don’t know. This oft more than not causes me to loose my morning cheeriness and wipes my Xicano smile of my face and a small Homer Simpson rebuke, dope! can be heard in the back of my head.

I live in the Swedish Higlands, in the boonies to be more exact and the small towns are, well, really small, mine has a population of 800 or so and everyone knows everyone here.

I have also recently gained the insight that I carry some city behaviour to small town Sweden with the consequences above mentioned, people don’t say hi to each other in small town Sweden if they don’t know them. Let alone mingle with them but that’s another story. Anyways, I figured that, what I deem an odd behaviour, god knows they deem mine so as well, has to do more with city habits than small town ones.

In big cities there is a necessity to say hi to each other because in essence no one knows no one there but in small towns they don’t have this habit at all, since as soon as one steps in their territory they know a stranger when they see one.

However, this might seem an obvious feature just about everywhere there is small towns, but you have to remember that Sweden has a huge territorial extension of small towns everywhere making American habits like mine odd at best.

So yeah, that, in Sweden.

Well I can officially kiss the suntan I adquiered during my sojourn in México adios. Its been raining cats and dogs in Sweden for 6 weeks in a row now and that means I will probably miss not only the summer the rest of the planet is probably indulging itself in right about now (- sticks tongue out to the rest of the whole wide world -) but also because of the cloudy skies that have been carrying all this water, something that ironically enough moved me from the metaphorical to the literal since I am now officially a wetback all day long, hey! try moving the lawn on a rainy day will ya?, (damn, that’s a long ass sentence, but hey! it’s my blog right?) I will also miss the blue moon on the 31 of July, rats!

Speaking of wetbacks, Kevin Sites has a story that one only hears about it in rumours in the press, this (get a load of the phrase) Mexican-Born Marine has something to say.

“When he was nine years old Carlos Gomez crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico to the U.S. with his father, mother and two sisters. They had heard stories about the opportunities in America, dreamed about them, wanted them so badly they ran through oncoming traffic on the 805 freeway to get to them. They didn’t stop until they reached San Diego. Fear, fatigue and La Migra slowly fading into the southern horizon like their homeland.”

Though clearly mr Sites needs to brush up on his geography a tad (or stop trying to romantize this kind of things) …erhm, last I crossed the border to the US via México the Rio Grande was a river in Texas and boy! running that 805 all the way from Texas to San Diego must of have been a real marathon! Wait … isn’t the 805 in San Diego?

On the glader side of the news, wait! There aren’t any with this freaking weather, I suppose that explains all the vodka consumption in this country, gotta get that chin up somehow.

Good thing I still have some of that tequila I brought back from my stint in the motherland. Salud!

Remember my post unscathed and alive whereby i related a blogsphere incident regards Tijuana identity? What i failed to take into account and just dawned upon me to tell my Xicana/o readership (is one allowed to use indiscriminately the suffix –ship when one but speaks of two? you’re damn right one can!) is how ignorant and prejudist seven headed eels reared their ugly electronic binary assumptions in monolingual and monocultural Mexico.

The assumptions ran from feeling pity for uprooted mexicans who found themselves in a cultural limbo (the link leads to a text in spanish written by Burgues) to people who radically complained about the constant memorabilia shopping spree we engage once on mexican soil like local Tijuana writer Rafa Saavedra says: Pochos who never learn to speak spanish y que vienen a comer tacos with mucho guacamole and to buy some galletas and cobijas pa’ taparse del frí­o racial en su home.

Inded, there is a belief that mexican natives have of Xicana/os that teeters on the border of despise. For local boys and gals in Tijuana all chicana/os and Xicana/os are nothing but pochos. Unlike we who like to distinguish between a pocho and a Ch/Xicana/o, local folk on mexican soil fail to differentiate the latter by any means. There is a common thinking best expressed succinctly by another blogsphere intellectual from Hermosillo Sonora named, after the blog, Humphrey Bloggart according to him Xicana/os romanticize México and long after the motherland. The conclusion is that we are basically bastards whose father constantly denies our existence and nothing more.

But that wasn’t really what i wanted to write about today though be that as it may it did spring out of another thought that just dawned upon me, yeah, it dawns like crazy today!

i sudddenly realized a parallell betweeen the mexican culture and our Xicana/o culture: we both deny an integral part of our reason for being; this thought also, by the bye’s, came into being due to my cuatro de julio post from yesterday.

We deny, in as much as we can, our American aspect in the same manner Mexicans deny Cortes.

Ain’t that something now?

boy, have i said enough about the weather here in sweden? jí­jole, me thinkest i’ve becometh too gringo like, pero i can’t seem to stop complaining about the summer that wasn’t. here we are in the first days of july and the sun? muy bien and thou? it has been nothing but cloud after cloud over here, speak of climate changes ah? though sticky is the operating word today, i seem to enjoy cutting wood, yes siree, woods the name for me, nothing but rugged country and away from the hot steeming sun, though i seem to be in the minority as always mind you, don’t wanna break any patterns here any time soon. so yeah, my daughter complained about a fly buzzing about our table during lunch, “take a good look at it cause that’s the only one you’ll see this summer baby” i said with my half sardonic joking voice.

have i said that i live in the swedish highlands? yeap, only about a gazillion times, so yeah, one group that absolutely strays from the norm, even further than i do, are the jehova’s you know which ones, don’t wanna get hits because of that phrase, poor suckers, don’t stand a devil’s of a chance here in uniform lutheran and half cooked baptist lands of nordic sweden. though my liberal education seems to take pity on them since every time they come knocking at our door i’m the only only paying any attention to those poor suckers, when everybody else is either ignoring their calls or just plain ignoring them, i take their pamphlets as a kind gesture and it makes me wonder who is the cruelest, me for making them believe they just planted a seed in this wasteland of a temple i call my body (they don’t know i sold my soul as a child when once i was tempted to get at any cost a butterfinger bar) or the people that just refuse absolutely any commitment with them. swedish people are kind of funny that way here, they don’t go about on the streets but boy do they ever peek at the windows. so they know who’s coming before you even take a step in the yard.

So yeah, small town mentality in the highlands here, that.

The good offices of Aztecpoet.com were kind enough to send me via internet Luis A. López recent book titled Warrior-Poet of the Fifth Sun, innercircle publishing 2004.

I must confess that if poetry has the quality to speak to the soul, Luis’s book not speaks but guides the path to be taken. This is Xicano poetry at its best and represents many of the spiritual dilemmas that we Xicana/os and Chicana/os battle within us in the everyday identity war field. His poetry soothes and describes in detail our inner spiritual wars; the conflict we have in dealing with our Spanish heritage; the loathing we have at times towards catholic dogma and the religious battle within ourselves to either believe the Christian God or our ancestors Gods, Quetzocóatl. There is also the fine fine tradition that stems all the way to Lope de Vega’s El Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias en Este Tiempo whereby Lope de Vega urged his countrymen to speak to them in their language. So does Lopez, and not only does he gives praise to other poets, he speaks to the universal in Spanglish. For let us not forget, and Lopez does not allow us to do it, spanglish is the language of our brethren from other parts of the latino world, the lingua franca amongst us latino who are bilingual and connects us to the Cuban, the puertorican, the Columbian. There is a profound sense of wanting to reach what Plotinus calls Beauty and the One. He reminds us of our nation Aztlán and speaks for the voiceless ones who cannot speak to monolingual America. He paints for us the streets as they are, were rutine meets the spirit of Hermes in those of us who need to detail what we see to others, yes Luis, you are meant to be a writer, and we can thank Quetzocóatl for that carnal.

i felt the breeze-to-rain on my brown hairy arms
here in these Swedish Highlands
my skin rejoicing with the wind’s humidity
the fresh air blowing icy comfort to my Xicano de Califas delight

and in my mouth when i rode my baika
down my throat an alien being in the snowy winter came in
though the climate was heavy with heat,
it wasn’t until i scratched a surreptitious bite i knew summer was here.

Shhh, listen to me now …

(i once sought their hibernating grounds with vengeance in mind with little success, step by step, only still brightly coloured wings which fluttered no more, six legged shells
and uninhabited dusty old cobwebs greeted me on the way,
though lifted did i rocks the creepers seemed oddly enough with the reaper away)

then the spiders are about
scouring its proximant victim
when the desperate buzz came to my ears
i knew the cobweb did its job
as i turned my eyesight towards it
i saw my arachnid friend wrapping its lunch

so the air in the skies is fresh and nice
the summer that wasn’t parting its way
as nature cares little for my sun tan
though complainaith i not.

life goes on.

I often find it amazing how America Gringa refuses to acknowledge some of its own history, twist it and bedmake it to sleep with the Other in its own house. I suppose it is easier for Gringo USA to see its own population thus. It is afterall, easier to manage since the Other in the United Gabacho States is a minority to whom the vast majority see nothing more than troublesome sectors, resistance fighters who do not fit in the “Good” category. Such is the misconception that Reuters recently reported on Aztlan and which you will find on the post below this one. I suppose it is easier for gringoland to see Aztlan as a cry of the return of lands (lost/gained?) from the 1848 mexican american war. Nothing can be further from the truth, in fact Aztlan is a concept, a semiotic idea to unite and to give a sense of identity to us who are impregnated with gringo and mexicano culture.

Aztlan can be best described by an act done by a man whose name is seldom seen or mentioned, he represents, in reality, the real cry Xicanos all over demand: Justice.

“ For most Americans the drowsy little village of Tierra Amarilla in northern New Mexico was first placed on the map June 6, 1967. On the second morning of the Arab-Isreali six-day war, newspaper readers all over the United States turned from the Sinai struggle to a national item that made them hastily recheck the dateline to be sure they were still in the Twentieth century.” Peter Nabokov

Reies Lopez Tijerina demanded that landgrants given to his descendents be honored by the US government, when this failed to materialize he raided a courthouse that sent shockwaves throughout the world wide over.

That is the one of the rallying cries for Xicanos in the US of America, that the Tratado de Guadalupe ne honored and that landgrants be honored, not that Aztlan be returned to a political establishment or institution.

Anyways, allows us to examine the article by Reuters, one done by a person who bears the name of Alistair Bell.

Let us see the repertoire of phrases which caught the eye of this citizen of Aztlan

Phrases from articles 1 to 3 are here:

“a warlike tribe with a passion for human sacrifice, wandered the badlands of central Mexico”
Hmmm, ok, wanna add some background on that that doesn’t give a christian spin to a culture who hadn’t notions of the judeo-christian persuation?

Next!

“Aztec legend says little about Aztlan”

Ouch! Separation without anesthesia is near criminal, if the aztecs have Aztlan as part of their repertoire then why not try to understand their culture in order to find more clues about it?

Next!

“Little stirs on the mosquito-infested islet nestled in a salt water lagoon on the Pacific coast.

An expected tourism boom to the state has mostly failed to materialize and the islanders still scratch a living from fishing for shrimp and lobsters.” [my bolds, not balls nimcopoop!]

Raid anyone?

Next!

“Try telling that to the growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States for whom the idea that Aztlan was in Utah or Colorado has become a matter of doctrine”

Ok, this is the best example of a reporter who fails in every degree to understand its own history, (hope the newshound is american gringo), as far as I know, the Aztlan notion and concept is a purely Xicano-a/Chicano-a affairs of state since most mexicans coming from México to the US have little or no knowledge of Aztlan because of differences of ideological rearing.

Next!

“With this massive wave of immigration from Mexico now, the immigrants are saying, ‘We are returning to Aztlan,’

Read the above.

Next!

“The issue of where the mythical Aztlan is has been thrashed about a lot. They haven’t located it definitively,”

Try my head, you’ll find it in the area formerly occupied by a Judeo-Christian God.

sources: Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid (1969) The Ramparts Press Berkely, Califas; Reuters.

I am ocassionally given to the reading of books which I, more often than not, peruse more than finish when the need arises to let time pass by in an adequate manner. So whenever I find myself answering the calls of mother nature I am of the habit of calmly answering it whilst I read a few paragraphs here and there. I also, whenever I have a chance, crack open a book at the library or the bookstore to see what a sentence might have in it. I am also of the disposition to take books with me to places where I know I shall be spending some time in idleness. It is a chore which I have acquiered through the years and one that has proven to be quite the rewarding one least to say a satisfactory one. Indeed, I have a chock-full bookcase of books in my library that are waiting for my eyes for this very chore, at times, I suspect, unpatiently since everytime I happen to pass by there I receive this eerie sensation of being drawn to them to comply with the promise I made them once they arrived to their current place in my humble library of no more than a 1000 volumes of which I have read no more than 200. It is a curios thing that once the coveted book has reached its goal to tend to gather more dust than use. Although, truth be told, I make the commitment of opening them every now and then to remind me of their position in the bookshelf. Such was the case of the only spanish book I have on Chicanos and why I started all this in the fashion I have done so.

Tino Villanueva, Chicanos (selección) Lecturas 89 Mexicanas Cultura SEP 1985.

I was rather surprised to find the following information regards Pochos on page 11 & 12 while I awaited my daughters to finish their swimming lessons, here on the Swedish Highlands one rather windy and partly cloudy day last week. Tino begins as thus: (loose translation):

I will open a long parentheses to discuss the term Pocho which according to Ramos I. Duarte, the first one to prove it, is derived from the Sonora ( a state along the Southwest border) word pochi (adj) which means “[c]orto (short) ; rabón (tail-less). Unos pantalones pochis cortos (short). Un perro pochi: rabón.” (Feliz Ramos I. Duarte, Diccionario de mejicanismos: Collección de locuciones i frases viciosas, Imprenta de Eduardo Dublí­n. México, 1895, p.408). And here we find the same definition half a century later by Francisco J. Santamarí­a in his respected Diccionario genreal de americansimos, first edition, II volume, Editorial Pedro Robredo, México, 1942:

Poche, cha m. y f. Name with which northamericans of spanish extraction, specially mexicans, are designated, in the south of the United States, particularly in California. (In Mexico the most common thing to say is pocho or pocha and it doesn’t present itself to be too odd that its origen stem from pochio, a sonorismo (from Sonora) which very likely stems from the yaqui; also meaning short in limitations. More clearly, stupid) 2.Corrupted spanish, a mix of english and worst spanish which northamericans and foreign residents of spanish origin speak, mainly mexicans, in California (USA) [pp. 504-505]

A similar definition added to a more ample, clearer explanation with a linguistic and historic link and that I shall now gloss is that of Horacio Sobarzo (Vocabulario sonorense, Editorial Porrúa, México, 1966, pp. 258-259). He considers the word pochi (pocho) an “authentic sonorismo” and traces it to two autochtonous sources. In its first sense, Pocho “originates from the ópata potzico, which means to cut, to yank weed or grass; potzi, very simply, has the connotation of cutting or recutting, anything […] and the particle tzi once adapted to the spanish phonetic system sounds like chi. Potzico in the middle of the 19th century meant metaphorically “ the art of yanking weed” in reference to the “compatriot which was yanked from our nationality”. On the other hand , the idiom which connotes a tailless animal is derived from another ópata word: tacopotzi which means without a tail. In short, the ethymological evolution of our word has two potential autochtonous sources: 1) potzico > potzi > pochi > pocho. 2) tacopotzi > potzi > pochi > pocho.
Though dictionaries assign Pocho the meaning of discolored, colored crackled, Sobarzo affirms that “within the pochi classification it was to be understood as well all of those that, inasmuch weed was, were yanked of their nationality and had the same fortune of that territorial portion which se pocho from our country, whites, blonds, blacks, morenos, colored and discolored”.

In another passage I also read that Pocho is older than Chicano. I read the following, in english too! this snippet by Américo Paredes: It was tthe barrio that produced the pocho, the early version of Chicano” … (Hey! Those 3 dots mean I am tired of translating) Further more I also read that José Vasconcelos confirmed that in the California of the 30’s pocho was already in use to mean those who deny their blood, dang.

Well, that explains that, doesn’t it!