Författare: xikano_2

The sad truth is that I might be the only one advocating Aztlán in Tijuana, but like in the movie, if you call them they will come. You think there is resistance to America still in Aztlán? truth be told I haven’t the slightest idea. I suppose that with every generation of Xicanos, Chicanos, (jainas included there too ese!) there is a new rallying cry for something, mine happens to have Tijuana see itself in the mirror a little more deeper. I just come from a cultural war of sorts on the Tijuana blogsphere front and oh boy did I take a beating, on the other hand I got them to think somewhat about their role in society and the labels they attach themselves. I hate the word “fronterizo” which many had started using to call themselves in Tijuana (many Julio? They were only four!) and I inadvertadly unleashed the mother of all blogsphere posts after posts diatribe against me, but I took the volley of rethoric and insults fairly well if I might say so myself. I more or less came out unscathed and left the matter at a stalemate, or, impasse as I said, man, I tell you, it was just little ol’ me there fending off some 7 blogs all against me, snif. There is so much resistance to America that it borders on the xenophobic, specially to us who have the guts to call themselves Xicano, and in Tijuana, the frontline of cultural wars, alas! civil strife is what it is but it only because the gringo there plays no role whatsoever. I supoose that it is here where Xicanismo fed itself, you know, the resistance from our abuelos, our parents to American dominion, in my youth days (when the Bionic man was popular and Wonder Woman made me tingle all over, yeah, that old ese!) when the rallying cry was “assimilation is assasination”. So it is with my fellow citizens in Tijuana. They adamantly refuse to see that they are assimilated into the Xicano culture in more than one way. We. i.e, Xicanos, stopped long ago, I believe, denying our americanness, mostly due to the english language and because many mexican americans got fed up and stood up against these derogatory rumors about being this less or that more, lacking that or being this from those filthy tongues coming from México ideology about the Other.

So yeah, that.

Dear diary, as the clouds perform their daily trek due south, due north at the whims of the winds, I strike the metal to the logs making a damp thump noise to make ready firewood for the incoming winter. It is the season, here in Sweden, of the fattning of the spiders. I heard today, dear diary, the desperate flapping of wings, the crying buzzing of a language I didn’t speak yet I understood the fear I felt, so universal to us in this planet. I swung my eyes to the window of the cabin where my ears caught the incoming SOS. I noticed the pane was littered with insect remains of a past feast and many more layered on the wood of the window sill. The cobwebb was impecably clean and built around the corners of the frame, except for the struggle taking place it was a nice opaque white spider web. It was a fly, a black tiny fly, the same kind I too kill at will on these hot spring-to-summer days on these swedish highlands.

And I thought, isn’t it funny how no one, of the letters I scour, speak of drinking water nowadays, how no one tells of cold mountain water runnning down your ribs, and how fresh it feels to have it downed through your throat?

Meanwhile, the arachnid, oblivious to the fluttering, circles the fly about, mapping out the best way to wrap the fallen critter for a later meal.

Ok, am’onna be real frank with’ya pancho. I ain’t got balls at all. Yeap, am a dinky mouse, a chicken shit and if am telling you this now, however that might surprise you, am trembling all the way down to the bladder, which is about to explode and make me pee in my pantalones ese; let it be said, as I speak these unlikely and unwilling words that I ain’t got jack shit on you compita and no huevos at all ese, nada, zilch, to even begin to think where to start to tell you off. So yeah, that.

-Once said that, he turned around and began zipping his tecate beer again. The night kept falling, the darkened shadows becoming evermore pitch black, like a bat’s wings fluttering above the sky, radar and all, all the way to his home. His only thoughts were “if only this were Scandinavia, yeah, midnight sun and all, yeap, that be nice ese, jijole, really nice homes.” Although truth be told, he only said homes to himself once things got acomplished and done, which in his case, wasn’t that often, so tonight, as he drew the pinkish-yellow, blue indigo flowered curtains in his room, to lay his head were he wished she was awaiting him, “just like good ol’ times”, he remembered fondly those northern lights dancing above in the dark skies of his cherished Norway.

He was the kind of guy that never came up with any witty remarks, and for the most part, he thought of replies way too late. Like days or hours after the incidents that had left him thinking passed away, much as the morning dew drops he so much enjoyed watching evaporize as the sun made its morning rutine and then trying to retell how they looked. His friends hadn’t the slightest notion what he talked about. Nor could he either make people laugh, yeap, this country, this new land was at times to much to bear. He longed for Aztlan, where he could make people laugh and hear his people’s voice, but that too was far away, love pulling in different directions. She in Norway and his soul somewhere in Aztlan, He, he is here. After 20 years in exile being a globetrotter has lost much of its appeal though he wasn’t too sure about visiting places anymore since what mattered the most was the ride, he loved the motion of travelling. It had something to do with this crazy notion that his mother travelled a lot as well when she was pregnant with him, and that, he reasoned it was why he felt a sense of security from a to b.

He just couldn’t explain his lack of courage.

Yonderliesit.org received two rather interesting emails from two concerned Aztlán citizens just a little less than what it took you to read this.

On the one hand, one email writer, mind you, at yonderliesit.org we faithfully hold to the anonymous right of the writer in question to maintain his or her full anonimity. As this was requested, we at yonderliesit.org respectfully respect the right of the said writer to full anonimity. So having cleared the legal mumbo jumbo, I was saying that the one writer objected with rather strong words to the idea that Aztlán be projecting Manifest Destiny ideas all the way to Tijuana. I quote: I think that Sir Julio Sueco is nothing more than a gringo from the 19th century trying to pull off even further the ideas of Mr Polk himself, who no doubt, is delighting himself in his infernal tomb as he sees with glee, from those burning flames in hades, Sir Julio Sueco expound his silly notions of Aztlán all the way to Tijuana

In our defense, we at yonderliesit.org can faithfully attest that nothing can be further from the Quetzacoatl truth. The only Polk we cherish here at the offices of yonderliesit.org are the polkas from Flaco Jimenez and the accordion sounds of the corridos of the Cadetes de Linares. Here have we, a number of times let it be said for the record, that we are dead set against said nefarious thoughts, notions, inklings and whatever incubating thought that resists the good sound judgement of the Aztlán nation altough truth be spoken, were it not have been for those gringos we in Aztlán could not exist as we are today. Besides, there was no need to offend as the writer referred to this letter answerer, as, and I quote again a “gringo”; that’s hitting below the waist, but in the interest of the public and so as to avoid future criticism of censure, we allowed said insult to remain, but dear readers, please do remain concentrated to the issues that affect all good citizens of the Aztlán nation. Having said that allow us to proceed with the next letter.

The second reader, who wrote in fault-free spanglish, no doubt an educated and outstanding citizen of the Aztlán nation and of the high crema and neta of Aztlán, referred to me, in nicer and kinder words than the last writer, no doubt a real connosiuer and a man of full integrity and taste, that I was somehow allowing, with my thinking, to germanate notions that México was bent on getting back the territories they lost back in 1848 and that the Tratado de Guadalupe sealed forever. I quote: Ese, what’s up homes, first of all, qvo, I was leyendo tu blog homes, and sabes, the idea struck me, like they always do as soon as I read your posts, men, the New York Times has nothing compared to you ese, please forgive me if I digress pero ya sabes homes, ando medio grifo now, anyways, that perhaps, estas allowing and feeding las nociones of the ultra left in México and dándoles ideas en general about getting back the terres ese, that’s not too nice homes, sincerily, Paco el Pachuco de long ago?

Qué onda homes, allow me to reassure that México has but all forgotten our struggle and that their only fear and concern lies at the very border where Tijuana lies. That is why I argue that with them it’s nothing more than jingoism, so allow me to alloy those nasty concerns which have no place in the good hearts of the citizenry of Aztlán.

We at yonderliesit.org have one and only one idea about Aztlán: the boundaries that concern the two nations that have been mentioned before bear no bearing on Aztlán since Aztlán is beyond the USA and México. Aztlán is México and the USA. Aztlán is an independent nation in the hearts and minds of its citizens who are free to be as they choose and can be on whatever side they want to be on. Aztlán does not condone any thinking that comes out of the Chicano/Xicano mind as those very thoughts are what constitutes the very fabric of our fragile nation.

Gracias for the continued and kind readership.

General publisher and editor of Yonderliesit.org, Julio Sueco.

The Republic of East L.A. – Stories (2002) by Luis J. Rodriguez

I am invariably always surprised at the ease with which I can understand Chicano literature. I can see right throught it. I figure it must be the cultural baggage. I mean I understand every concept, image, and connotation implied in those letters. I, at times, can’t help but feel sorry for those who aren’t acquainted with the fine letters my people are churning out, much to my delight, I can sit on any given midnightsummer day and just let the evening run its course while my head roams the loving fields of Aztlán, well, in these case the streets of LA.

I, incredibly enough, along with the Cisneros Caramelo book, bought these books here in Sweden, Stockholm to be precise, yes folk, our literature is going international!

So yeah, this fine fine book maps out rather nicely some of the territories that the Xicano soul has traversed in its relatively young culture. Rodriguez stories handle despair, hope, misfortune, treks, confrontation with the now defunct migra (INS), the confrontation and disregard that gringo institutions have given us, blue collar worker lifestyle (gloomy) have given us and well, the list goes on. His characters all have this snappy survival attitude to them and one can easily relate to them.

He even touches upon the different sorts of chicano manifestations that arise from our unique culture such as chicanos who dislike mexicans and who feel cheated because according to them mexicans from proper México give a bad name to american (USA) chicanos.

There are 12 short stories in this book and I personally loved reading My Ride, My Revolution, Las Chicas Chuecas, Oiga, Miss East L.A and La Operación, this particular one touches upon the migrating patterns of some indigenous people who are forced out of their homes in the Sierra Madre mountains in Chihuahua by drug lords and then by the migra once in the US, in essence, how they live only to be repressed by their governments and discriminated by their fellow brethen both in México and the USA. Heck, there is even one story there about my hometown Tijuana, I liked that one rather much I must say.

Rodriguez is a master storyteller, no doubt, but he has some flops in there but be they flops they are ok regards the theme they present. He uses a lot of chicano language that arises particularly along the border, I can even go so far as to say that southwestern spanish is nearly absent but I won’t. I was certainly surprised to see many words in there that we appearently use all the way up to L.A. This is not just english sprinkled with spanish words, there are unique chicano/pachuco words like wino (although I dislike this spelling since I think that it does not render the full phonological essence of the word. I think it should be why-no, whine-o, or wayno, but since the book is intended for an english audience I suppose the editors thought that this was the best option), neta, qué hubo, (I didn’t like this either, it should be Qvo), cagando el palo, rifar, and the likes of zafada. It is this sprinkling of full phrases in spanish (mind you, surprise! no translation is offered except in one or two cases!) that add its pizzazz to the telling and at times a rather amusing touch to it all.

Oh, and did I forget? He wasn’t born in the USA.

I consider myself a Xicano, with an x mind you.

A Xicano from Tijuana or a Xicano mexicano as I see it in order to disntinguish myself from my brethen on the other side of the border, Californios and all. But in reality am no more than a minority. Not everyone in Tijuana has this vision that Tijuana is a part of Aztlán. It does not matter that Aztlán is only a geographical area in the imagination of Xicanos, though it be a palpable one.

That is why I am utterly surprised at this sudden surge of interest (again?) in the border. I for one haven’t the slightest idea what the border might mean because in Tijuana there are just too many interests and mexican natiolistic jingoism at play to consider the border as nothing more than a political boundary; a divisionary line which has nothing to do with Tijuana nor San Diego for that matter.

The history of Xicanismo begins when he or she reaches the border and it is the darling theme of san diegans and certain minorities from Tijuana. University posers who want a quick shot at stardom as if it were a buck away from your local quickmart. These very same souls that are neither interested nor know nothing of Xicanismo because their prejudice is the greatest divide.

It isn’t necesasary to explain that we are hated because we don’t know how to speak spanish, the proper and correct way as some are quick to remind us. More oft than not we are loathed because we are a race that has its own vocabulary and use the languages that permeate Aztlán to forge a unique identity. We are a race apart and clearly a threat to those ideologies that Washington, Madrid and México promulgate to ostent an identity which has nothing to do with Aztlán (read: Tijuana). So please, do tell, what is the Aztec Emperor doing in Tijuana’s boulevards when Baja California has its own indeginous population? And don’t even go near Jefferson nor Lincoln, what do those bastards have to do with the Californias?

Truth be told these concepts, which no one questions and which permeate the identity of Tijuanenses all over, is swallowed everyday no questions asked. So how are we to ask Tijuana citizens what is it to be a Tijuanense? What does the border mean? This is more than a slap in the face, as our good fellow Manuel says, this is a kick in the balls that runs up deep in the ass.

Am not about to entertain the idea that I might offend someone with these letters, yet these mamadas de Tijuana Tercera Nación is just one more ideology thrusted upon our throats from México City to squash the notions that Tijuanenses (at the very least those ones I know, my Tijuana that I see, saw and will keep seeing) have and who they really are but no one dares speak of, we are more mexican-american than ordinary mexicans.

It is like that directive that came straight from the centralist government more than a score ago. It demanded out of the local city government that they stop registering children with anglo names, so yeah, suddenly we were not that free to choose, or when we are encouraged to spend more pesos than dollars or when we are told that evangelists are a thing of the devil (mind you, in Tijuana when people say 3pm they mean 3pm, not 3:20pm like a good catholic might understand it) or that it be denied that there is a small but growing bilingual minority in Tijuana (even unwanted, when will they put Lalo Alcaraz or Luis Alberto Urrea in the Paseo de la Fama in Tijuana?). In other words, this is more centralism to stamp the cactus and the eagle in our foreheads and nothing more. These are ideological wars that attract people because the money is good. Just imagine, a spaniard is behind all of this! Antonio Navalón Sánchez, a representative of the Prisa group and a member of the spanish consortium Santillana, hmmm, one wonders indeed what these fellows want, conquer Aztlán?

That world renowned artists might attend this exposition and that they come to speak about their vision of the wonders that Tijuana is is another story because truth be told they have her all figured out in very romantic terms. As always the real Tijuanenses shall remain in the dark until all the reflectors, both from the US and México City, are gone. Only then can we begin our daily trek of criss crossing from one side to the other without being hailed as the 8th wonder of the world for being so tolerable to others.

I sincerily hope that this proyect becomes a resounding success, after all there are many Tijuanenses involved here, believe me I hold no deep grudge. I long ago realized that Tijuana has many realities nowadays. Here I only try to iron out that this is repression, like it always has been, and that is the repression of the bilingual Tijuanense, the catholic/protestant Tijuanense and above all, the mexican american Tijuanense. Truth hurts, I know.

*source: http://www.bitacora-tj.com/384/art11.html

The phoneme /w/ [a voiced labio-velar approximant, lip rounding] has multiple and productive sounds in the spanglish and espanglish Xicano community.

For us there are choices to be made between:

Gíüey, huey and wey
Gíüero, huero and wero
What, guat and huat
Wacatelas, guacatelas and huacatelas (seldom seen written as thus)
Wacha
Wayno (although to english this is better represented by why-no)
Wachatelas
Wuacara, guacara
Wacha (watch) (notice the eliptic u [it sounds as guacha]once it is pronunced in espanglish)

The fact is that this phoneme has various representations when it comes to the written spanglish/espanglish Xikano language.

However, there is a clear distinction once it is blurted out of ones mouth.

I particularly noticed this in my trip to Mexico City. They had a curios expression going on there. More than several times I noticed that people responded with a what? when addressed, although their what sounded more like a guat with a /g/ (clear and distinct velar stop), and were, for the most part, unable to render a clear and pure /hw/.

The curios thing about this phenomenon is that it would seem to appear that it is stricly a border phenomena.

Note: Especially in AmE and Scots, there exists two allophones of /w/ that actually become separate phonemes, /w/ and /hw/. The /hw/ is a voiceless labiovelar approximant, like a /w/ with a puff of air (an /h/) to start it off. It normally is spelled with [wh-], as in [what, where, whistle, whoop]. It is becoming increasingly rare in EngE and has no major significance in AmE, some people using it and others not.

Note: Like /j/, /w/ is a semivowel; they are proniunced like vowels, but function like consonants. (notes: David Minugh, Stockholm University)

The point here is that there is a semi-vowel shift going on just now in the border towns, which makes for a pretty interesting thang, so yeah, that.

These days I find myself deeply fond of XX century thinking.

From Volume IV Number IV
The New Criterion A Quarterly Review October 1926
New York Chronicle: Gilbert Seldes

There is an attitude of mind familiar to observers of American intellectuals which Europeans ought to understand; I find it so often undermining my own judgement that it would be unfair of me not to state it. It is the tendency to misprise the purely American thing, the provincial or the local, as a method of glorifying whatever in our arts has the pretension of being universal. For example, although I am keenly interested in the natural development of those cadences and rhythms which, much more than slang and individual words, are making the American language, I can find nothing attractive in the nasalities, the hard utterances, or the drawls which give us, in various parts of the country, the American accent. We are hardly ever pleased by the literary or social success of anyone or anything because of American ?quaintness?; to ourselves we are neither picturesque nor quaint, and except for those who are trying to isolate America artistically as well as in politics, we wish to be loved as equals. I can see no impropriety in this attitude, and am actually concerned with its results. The popular and journalistic success of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novels was remarkable; yet it remained for the English critics to hail them as exceptionally fine works of art in the satiric vein; to us they were rather pedestrain reporting only interesting for their temperamental dislike of our commercial middle class, a dislike which we had passed through perhaps ten years earlier, and had lacked the acumen or the energy to record, probably because we felt the whole thing had been done by the French Romanticists and had achieved perfection in Madame Bovary. (…)

I came to my ancestors land yet just as I saw Aztlan
you hovered over my every concious moment,
(even in my sleep at times)
making sure I knew who was it that I was,
since your job was to remind:
how much a part of that no more I was.
(Only a false memory you tried to convince me)

Though every living tissue
Of my constitution claimed its ancient stake.
You made sure I was dead scared.
Not unlike you now, ghostly reminder.

Yet I convinced myself all the time
(that’s how I battled you)
‘Tis here you belong, Aztlan is your home.

Yet you flew free in my thoughts.
(unlike me, in the land of the free)
You kept whispering your reality in my head: I am illegal.
I tried to ward you off.
By simply being who I was: a Xicano.
(I belong cried out a million times in the chambers of my noise-proof head)

I expelled you with ancient incantations,
by presenting you my roots.
Though you always found a way back into my soul.
Until I decided to be no longer with you,
I moved away, and kept you at bay.

I was saddened, exiled and far.
I know who I am, yet I never vanquished you.
I see with my tears as I contemplate now.
How hard it was to be then Xicano in Aztlan.

Yet thanks to that I am who I am now.
The ghost now gone and dead,
(vanquished at last!)
Occasionally raising to remind me,
how it took all that, to be me today.

I went to the beach in Tijuana. It was crowded on Sunday, it was sizzling hot. So yeah, there are we, strolling, me and my friend. So I tell him, let us go to the fence. It was already corroded, the sea salt did it and the stupid army surplus material which was used to build the fence up is rapidly deteriorating. There were some kids on the other side of the beach the so called, otro lado. The migra came to them because they were having conversations with Mexicans on the other side. They asked for identifications and those were provided. But suddenly one of the migras asked if we had not seen the paletero. The migra wanted a Mexican ice cream and the little crowd that formed to see the agents do their job, with jeers and boos tried to be friends. The paletero came and he bought an ice cream, I could not resist asking if he did not have pesos on him. I do not need to he said. Why not I answered back, we carry dollars with us, right?

So I was there, giving the agent a hard time, those poor souls in those green uniforms, under this heat, seeking out a threat among us, this is Aztlan I told him, as I pointed to the both sides of the land, separated by a corroded fence, he craving for an ice cream and I craving for an anger to be let loose, it was after all, safe therapy.