Article: Appreciate El Grito as a Celebration of Freedom
Questions on Mexican Independence Day
by Rodolpho Carrasco
in PRISM magazine, Summer 1998
(Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. and a columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.URBAN ONRAMPS --- HARAMBEE CENTER
EDITOR'S NOTE: Around the United States this May, American will gather in Mexi-Cali restaurants, raise their margaritas, and celebrate Cinco de Mayo. But, as regular PRISM contributor Rudy Carrasco noted to me in our correspondence regarding the following article, "Cinco de Mayo does not carry the emotional charge/threat that September's Mexican Independence Day does." Indeed, Cinco de Mayo is beloved more by non-Mexicans than Mexicans. They are, says Carrasco, "frankly intrigued as to why we celebrate it in this country." But Independence Day, is altogether different. Carrasco wondered aloud to me: "Why celebrate the independence of one nation when you live and draw sustenance from another?"
It's a good question. Mexican and other Latinos are now migrating into the U.S. at the highest rates of any one ethnic/national group in the history of this country. Mexican/Latino migration is no longer just across the border, but northward into Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, South Dakota-anywhere there are jobs. For those Latino workers and their families, entry into the "land of the free" is rife with potential conflict. Said Carrasco: "Living in a city with 4 million Latinos, I don't fear for myself the way previous generations of Latinos did. But this is not the case outside of our large cities. The Latinos in Nebraska are experiencing misunderstanding and discrimination at the hands of people who, more than not, just don't know what to think about them. I think this article will help those non-Latinos in Nebraska, and elsewhere, to understand us a little bit."
It is our prayer as well.
-- Dwight Ozard, Editor
Is it good or bad to celebrate Mexican Independence Day?
September 16 is the day Mexicans celebrate independence from the 300-year, colonial rule of Spain. Much like our Fourth of July, this day is the greatest day of the year for Mexicans and Mexico.
But in a non-Mexican nation, what does this day mean for people who are not of Mexican descent? If you are white, what does it mean to you? What if you are African American or Asian American?
Is it a benign event, a state-sanctioned excuse to tap the Rockies, much as the Fourth of July is for Americans? Or do you remember the day, a week before the vote on Proposition 187, when 70,000 people marched in Los Angeles waving every kind of flag- Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, et al-in defense of the imminent statewide majority?
To which belongs the waving of a Mexican flag on Mexican Independence Day-tapping the Rockies or tapping the defiance?
To answer that question, you have to decide whether or not you believe Latinos represent a threat to California.
Many Latinos are convinced that non-Latinos do indeed see them as a threat. They see the initiative to end bilingual education as we know it-currently gathering petitions in order to appear on the 1998 state ballot-as the latest in a siege of efforts to dilute Latino influence in the state.
Charlie Erikson of Hispanic Link News Service expresses the thoughts of many Latinos when he writes that the initiative's author, Ron Unz, "plans to rid his state of bilingual education, just as others before him created Propositions 209 and 187 to purge California of affirmative action and to lock the children of undocumented immigrants our of its schools."
Are things that bad? Is Unz this years' bogeyman, and English for Our Children this year's anti-Latino proposition? It's not definite, especially given Unz's outspoken opposition to Proposition 187 and the broad and diverse coalition-including immigrant Latino parents-forming behind his effort. But tell that to countless Latinos who are convinced that they are being targeted.
Let's say, for argument's sake, that someone sees Latinos as a threat. Let's say you fear that California may become Mexican, losing its American West settler heritage.
Have you ever heard of assimilation?
The Latinos are fighting that, you say?
As I muse on this I listen to as Mexican-American teens, hyphenated American, born at Huntington Hospital, speak their bilingual lingo. One of the languages they mix is Spanish. The other is not Standard American English, however. It is closer to Ebonics. "Where you fittin' ta go? Te llamo Rudy." These young people are bilingual, but neither one of their languages will fly in the business world.
Assimilation. Americans of all generations are today concerned that immigrations to the U.S. are creating separatist ethnic enclaves, refusing the American spirit along with the language. But do these Americans ever imagine the problems immigrant parents are having with their children? Mexican immigrant families are not shy to use the tactic of sending their U.S. raised children back to Mexico for a year to reinforce a Mexican cultural core. The effectiveness of this tactic is questionable. on the one hand, it seems to work. One the other hand, one girl listens to KROQ at top-volume, while the other continues to wander the neighborhood, going from friend's house to friend's house, at all hours of the night.
It's one thing to struggle against the culture of the gavacho, the gringo, the white American. It's another when the assimilation is towards rap music and the African American community.
It's not just Mexicans or Latinos who struggle. The Korean community has these problems. A Korean-American friend of the 1.5 generation (born in Korea, raised in the U.S.) got caught in the crossfire when he announced to his parents his desire to marry his Chinese-American girlfriend. Why would he marry outside the Korean community, they wondered? Why a Chinese girl? Doesn't he know the difficult history of Korea and China?
If the nation at large is struggling with mulit-ethnicity, why is it a stretch to believe that immigrants have the same struggles?
Soon we must deal with the necessary fictions of "Latino" and "Hispanic" and "Asian American."
Latinos are slow to warm to the idea of a "Latino community." Better to speak of Latino communities, plural. Ask any Mexican or Salvadoran how strongly they identify with a pan-ethnic term. Studies show it is the second and third generation of Latinos-raised in the U.S., and possibly of a Latino plus-other-race union-who are more likely to identify with a pan-ethnic label than a nation of origin.
And what about the Asian American fiction? Not only do immigrant Koreans and Chinese and Filipinos not identify with a pan-ethnic label, there isn't even a unifying language like Spanish to lean on. Koreans speak Korean; Chinese speak Mandarin and Cantonese; Filipinos, Tagalong; Vietnamese, Vietnamese. And don't you forget it.
Then again, who says assimilation doesn't go both ways? Is it fair for Americans to comprehend the incredible forces assimilation immigrants into the fabric of this nation and yet insist on standing apart? There is such a thing as a reverse assimilation, where whites and blacks come to grips with Latino realities. It comes slowly, in a little bit of language and a lot of food, a taco truck stop and a friendly kid down the block. And who wouldn't want some cohesive Latino family values to infect their own?
Is there a threat in acknowledging another's heritage, in waving the flag of another nation than the one you are in?
What was it like to be an American attending the July 1996 soccer match between the US and Mexico at the Rose Bowl? Of the 97,000 in attendance, perhaps 10 or 15 thousand cheered the U.S. team on U.S. turf. More than 80,000 fans shook the Arroyo for the Tri-Color. Though flags were not permitted, more than a few hearty fans smuggled theirs in and waved them with abandon. Surely here, at a soccer game in a crowd filled with Mexicans and flooded with the Spanish language, the Mexican threat is in display.
My brother and I sat in a section where we the only two cheering for the U.S. team, in English. Nobody bothered us. No one glowered or threatened. A man wearing Mexico's green jersey cleared the path to my seat.
For all the talk by a smattering of Latinos on the Latino takeover of California, the Latino migration to California has turned out as much less than an invading army digging trenched along Highways 5 and 101 and 395. If you don't believe that, visit some of these so-called trenches.
Come to my neighborhood and see families smiling in their poverty, fixing me a plate when they are not sure their children will get one. Come visit the house there the father and his five sons slept in shifts in the two-bedroom home until they had saved enough to purchase the home (and two others, at last count). Witness the celebration when a child graduated from high school, the first in his family to do so in either Mexico or the U.S. (For this reason my introduction as a graduate of Stanford will bring a Mexican family to tears and long, pride-filled speeches.)
I represent the second generation in my Mexican family to attend college.
My half sister, Yolanda, was the first and paved the way fro me and my two siblings.
Accepted into Yale University when that Ivy League school went co-ed in the early 1970's, Yolanda chose to stay in Los Angeles and attend Occidental College because our mother was very sick. Two years later, as a sophomore in college, Yolanda would preside over my mother's death and burial, arrange for relatives to care for her three siblings, and still find time to excel in the classroom. She labored for two years to finish school under budget and on time. On graduation she had it all: a job in downtown Los Angeles, a diploma, a home purchased using the sale of my mother's home as a down payment, and a sister and two brothers (I'm the youngest) to raise.
The situation was too much for her. She called the suicide hotline. They talked to her about Jesus. The next Sunday she joined a Baptist church. I was raised by Baptists in Burbank-me, a child of East Los Angeles. She raised us to survive in the U.S. She warmed to every probe into out ethnic heritage, but she made sure we knew English well, did our homework, and went to college. All four of us today hold college degrees.
Am I a threat? Am I the Latino menace? If not, who is?
Is it the mamasita shopping for groceries at the corner store, a legal immigrant with food stamps now disappeared at the stroke of the governor's pen?
Perhaps we fear the scores of tattooed, skin-headed Mexican men and youths. But have you talked with them? How do you know that they prefer a riotous revolution over an anonymous, middle-class, suburban existence? What if you uncovered a kernel of commonality, the desire for a son or daughter to attend a safe school with good teachers?
Whom do you fear?
On September 16, Mexican Independence Day, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans celebrate the same spirit of freedom and revolution that propelled American insurgents to a tax revolt, to defy freezing winters, and to war against the Crown. At the close of the millennium, Mexicans in Los Angeles celebrate a land they remember through mental gymnastics and photos. They miss their hometowns, the old friends. They resolve anew to hope and struggle for a better future.
