Brown: The Last Discovery of America (16 page)

I think Richard Nixon would not be surprised to hear that some of my Hispanic nieces and nephews have Scottish or German surnames. Nixon intended his Spanish’d noun to fold Hispanics into America. By the time the Sunday supplements would begin writing about the political ascendancy of a Hispanic generation, the American children of that generation would be disappearing into America. But Nixon might be surprised to hear that my oldest nephew, German-surnamed, has a restaurant in Oakland dedicated to classic Mexican cooking; the majority of his customers are not Hispanic.

In generations past, Americans regarded Latin America as an “experiment in democracy,” meaning the brutish innocence of them, the negligent benevolence of us, as defined by the Monroe Doctrine. We installed men with dark glasses to overthrow men with dark glasses.

As a result of Nixon’s noun, our relationship to Latin America became less remote. Within our own sovereign borders, crested with eagles, twenty-five million became twenty-seven million Hispanics; became thirty-five million. The Census Bureau began making national predictions: By the year 2040 one in three Americans will declare herself Hispanic. Leaving aside the carbonated empiricism of such predictions, they nevertheless did convince many Americans that Latin America is no longer something “down there,” like an adolescent sexual abstraction. By the reckoning of the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States has become one of the largest Latin American nations in the world.

And every day and every night poor people trample the legal fiction that America controls its own destiny. There is something of inevitability, too, in what I begin hearing in America from businessmen—a hint of Latin American fatalism, a recognition of tragedy that is simply the verso of optimism, but descriptive of the same event:
You can’t stop them coming
becomes
the necessity to develop a Spanish-language ad strategy.

The mayor of San Diego, speaking to me one morning several years ago about her city’s relationship to Tijuana, about the proximity of Tijuana to San Diego, used no future tense—
Here we are,
she said. She used no hand gesture to indicate “they” or “there” or “here.” The mayor’s omission of a demonstrative gesture in that instance reminded me of my father’s nonchalance. My father never expected to escape tragedy by escaping Mexico, by escaping poverty, by coming to the United States. Nor did he. Such sentiments—the mayor’s, my father’s—are not, I remind you, the traditional sentiments of an “I” culture, which would formulate the same proximity as
“right up to here.”
For my father, as for the mayor, the border was missing.

In old cowboy movies, the sheriff rode hell-for-leather to capture the desperados before they crossed the Rio Grande. It is an old idea, more Protestant than Anglo-Saxon: that Latin America harbors outlaws.

Some Americans prefer to blame the white-powder trail leading from here to there on the drug lords of Latin America. More Americans are beginning to attribute the rise of drug traffic to American addiction. Tentative proposals to legalize drugs, like tentative proposals to open the border, bow to the inevitable, which is, in either case, the knowledge that there is no border.

The other day I read a survey that reported a majority of Americans believe most Hispanics are in the United States illegally. Maybe. Maybe there is something inherently illegal about all of us who are Hispanics in the United States, gathered under an assumed name, posing as one family. Nixon’s categorical confusion brings confusion to all categories.

Once the United States related millions of its citizens into the family Hispanic—which as a legality exists only within U.S. borders—then that relation extends back to our several origins and links them. At which juncture the U.S.A. becomes the place of origin for all Hispanics. The illegal idea now disseminated southward by the U.S. is the idea that all Latin Americans are Hispanic.

The United States has illegally crossed its own border.

THE THIRD MAN

A CHINESE OR AN ESKIMO OR A COUNTERTENOR COULD PLAY this role as well. Anyone in America who does not describe himself as black or white can take the role. But the reason I am here, on this dais, in a hotel ballroom, is numerical.

Our subject today is the perennial American subject: Race Relations. You understand, by this time, I am not a race. I do not have a race. To my left, standing at the microphone, is an African-American academic who refers to himself as “black.” To my right sits a journalist who calls himself “white.” My role is the man in the middle, the third man; neither.

Situated thus, between black and white—occupying the passing lane in American demographics—the Hispanic should logically be gray or at least a blur.

Americans dislike gray. Gray areas, gray skies, gray flannel suits, mice, hair, cities, seas. Moscow. Hera’s eyes.

But I am not gray, I am brown as you can see, or rather you can’t see, but my name on this book is brown. Rodriguez is a brown name—or gray—halfway between Greenwich and Timbuktu. I am brown all right—darkish reddish, terra-cotta-ish, dirt-like, burnt Sienna in the manner of the middle Bellini.

At the microphone, the African-American professor refers (in one breath) to “blacks-and-Latinos,” his synonym for the disadvantaged in America—the dropout, the lost, the under-arrest. The professor’s rhetorical generosity leaves me abashed.

In truth, African Americans are in fierce competition with Hispanics in this country. We compete for the meanest jobs or for the security of civil service positions or for political office or for white noise. If I were an African American I would not be so generous toward Hispanics, especially if I had to read every morning of their ascending totals. The
Wall Street Journal
, March 8, 2001: NUMBER OF HISPANICS BALLOONED IN 1990S; GROUP IS ABOUT TO BECOME BIGGEST MINORITY. I would resent the incurious gabble of Spanish invading African-American neighborhoods; Hispanics demanding from the federal government the largest slice of black metaphor; and this—my brown intrusion into the tragic dialectic of America, the black and white conversation.

Not so long ago, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans and Cubans, resisted the label of “minority.” In a black-and-white America, Hispanics tended toward white, or at least tended to keep their distance from black. I remember my young Mexican mother saying to her children, in Spanish, “We are not minorities,” in the same voice she would use decades later to refuse the term “senior citizen.” One day in the 1980s, my mother became a senior citizen because it got her on the bus for a nickel. One day, in the 1960s, the success of the Negro Civil Rights movement encouraged Hispanics (along with other groups of Americans) to insist on the coveted black analogy, and thus claim the spoils of affirmative action.

Today you will see us listed on surveys and charts, between Black and White, as though Hispanics are necessarily distinct from either Black or White; as though Hispanics are comparable to either Black or White.

Out of mischief or stupidity, federal demographers have taken to predicting that Hispanics are destined to replace African Americans as “America’s largest minority.” The Census Bureau manages both to trivialize the significance of Hispanics to our national life, and to insult African Americans by describing Hispanics as supplanters. To date, the nation’s Hispanic political leadership has remained silent about the Census Bureau’s grammar.

The notion of African Americans as a minority is one born of a distinct and terrible history of exclusion—the sin of slavery, later decades of segregation, and every conceivable humiliation visited upon a people, lasting through generations. To say, today, that Hispanics are becoming America’s largest minority is to mock history, to pervert language, to dilute the noun “minority” until it means little more than a population segment.

This is exactly what Hispanics have become—a population segment, an ad-agency target audience, a market share. Not coincidentally, it was an advertising agency that got the point of Hispanic totals as early as the 1980s. It was then that Coors Beer erected billboards throughout the Southwest that flattered “The Decade of the Hispanic.”

By telling you these things, I do not betray “my people.” I think of the nation entire—all Americans—as my people. Though I call myself Hispanic, I see myself within the history of African Americans and Irish Catholics and American Jews and the Chinese of California.

When citizens feel themselves excluded, it is appropriate that they lobby, petition, attract the interest of government and employers. But when Americans organize into subgroups, it should be with an eye to merging with the whole, not remaining separate. What was the point of the Negro Civil Rights movement of the early twentieth century, if not integration?

The trouble with today’s ethnic and racial and sexual identifications is that they become evasions of citizenship. Groups beget subgroups: Last week in Atlanta there was a meeting of Colombian Americans, their first convention. In parody of Hispanics nationally, Colombian Americans declared themselves to be “America’s fastest-growing minority.”

At Yale University, I was recently trailed by a white graduate student—truly Hispanic—who kept boasting that she was the “first Latina to win” and the “first Latina named.” The moment we sat down to talk, this white Hispanic referred to herself as “a person of color” and I realized she had no idea.

Alone among the five (White, Black, Asian, et cetera) options placed at one’s disposal on affirmative action applications, Hispanic is the only category that has no reference to blood. One can be an Asian Hispanic or an Indian Hispanic, et cetera. Indeed, I know Hispanics who are of a complexion most Americans would call black but who elect to name themselves Hispanic. I know Hispanics who are blithe as daffodils.

Here is what I will say when it is my turn to get up and speak:
Hispanicity is culture. Not blood. Not race. Culture, or the illusion of culture—ghost-ridden. A belief that the dead have a hold on the living.

What I will not say, when I get up to speak, is that from childhood I have resisted the notion of culture in Spanish. There was not another noun in my childish Spanish vocabulary that made me more uneasy than the word
“cultura”
(which was always used against me, but as indistinguishable from me—something I had betrayed). I did not shrink from culture’s cousin-noun,
“costumbre”
—custom, habit—which was visible, tangible, comestible, conditional.

In Spanish, culture is indissoluble; culture is everything that connects me to the past and with a sense of myself as beyond myself. When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said. (So it was possible to lose, after all? If culture is so fated, how could I have lost it?) Many years later, complete strangers—Hispanic readers and academics, even non-Hispanic readers and academics—picked up the taunting refrain. As if culture were a suitcase left too long unclaimed. I had lost my culture. The penalty for my sin was a life of inauthenticity. Then they commenced hurling coconuts—all those unchivalric taunts that are the stock of racial and sexual and patriotic bullies.

The audience is bound to misunderstand what I will tell them. There is nothing fateful about the notion of culture in American English. (The English word means exactly the opposite of the Spanish word.) The word “culture” in America comes equipped with add-on component jacks. The word “culture” in America pivots on a belief in the individual’s freedom to choose, to become a person different from her past. Culture in American English separates children from grandparents, the living from the dead, this moment from what I believed only yesterday. “Culture gaps” and “culture shocks,” “cultural pride” and “counterculture” are American specialties, presupposing obsolescence.

Insofar as I remain culturally influenced by Latin America, I must notice the fallacy that supports the American “I”: American individualism is a communally derived value, not truly an expression of individuality. The teenager persists in rebelling against her parents, against tradition or custom, because she is shielded (blindfolded, entranced, drugged) by American culture from the knowledge that she inherited her rebellion from dead ancestors and living parents.

But insofar as I am culturally American, my gringo eye sees only diversity among the millions of people who call themselves Hispanic. The songwriter from Buenos Aires, the Bolivian from a high mountain village, the Mayan Indian who refuses Spanish, the Mayan Indian who exaggerates Spanish, the Salvadoran evangelical Protestant, the Cuban anticommunist, the Cuban communist, the green criminal, the Catholic nun, the red poet, the city dweller, the inhabitant of the desert, the swimmer from the tropics, the agnostic scientist with a German surname—Hispanics all! In no sense can so many different lives be said to inhabit a singular culture. Save one sense: Hispanics in the United States are united in the belief (a Latin American belief) that culture is a more uniform source of identity than blood.

The African-American professor has concluded his speech. He catches my eye as he sits. We smile conspiratorially. He assumes we plot the same course. Then the white journalist rises to speak. The journalist says, “Racism has not gone away, it haunts our streets, it haunts our courtrooms, it haunts our boardrooms, it haunts our classrooms . . .”

When Americans speak about “race” they remind me of Latin Americans speaking of “culture.”

 

Culture in Latin American Spanish is fated.

Culture in American English yields to idiosyncracy.

Race in American English is fated.

Race in Latin American Spanish yields to idiosyncracy.

 

I hardly mean to imply racism does not exist in Latin America. Latin America predictably favors light over dark. Certainly in Mexico, the Latin American country I know best, white ascends. Certainly, the whitest dinner party I ever attended was a Mexico City dinner party where a Mexican squire of exquisite manner, mustache, and flán-like jowl, expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. One thought he would never get over it.
Un escritor . . . ¿Un escritor . . . ?
Turning the word on a lathe of tooth and tongue, until: “You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,” he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose, bugger your mother.