IV.1.1 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061252
In this key essay, Luis Valdez (born 1940)—the Chicano playwright, writer, and film director—questions the validity of differentiating appellations such as “Spanish American,” “Mexican American,” or “Latin American.” He argues, instead, for the appropriateness of the politically-loaded “Chicano” and locates the concepts of “La Plebe” (the riffraff) or “La Raza” (the race) as part of a continuum of bronzed people at the core of the mestizo nations in the Americas. Although Valdez wrote the essay in English, he intersperses key Spanish words and phrases, employing the same sort of discretionary bilingualism that is ubiquitous in the work of many Latino writers in the United States. The text first appeared in 1972 [Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, eds., Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House of Canada), xiii–xxxiv]—a few years after the playwright established El Teatro Campesino, located in the historic Mission San Juan Bautista in California. A strong supporter of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, his troupe and cultural arm of the United Farm Workers paved the way for an explosion of a national Chicano theater movement in the 1970s.
IT IS THE TASK OF ALL LITERATURE to present illuminating images of mankind. This, as most writers are surely aware, is not easy to do. It takes the clearest, most unassuming effort on the part of the poet to speak for Man. This effort is very often confused and frustrated when the writer is a victim of racism and colonization. His birthright to speak as Man has been forcibly taken from him. To his conqueror he is patently subhuman, uncivilized, backward, or culturally deprived. The poet in him flounders in a morass of lies and distortions about his conquered people. He loses his identity with mankind, and self-consciously struggles to regain his one-to-one relationship with human existence. It is a long way back. Such is the condition of the Chicano. Our people are a colonized race, and the root of their uniqueness as Man lies buried in the dust of conquest. In order to regain corazón [our soul], we must reach deep into our people, into the tenderest memory of their beginning. . . .
Man has been in the Americas for more than 38,000 years. White men have been around for less than five hundred. It is presumptuous, even dangerous, for anyone to pretend that the Chicano, the “Mexican-American,” is only one more in the long line of hyphenated-immigrants to the New World. We are the New World.
Our insistence on calling ourselves Chicanos stems from a realization that we are not just one more minority group in the United States. We reject the semantic games of sociologists and whitewashed Mexicans who frantically identify us as Mexican-Americans, Spanish-Americans, Latin-Americans, Spanish-speaking, Spanish-surname, Americans of Mexican descent, etc. We further reject efforts to make us disappear into the white melting pot, only to be hauled out again when it is convenient or profitable for gabacho [gringo] politicians. Some of us are as dark as zapote, but we are casually labeled Caucasian.
We are, to begin with, Mestizos—a powerful blend of Indigenous America with European-Arabian Spain, usually recognizable for the natural bronze tone it lends to human skin. Having no specific race of our own, we used poetry and labeled ourselves centuries ago as La Raza [the Race], albeit a race of half-breeds, misfits, and mongrels. Centuries of interbreeding further obfuscated our lineage, and La Raza gave itself other labels—la plebe, el vulgo, la palomía.1 Such is the natural poetry of our people. One thing, however, was never obscured: that the Raza was basically Indio, for that was borne out by our acts rather than mere words, beginning with the act of birth. During the three hundred years of [the Vice-Royalty of] Nueva España, only 300,000 gachupines2 settled in the New World. And most of these were men. There were so few white people at first, that ten years after the Conquest in 1531, there were more black men in Mexico than white. Negroes were brought in as slaves, but they soon intermarried and “disappeared.” Intermarriage resulted in an incredible mestizaje, a true melting pot. Whites with Indios produced Mestizos. Indios with blacks produced zambos. Blacks with whites produced mulattoes. Pardos, Cambujos, Tercernones, Salta atrases, and other types were born out of Mestizos with zambos and mulattoes with Indios, and vice versa. Miscegenation went joyously wild, creating the many shapes, sizes, and hues of La Raza. But the predominant strain of the mestizaje remained Indio. By the turn of the nineteenth century, most of the people in Mexico were Mestizos with a great deal of Indian blood.
The presence of the Indio in La Raza is as real as the barrio. Tortillas, tamales, chile, marijuana, la curandera [witch doctor], el empacho [indigestion], el molcajete [mortar], atole [corn hot drink], La Virgen de Guadalupe—these are hardcore realities for our people. These and thousands of other little human customs and traditions are interwoven into the fiber of our daily life. America Indígena is not ancient history. It exists today in the barrio, having survived even the subversive onslaught of the twentieth-century neon gabacho commercialism that passes for American culture.
Yet the barrio is a colony of the white man’s world. Our life there is second hand, full of chingaderas [garbage] imitating the way of the patrón. The used cars, rented houses, old radio and TV sets, stale grocery stores, plastic flowers—all the trash of the white man’s world mixes with the bits and pieces of that other life, the Indio life, to create the barrio. Frijoles [beans] and tortillas remain, but the totality of the Indio’s vision is gone. Curanderas make use of plants and herbs as popular cures, without knowing that their knowledge is what remains of a great medical science. Devout Catholics pray to the Virgen de Guadalupe, without realizing that they are worshipping an Aztec goddess, Tonatzin.
The barrio came into being with the birth of the first Mestizo. Before we imitated the gringo, we imitated the hacendado [land owner]; before the hacendado, the gachupín. Before we lived in the Westside, Chinatown, the Flats, Dogtown, Sal Si Puedes, and El Hoyo, we lived in Camargo, Reynosa, Guamúchil, Cuautla, Tepoztlán. Before the Southwest, there was Mexico; before Mexico, Nueva España. The barrio goes all the way back to 1521, and the Conquest. . . .
Imagine the Conquistadores looking upon this continent for the first time. Imagine Pedro de Alvarado, Hernando Cortés! Fifty-foot caballeros with golden huevos, bringing the greed of little Europe to our jungle-ridden, god-haunted world. They saw the land and with a sweep of an arm and a solemn prayer claimed this earth for the Spanish crown, pronouncing it with Catholic inflection and Siglo de Oro majesty: Nueva España, New Spain. Imagine now a fine white Spanish veil falling over the cactuses, mountains, volcanoes, valleys, deserts, and jungles; over the chirimoya [custard apple], quetzal [bird], ocelotl, nopal [prickly pear]. Imagine, finally, white men marching into the light and darkness of a very old world and calling it new.
This was not a new world at all. It was an ancient world civilization based on a distinct concept of the universe. Tula, Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Uxmal, Chichen Itzá, México-Tenochtitlán were all great centers of learning, having shared the wisdom of thousands of generations of pre-Columbian man. The Mayans had discovered the concept of zero a thousand years before the Hebrews, and so could calculate to infinity, a profound basis of their religious concepts. They had operated on the human brain, and had evolved a mathematical system which allowed them to chart the stars. That system was vigesimal, meaning it was based on a root of twenty rather than ten, because they had started by counting on their fingers and toes instead of just their fingers as in the decimal system.
It was the Mayans who created the countless stone stellæ, studded with numerical symbols utilizing the human skull as number ten. Did this imply a link between mathematics and the cycle of life and death? There is no telling. Much about the Mayans is mysterious, but it is clear they had more going for them than frijoles and tortillas. Then there were the Toltecs, Mixtecs, Totonacs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, and hundreds of other tribes. They too were creators of this very old new world. The Aztecs practiced a form of “plastic surgery,” among other great achievements in medicine. If a warrior, an Eagle or Ocelot Knight, had his nose destroyed in battle, Aztec surgeons could replace it with an artificial one. They also operated on other parts of the body and stitched up the cut with human hair. All cures, of course, were not surgical, for the Aztec had a profound knowledge of botany, not to speak of zoology, astronomy, hieroglyphics, architecture, irrigation, mining, and city planning. The design of entire cities was an ancient art in the Americas when Madrid, London, and Paris were suffocating in their own crowded stench. . . .
América Indígena was obsessed with death. Or was it life? Man was a flower, a mortal subject to the fugacity of all natural things. Nezahualcóyotl, Chief of Texcoco (1402–72), was a philosopher king and one of the greatest poets America has ever produced. His poem “Fugacidad Universal” [Worldly Fleeting Nature] pondered the philosophical question of temporal existence. An nochipa tialtipac: zan achica ye nican. His words lose much in a double translation from the Náhuatl to Spanish, then English: It is true we exist on this earth? Not forever on this earth: only a brief moment here, even jade shatters…
Man was born, blossomed, and then deteriorated unto death. He was an intrinsic part of the cosmic cycle of life and death, of being becoming non-being, then back again. Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of fertility, was sculpted as a poet’s vision in stone: with a death’s head, scales like a serpent, and a belt of human hands and hearts. She was the embodiment of the nature of existence: death becoming life, life becoming death. Fertility. Life on earth was ephemeral, but impossible without the sacrifice of other living things. Did man not survive by devouring death, the dead bodies of animals and plants? Was he not in turn devoured and disintegrated by the earth? Even Tonatiuh, the Sun God, must eat, so man offered Him human hearts as sustenance, and thus became deified. . . .
The Popol Vuh—sacred book of the Ancient Quiché Maya—describes Creation as American man saw it thousands of generations ago: “There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Cucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and were therefore called Cucumatz.” How natural, how fitting, how deep is this Indio vision of genesis! Where else could life have begun but in the water? And with the Creator hidden under blue and green feathers! The sophisticated use of natural life symbols is so profound that the Catholic Conquistador, confident in his ignorance, must have thought it naïve. None of the achievements of Indigenous America meant very much to the Conquistador. Nor was he content to merely exploit its physical strength. He sought to possess its mind, heart, and soul. He stuck his bloody fingers into the Indian brain, and at the point of the sword, gun, and cross ripped away a vision of human existence. He forced the Indio to accept his world, his reality, his scheme of things, in which the Indio and his descendants would forever be something less than men in Nueva España’s hierarchy of living things. Murder and Christianity worked hand in hand to destroy the ancient cities, temples, clothes, music, language, poetry. The women were raped, and the universe (el Quinto Sol, the world of the Earthquake Sun) was shattered.
. . .
In the twilight of the Conquest, the Mestizo was born into colonization. Rejected as a bastard by his Spanish father, he clung to his Indian mother and shared the misery of her people, the overwhelming sense of loss: “Nothing but flowers and songs of sorrow are left in Mexico and Tlaltelolco, where once we saw warriors and wise men.” Soon there was not even that. Death overtook all who remembered what it had been like, and colonization set in for three hundred years.
Our dark people looked into one another’s eyes. The image reflected there was one the white man had given us. We were savage, Indio, Mestizo, half-breed: always something less than simple men. Men, after all, have a tendency to create God in their own image. No, men we could never be, because only the patrón could be a god. We were born to be his instrument, his peon, his child, his whore—this he told us again and again through his religion, literature, science, politics, economics. He taught us that his approach to the world, his logical disciplines of human knowledge, was truth itself. That everything else was barbaric superstition, even our belief in God. In time there was nothing left in our hearts but an empty desire, a longing for something we could no longer define.
Still, for all the ferocity of the Conquest, the Mestizo cannot totally condemn the Spaniard. He might as well condemn his own blood. Anglos particularly are very fond of alluding to the black legend of the Conquistador in Mexico, perhaps to mask the even more inhuman treatment of the Indian in the United States. The gachupín offered the Indio colonization; the Anglo, annihilation. There is no question that Nueva España was more human to América Indígena than New England. Some white men, such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, saw the evils of New Spain and denounced them: “All the wars called conquests were and are most unjust and truly tyrannical. We have usurped all the kingdoms and lordships of the Indies.” Others, like [Fray Bernardino de] Sahagún and [Fray Toribio de] Motolinía, saved what they could of ancient chronicles, Los códices de la tinta negra y roja [The Red and Black Codices], the life thought of a dispossessed world civilization.
It is doubtful, however, that any white man in colonial Mexico or New England was aware of the ultimate importance of the Mestizo. As the real new man of the Americas, he was the least likely candidate to be called an American. The reason may be that the name America was an imported European title, and reserved therefore only for European types. By right of discovery, the honor afforded to Amerigo Vespucci should have gone to Christopher Columbus. Yet Columbia would have been just as alien to the native people of this land as America. The naming of the continent had nothing to do with the Indios or their Mestizo children. It was strictly an amusement of white, western European man. Once America was named, Europe yawned and went on with the dull but profitable business of exploitation and colonization. Wherever possible, North and South America were built or rebuilt in the image of Europe. Spain gorged itself on the gold of New Spain; and England did a brisk trade on the tobacco of New England. Aside from mercantile ventures, the Old World was so uninterested in the New that even white colonists felt neglected.
It took a revolution in the thirteen colonies of New England to again raise the issue of America. Once again the Indios and Mestizos were forgotten. In 1776 the United States of America usurped the name of a continental people for a basically white, English-speaking, middle-class minority. It revealed, perhaps, the continental ambitions of that minority. But an American was henceforth defined as a white citizen of the U.S.A. The numerous brown Quiché, Náhuatl, and Spanish-speaking peoples to the south were given secondary status as Latin Americans, Spanish Americans, and South Americans. It was a historical snow job. The descendants of América Indígena were now foreigners in the continent of their birth.
Gabacho America,3 however, was not to touch the Mestizo for at least another half century. While the Monroe Doctrine [SEE DOCUMENT III.1.1] and Manifest Destiny were being hatched in Washington, D.C., the Mestizo was still living in Nueva España. During the colonial period, he easily achieved numerical superiority over the white man. But the dominant culture remained Spanish. So the Mestizo stood at a cultural crossroads, not unlike the one he later encountered in the United States: choose the way of Mexico Indio and share degradation; or go the way of the white man and become Hispanicized. The choice was given as early as 1598, when Don Juan de Oñate arrived in the Southwest to settle and claim New Mexico, “from the edge of the mountains to the stones and sand in the rivers, and the leaves of trees.” With him came four hundred Mestizos and Indios as soldiers. Many of the Hispanos, or Spanish Americans living in New Mexico today, are descended directly from those first settlers. Their regional name reveals the cultural choice their ancestors made; but it also reveals a reluctance to choose, for Hispano to some New Mexicans also means Indio-hispano. In 1598 there was not, of course, national status for Mestizos as Mexicanos. Even so, after Independence, Hispanos refused to identify with the racial, cultural, and political confusions of Mexico.
The internal conflicts of nineteenth-century Mexico re-stilted from a clash of races as well as classes. Conservative Criollos and the clergy usurped the War of Independence against Spain; after 1810, the bronze mass of Indios and Mestizos continued to be exploited by a white minority. Avarice and individual ambition superseded the importance of national unity. Coups and pronunciamentos [military rebellions] became commonplace, and further weakened the new nation. Mexico did not belong to her people.
Watching the internal struggles south of the border, the United States circled around Texas and hovered above California like a buzzard. Mexico was ill-equipped to defend either state. When rebels struck at the Alamo, President Antonio López de Santa Ana unfortunately decided to rout them out personally. Leaving General don José María Tornel in charge of the government, he drafted an army of six thousand. Through forced loans from businessmen, he equipped them poorly, and with promises of land in Texas won their allegiance. The long march to Texas was painful and costly. Supplies, animals, ammunition, and hundreds of soldiers were lost due to the rigors of winter. Inept as a general, Santa Ana despotically ordered the worst routes for his convoys. He almost accomplished the failure of the expedition before even reaching Texas. The rest is “American” history. The rebels lost the Alamo, but regrouped under Samuel Houston to finally defeat Santa Ana at San Jacinto. Some important historical facts, however, are never mentioned in U.S. classrooms. After the fall of the Alamo and San Antonio Bejar, the rebels resorted to guerrilla warfare. They destroyed crops and burned towns, so that the Mexican troops would have no place to get supplies. They in turn received weapons, food, and men from the United States. The South particularly was interested in Texas as a future slave state. Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1824, but some of the defenders of freedom at the Alamo died for the freedom of holding black slaves.
Slavery was foremost in the minds of the Mexican signers of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. Ceding fully half of the national territory of Mexico to the United States, they were concerned about the 75,000 Mexican citizens about to be absorbed into an alien country. They feared that the dark Mexican Mestizo would share the fate of the black man in America. They asked for guarantees that Mexican families would not lose their ancestral lands, that civil and cultural rights would be respected. But the United States, still hot from its first major imperialistic venture, was not ready to guarantee anything.
Witness the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, who was with General Zachary Taylor at the Rio Grande, which admit that the United States had goaded Mexico into “attacking first.” No stretch of the imagination can explain why Mexico—bleeding from internal conflict—would want to provoke war with the U.S. Known as la invasión norte-americana in Mexico, the Mexican War polluted the moral climate of America. Abraham Lincoln debated with Stephen Douglas over the ultimate wisdom and morality of the war. It was an early-day version of Vietnam. Manifest Destiny won the day, however, and the U.S. acquired the Southwest. When the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo came before Congress for ratification, Article Nine was replaced and Article Ten was stricken out. The two Articles dealt, respectively, with civil rights and land guarantees. The no-nonsense attitude of American politics merged with white racism to create the stereotype of the “Mexican greaser.” Carrying the added stigma of defeat in battle, the Mestizo was considered cowardly, lazy, and treacherous. Anglo America was barely willing to recognize his basic humanity, much less the nobility of his pre-Columbian origins. He was a Mexican, and that was it. But contrary to the myth of the Sleeping Giant, the Mexican in the Southwest did not suffer the abuses of the gringo by remaining inert.
In 1859, Juan N. Cortina declared war on the gringos in Texas. On November 23 from his camp in the Rancho del Carmen, County of Cameron, he released a proclamation: “Mexicans! When the State of Texas began to receive the new organization which its sovereignty required as an integrant part of the Union, flocks of vampires, in the guise of men, came and scattered themselves in the settlements . . . many of you have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts, because your labor was fruitful, and because your industry excited the vile avarice which led them. A voice infernal said, from the bottom of their soul, ‘kill them; the greater will be our gain!’” The document was intense but despairing for a real solution to the problem of gringo domination. Cortina proposed to fight to the death if need be, and offered La Raza in Texas the protection of a secret society sworn to defend them. He addressed his people as Mexicanos, but the fact remains that they were no longer citizens of Mexico. They were Mestizos cast adrift in the hellish limbo of Anglo America. Cortina got his war, and lost.
There were others, before and after Cortina, who waged guerrilla warfare from the mountains of the Southwest. In California, from 1850 to 1875, Joaquín Murrieta and Tiburcio Vásquez span a period of unmitigated struggle. History dismissed them as bandits; asinine romanticized accounts of their “exploits” have totally distorted the underlying political significance of their rebellion.
Bandits in Mexico, meanwhile, were on the verge of creating the first major revolution of the twentieth century. The Revolution of 1910: the revolution of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, El indio y el mestizo. At Independence, only one fifth of Mexico’s population had been white. A century later, it was less than one thirteenth. In the hundred years between Independence and the Revolution, the number of Mestizos quadrupled. In 1910 they numbered fifty-three percent of the total population, while the Indios had remained fairly stable at close to forty percent. Yet white men ruled, while the blood and flesh of Mexico went hungry. A new motivating force was behind the Revolution of 1910, and that force was La Raza, la plebe, los de abajo [the underdogs]. Indigenous Mexico discovered itself and so arose with all the fury that four hundred years of oppression can create. The bloodroot of la patria [the fatherland] exploded, and Mestizos and Indios fought to the death to make Mexico what it had not been since Cuauhtémoc: a unique creation of native will. . . .
It was a revolution with few restraints, and La Raza expressed itself as never before. A half-breed cultural maelstrom swept across Mexico in the form of corridos, bad language, vulgar topics, and disrespectful gestures: pleberías. It was all a glorious affront to the aristocracy, which, wrapped in their crucifixes and fine Spanish laces, had been licking the boots of American and British speculators for a lifetime. In 1916, when Woodrow Wilson sent [General John Joseph] Pershing into Mexican territory on a “punitive expedition,” looking for Pancho Villa, U.S. intervention had already seriously crippled the Revolution. Pershing failed to find Villa, but la plebe launched a corrido. . . .
Three years later Emiliano Zapata was dead in Chinameca, and the terrible reality of a dying Revolution began to settle on the people. In 1923 Pancho Villa was assassinated by a savage hail of bullets in the dusty streets of Parral, Chihuahua. That same year, almost 64,000 Mexicans crossed the fictitious border into the United States. During the following years 89,000 poured across, and the U.S., alarmed by the sudden influx, organized the border patrol. This was the first time the boundary between Mexico and the Southwest had ever been drawn, but now it was set, firmly and unequivocally. Even so, ten percent of Mexico’s population made it across: pa’ este lado. La plebe crossed the border, and their remembrance of the patria was forever stained by memories of bloody violence, festering poverty, and hopeless misery. For all their hopes of material gain, their migration (and it was only a short migration into the Southwest) meant a spiritual regression, for them and for their sons—a legacy of shame for being of Mexican descent in the land of the gringo. Yet the Revolución would persist in memory, in song, in cuentos. It would reach into the barrio, through two generations of Mexicanos, to create the Chicano.
The Chicano is the grandson, or perhaps even the son, of the Mexican pelado.4 Who is the pelado? He is the Mestizo, the colonized man of Mexico, literally, the “stripped one.” La Raza is the pelado en masse. He is almost inevitably dirt poor, cynical about politics, and barely manages to live. He earns his immediate survival day by day, through any number of ingenious schemes, or movidas. During the last thirty years or so, he has been epitomized in the cine mexicano by the genius of Mario Moreno’s Cantinflas. Yet he is hardly a mere comic figure. The humor in his life is born of such deep misfortune that the comedy takes on cosmic proportions and so becomes tragedy. The pelado is the creator of the corrido and the eternal patron of mariachi. His music, in turn, inspires him to express all his joy and sorrow in a single cry. So he lets out a grito [shout] that tells you he feels life and death in the same breath. Viva la Raza, hijos de la chingada!
In Mexican history, the pelado undoubtedly gave voice to the “Grito de Dolores” in 1810, and then went off with Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla to fight the War of Independence against Spain. In other generations, the pelado took orders from Santa Ana at the Alamo, and probably finished off Davy Crockett. He also fought with Don Benito Juárez during La Reforma,5 and most certainly rode with Pancho Villa. It was the pelado who crossed the border into the United States, only to be viciously stereotyped as the sleeping Mexican, leaning against a cactus. There is no understanding of the pelado in the literature of the United States. None, that is, except for the embryonic works of Chicano literature. Comadres and compadres [godparents], pachucos [zoot suit men], campesinos [peasant] begin to emerge from the pen of the Chicano poet: people of the rural and urban barrios of the Southwest, with names like Nacho, la Chata, Tito, Little Man, Pete Fonesca, and “el Louie Rodriguez, carnal del Candi y el Ponchi.” Some are sketched, some are fully drawn, but they are all intimately real—a far cry from the racist stereotypes of the John Steinbeck past.
Yet they are all drawn against the background of the barrio, replete with the spiritual and material chingaderas of colonization. Beset by all the pain and confusion of life in los Estados Unidos, the pelados in Chicano literature take drugs, fight, drink, [are in] despair, go hungry, and kill each other. Some resist racism of the gringo, and become pachucos. Some acculturate and sell out as Mexican Americans. Some are drawn from a distant twenty-year-old memory, and some are as real as today. But they are not to be confused with the writers that created them, for they are Chicanos.
The Chicano is not a pelado. His very effort to cut through nearly five centuries of colonization defines him as a new man. This effort is so total, in fact, that it is characteristic of Chicano writers to also be teachers, community organizers, and political leaders. In one sense, being Chicano means the utilization of one’s total potentialities in the liberation of our people. In another sense, it means that Indio mysticism is merging with modern technology to create un nuevo hombre, a new man; a new reality, rooted in the origins of civilization in this half of the world. Neither a pelado nor a Mexican American, the Chicano can no longer totally accept as reality the white, Western European concept of the universe. Reason and logic are not enough to explain the modern world; why should it suffice to explain the ancient world of our ancestors? The sciences of archaeology and anthropology may unearth the buried ruins of América Indígena, but they will never comprehend, through logic alone, its most basic truth: that man is a flower, for there is poetry in reality itself.
In an effort to recapture the soul-giving myth of La Raza, the Chicano is forced to re-examine the facts of history, and suffuse them with his own blood—to make them tell his reality. The truth of historical documents can sometimes approach poetic truth. So the Chicano poet becomes historian, digging up lost documents and proclamations other men saw fit to ignore. Yet he will inevitably write his own gestalt vision of history, his own mitos. And he will do it bilingually, for that is the mundane and cosmic reality of his life. Anglo America, no doubt, will resent the bilingualism of the Chicano. The average educated gabacho will probably interpret bilingual Chicano literature as reflecting the temporary bicultural confusion of the “Mexican American.” He will be reluctant to accept in the Chicano poet what he proudly accepts in a T. S. Eliot. Both are bilingual, or even multilingual poets; but the former intersperses his English with mere Spanish, while the latter alludes in the “highly sophisticated” Latin or French.
If the Anglo cannot accept the coming reality of America, que se lo lleve la jodida. . . Otherwise, he can learn Spanish, which is the language of most of the people in America. The time has come to redefine all things “American.” If our bilingualism has prompted gabachos to wonder if we are “talking about them,” in the street, in school, at work, this time, the Chicano literature, we certainly are discussing them. If Anglos insist on calling us Mexican Americans, then we must insist on asking: What is an American? Nobody pursues the title with such vehemence as the white man in the United States. He does on occasion recognize the existence of “Latin” America, and so calls himself a norte-americano. Still, North American does not define him clearly enough. After all, North America is not only the United States. It is also Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Cuba. Fidel Castro is a norte-americano.
Who then is this resident of the United States known by the Chicano as an Anglo, gringo, yanqui, bolillo, or gabacho? Who is this person whose immediate ancestors were so incapable of living with Indigenous America that they tried to annihilate it? He is the eternal foreigner, suffering from the immigrant complex. He is a transplanted European, with pretensions of native origins. His culture, like his name for this continent, is imported. For generations, despite furious assertions of his originality, the “American” has aped the ways of the Old Country, while exploiting the real native peoples of the New. His most patriotic cry is basically the retort of one immigrant to another. Feeling truly American only when he is no longer the latest foreigner, he brandishes his Americanism by threatening the new arrival: “America, love or leave it!” Or, “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from!”
Now the gringo is trying to impose the immigrant complex on the Chicano, pretending that we “Mexican Americans” are the most recent arrivals. It will not work. His melting pot concept is a sham: it is a crucible that scientifically disintegrates the human spirit, melting down entire cultures into a thin white residue the average gabacho can harmlessly absorb. That is why the Anglo cannot conceive of the Chicano, the Mexican Mestizo, in all his ancient human fullness. He recognizes him as a Mexican, but only to the extent that he is “American”; and he accepts Mexican culture only to the extent that it has been Americanized, sanitized, sterilized, and made safe for democracy, as with taco bars, chile con carne, the Mexican hat dance, Cantinflas in Pepe, the Frito Bandito, and grammar school renditions of Ay Chiapanecas Ay, Ay… [Clap, clap, children]. But we will not be deceived. In the final analysis, frijoles, tortillas, y chile are more American than the hamburger; and the pelado a more profound founding father of America than the pilgrim. No, we do not suffer from the immigrant complex. We suffered from it as its victims, but history does not record the same desperation among our people that twisted and distorted the European foreigner, that made the white immigrant the gringo.
We left no teeming shore in Europe, hungry and eager to reach the New World. We crossed no ocean in an overcrowded boat, impatient and eager to arrive at Ellis Island in New York. No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country, and left us with the notion that the land was free, even though Mexicans and Indians already lived on it. We did not kill, rape, and steal under the pretext of Manifest Destiny and Western Expansion. We did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.
We have been in America a long time. Somewhere in the twelfth century, our Aztec ancestors left their homeland of Aztlán, and migrated south to Anáhuac, “the place by the waters,” where they built their great city of México-Tenochtitlán. It was a long journey, for as their guiding deity, Huitzilopochtli, had prophesied: the elders of the tribe died en route and their children grew old. Aztlán was left far behind, somewhere “in the north,” but it was never forgotten. Aztlán is now the name of our Mestizo nation, existing to the north of Mexico, within the borders of the United States. Chicano poets sing of it, and their flor y canto [flower and song=poetry]6 points toward a new yet very ancient way of life and social order, toward new yet very ancient gods. The natural revolutionary turn of things is overthrowing outmoded concepts in the life of man, even as it does in nature; churning them around in the great spin of Creation, merging the very ancient with the very new to create new forms.
The rise of the Chicano is part of the irrevocable birth of America, born of the blood, flesh, and life spirit of this ancient continent. Beyond the two-thousand-mile border between Mexico and the U.S.A. we see our universal race extending to the very tip of South America. We see millions upon millions of bronze people, living in Mestizo nations, some free, some yet to be freed, but existing: mexicanos, guatemaltecos, peruanos, chilenos, cubanos, bolivianos, puertoriqueños; [and] a new world race, born of the racial and cultural blending of centuries. La Raza Cósmica [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.2], the true American people.
1
“La plebe” suggests a range of identifications from plebes to guys to kids; the broad, overarching definition of “el vulgo” could include: the masses, from the common people to riff-raff; “la paloma or palomilla” (palomía in northern Mexico) suggests both a mischievous group of friends as well as a rabble or a gang.—Ed.
2
Gachupines is a pejorative term denoting a Spaniard living in the Americas.—Ed.
3
In current Mexican slang “gabacho” identifies an American citizen, the Yankee, the Gringo, even a blond person; however, the term originally stemmed from the watercourses in the Pyrennes and referred to a Frenchman, a ”Frog,” and even a Gallicism in Spanish literature.—Ed.
4
The word “pelado” literally translates to peeled, as in a fruit. In Mexican slang, however, it can be used to refer to a poor, coarse common person or to a foulmouthed and rude one.—Ed.
5
A turning point in Mexican history when, led by Benito Juárez, the State declared that it was best for the national government to be independent from the Church, the Holy See. By means of the Reforma legislation, the official relationship with the Vatican was severed in 1857, assuring the secular identity of the State.—Ed.
6
A Náhuatl term, “xóchitl” (flower)—as a modifier that has the sense of “something precious, delicate”—was conventionally paired in the Aztec world with “cuícatl” (song) to refer to poetry. One well-known examples comes from Nezahuacóyotl’s poem Nitlayocoya (I am sad): “xochitica ye ihan cuicatica” (my deepest poetry).—Ed.