THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO MARGARITAVILLE

Vivien Mejia

 

 

 

Tan trash. That’s what I like to call myself when I order in beer and pizza to the horror of my gastronomically snobby friends. I’m first-generation American by way of Colombia, S.A., thus the “tan” part. I’m one of those hopelessly mixed-up kids who still believe in the ever-more-tarnished American Dream through franchising (I’d like to open a Petco/Taco Bell combo) but can trace back my roots twenty generations straight to the Spanish Inquisition and Fitzcarraldo in the jungle by the wide green Amazon. Oh, yeah, and I’m a writer by trade. Lately, a “Latina” writer. Somehow the moniker that once garnered me nothing but disdain from the brats at Coral Gables Elementary School now gets me gigs. “Sure, sure, I’m Latina,” I say. As if somehow, by default, the lilt in my last name has imbued me with a level of expertise about one-fifth of the world’s population someone who isn’t Latino can’t possibly fathom. And so goes the writing—from what Latinos eat for breakfast to how Latinos vote, I’ve covered the gamut in my essays and have called myself an expert with nary a doubt in my voice, if not my head. I have to constantly remind myself and others I can only squeak out my own tiny voice from my corner of this vast literary landscape, and it has nothing to do with beans and rice, Spanglish, or even, sadly, salsa dancing.

On the contrary, it’s a wasteland of strip malls, MTV commercials, and J-Lo, just like every other schmo, white, black or brown. I even pepper my language with Yiddish for crying out loud—too many years in Hollywood, I guess. And therein lies the rub: The “Latino” market is the American market; they’re one and the same. And while the Latino demographic continues to grow by leaps and bounds in the United States, it’s a bit of an artificial barometer. Part of the problem is the slippery slope one gets onto when describing the “typical Latino.” With a couple of dozen Spanish-speaking countries around the world, each with a host of disparate influences on their fundamentally Spanish foundation, from African, to indigenous, to European, to Asian, it’s no wonder it’s hard to herd the vanguard that ends up in the United States into one convenient marketing slice o’ pie.

I remember back in the day, short on cash, I’d joined one of those focus group agencies, where on occasion, for fifty or seventy bucks, I’d be called in to blab about my toilet paper habits or what kind of car I’d like to drive. More and more they’d begun to favor me because I could speak Spanish and filled an ever-growing demand for “Latino” consumers. I’d listed I owned pets but had left it at that. One day, I was called by an officious young man who asked me if I owned a dog. I didn’t, but replied vaguely, hoping to still get the gig. “I could own a dog, “ I said. “OK, well, this is the most important part,” he said. “Would you say you speak Spanish at home as your primary language?” “Hmm, well, I live alone, so usually I’m not really speaking (out loud anyway).” Good enough. Before I knew it I was with ten other women arguing about what kind of dog food to feed little Paco, my imaginary pug. Some of these women had arrived by bus and were feeding their dogs scraps from the table; a couple had business suits on and were feeding their pups something off the supermarket shelf. By the end of the session, I’d become what is known as an “influencer” and was instructing the women to shop at specialty pet stores that can really address a dog’s changing needs as he grows older. I’m not sure what was deduced by the group moderator besides that it was going to be a long night.

At the risk of sounding too business-like, I will say that the Latino population is at its core a vertically integrated socio-economically divergent population. We are simply not homogeneous and therefore create the same kind of challenges publishers, advertisers, and so on have faced when trying to market to the Asian population, for example, who, though ethnographically homogeneous, come from different cultural and linguistic centers. I mean, come on; half “my peeps” don’t even like each other. Just ask a Venezuelan about a Colombian or an Argentinean about anyone outside Europe or Buenos Aires, for that matter, and you’ll get some pretty un-PC commentary. And so to assume a uniformity of thought on anything from music to religion to literature is a flawed proposition at best.

“Well, then, how come Spanish-language television and Spanish-language entertainment are a multi-billion dollar enterprise?” you might ask. I’ll tell you why: Español, baby, Español.

The beautiful comfort of a shared language can unite much more than it should: Suddenly opinions on so many of life’s infinite choices seem to be soothed by the sound of the mother tongue. That tongue is being spoken more and more in the United States by recent immigrants, and it is perhaps that aspect of the Latino market that should be embraced and serviced more by traditional translation and Spanish content material than by trying to appeal to the netherworld of English-speaking first- and second-generation Latinos like myself. Because the truth of the matter is we’re reading the New Yorker (or the National Enquirer, or both) along with everybody else. And here’s the crux: We’re reading them in English.

And we’re writing in English.

Confusing, I know. Why do you think over 65 percent of first- and second-generation Latinos have been in some form of psychotherapy? Actually, I made that figure up, but it can’t be too far from the truth. I mean, the experience, as I’m sure has been related ad infinitum, of the immigrant-raised child, dreaming in one language but speaking in another, is, well, crazy-making. And the literature written by the Junot Diazes and Julia Alvarezes of the world is filled with that mysterious and singular combination of Latin poetry and American angst found nowhere else. But let us remember that, though uniquely fascinating and deserving of merit, this is a wholly different and separate enterprise than needing to translate Tide commercials into Spanish for Vanidades magazine. And I might add, if there was some way to check, I would venture to say the audience for Diaz or Sandra Cisneros might not necessarily be too different from the audience for, say, Alice Sebold or Wally Lamb.

There is a kind of “cultural tourism” that takes place among literature-loving types. I remember a friend telling me she connected with Latinos more after reading The House on Mango Street. She liked the way slang and Spanish were sprinkled into the narrative. She said she felt as if she now understood how “Latinos” spoke at home. I said nothing. What was the point of explaining to her I grew up in a household where Spanglish was slapped down like the lowest form of virus. Where I was taught a “pure Castilian” and wasn’t allowed to mix with what was perceived as the teeming masses by my elitist family. Where English was not spoken at all, but my brother and I devoured English storybooks at night like contraband Playboys. But that is my singular story and I don’t necessarily expect anyone else to share it. Even if I did write about it. So, no, I didn’t bother to explain to my highly educated, liberal, well-read friend that her statement would be the equivalent of me saying I understood how southerners lived now because I read Bastard Out of Carolina or how the French made love after reading The Story of O—OK, maybe not The Story of O, maybe Spy in the House of Love.

In any case, yes, Cisneros wrote a book filled with a narrative reality worthy of praise, but I can safely assume she meant it to be used as an allegory and not a travelogue or documentary on the lives of every person of Latin descent in the United States. Nevertheless, my friend’s overly eager embrace of Mango Street might help explain the uptick in sales of certain Latino authors, as the American book-reading public grapples with trying to understand this vast group of people taking up residence in their neighborhoods, churches, and schools. But it might also explain why Latinos aren’t necessarily the demographic buying the books themselves. The Latino Americans’ experience is as varied and singular as any non-Latinos’ experience, and chances are they, too, would be “cultural tourists” in Oscar Hijuelos’s Cuban-American reality, just as he might be a tourist in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s Dirty Girls Social Club. Meaning, while I could be moved by Cisneros, I don’t necessarily know if I relate to her protagonist any more than I do to Bridget Jones: Unfortunately for me, I fit into that demographic as well.

None of this is to say there isn’t something particularly telling and vivid in the ever-growing list of Latino-American writers (vs. Latin American) who are currently writing about their ever-varied experiences growing up hyphenates in this country. Though their stories are as differentiated as Danielle Steele is from Dave Eggers, they are, in a fashion, documenting the bizarre and eternal alchemy of north meets south, or yin meets yang, salsa meets meatloaf, and so on. As they do so, much of the writing feels a bit—Dare I say?—mutant.

This mix of English and Spanish, and hip-hop, and Chinese, and French and, and, and . . . is staggering. It only proves further the prescience of cult film Blade Runner’s vision of a world where, for instance, Los Angelenos would be speaking a dialect consisting of several languages and everyone would look mildly Asian-Latino-Anglo-African-American. It’s dizzying and it’s exciting. We are indeed moving in a new direction.

This new breed of writer who dreams in Spanish but writes in English, who eats Captain Crunch but dances merengue, who knows Marc Antony but doesn’t know Simon Bolívar, is a reality. A reality only mirrored by the general population. There will always be messengers, but eventually the masses do follow. Joe West Virginia may not know who Isabel Allende is, but I guarantee you he knows how to make a mean margarita and can probably appreciate pot stickers, too. And isn’t that strange and funny and weird and . . . American?

I’m reminded of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, with its postmodern Mexico City sets. Who would’ve thought that quickly mutating and churning world of multiethnicity, borderline baroque pollution, and overpopulation could be so romantic? And yet it was. It was downright darling. I always wanted to write a touching, terribly tragic love story set in a Jack in the Box. Like Hemingway’s short story “Hills like White Elephants,” our doomed couple would talk about life, death, and romance, only they would be doing it over french fries, egg rolls, and diet cola as they watched traffic gridlock on Wilshire Boulevard. Strangely enough, though the strangeness of our future may seem so clear to us right now, I have no doubt there will come a time when this topic will seem as provincial and quaint as when Cervantes and Dante were scandalizing the world with their vernacular takes on the Latin in Don Quixote and Inferno. In their heyday, writing in Spanish and Italian, respectively, both languages considered bastardizations of Latin, they took their world by storm. I’m certain they were being called the equivalent of “tan trash” back in their day. And so I can only hope to walk in their footsteps proudly, a Marlboro on my lips, a cerveza in my hand.