Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (15 page)

What we knew of Mexico was academic, and came out of geography and history classes, not "cultural studies" - its major exports, largest cities, history before and after Cortes, names of the Mexican presidents and dictators, and so on. Our classmates filled in the blanks about real life in Mexico with patchy memories and exaggerated stories of contaminated water and crooked cops down south. When Ralphie Salinas left at the semester break for a visit to Mexico, he asked me to pray for his safe return. When he got back safe and sound, he sold us illegal fireworks, pornographic comic books and strange candies, warning us in a whisper, "There are even scarier things down there than these."

Apparently, our rather unsophisticated teachers thought the purpose of learning was to master the English language and acquire the rudiments of math and American literature. As I can best fathom it some forty years later, their aim was to create a sweeping egalitarianism, a mass of students who would reach high school all with about the same chances of success or failure. And so we were given demerits for mispronouncing names, writing left-

handed
, and other felonies like chewing gum, handing in our papers without our names written on the upper-right-hand corner, and wearing Frisco or Payday baggy pants and pointy boots.

Latinos were asked by the district speech therapist, Mrs. Albright, to say "A Chevy with a stick-shift" - a drill to ensure that there was no sign of a Mexican accent, and that, like Armenians and Japanese, they could filter undetected into mainstream society and prosper in the judgmental world of commerce. "You are judged on how you speak, and a big vocabulary will do you no good if you maul your words," Mrs. Albright lectured us each Thursday morning. The sixtyish, blue-haired therapist added that "looks and diction" were as important for success as raw talent.

Mr. Gronski, our itinerant musician, who rotated to our rural school each Friday for a morning of "Music Appreciation," made us memorize polkas, waltzes, Australian ballads, Mexican folk songs and black spirituals without including a single editorial remark about oppression or exploitation. He was teaching us the music scale, the role of half- and quarter-notes the world over, and how different peoples sought to harmonize, use refrains, and embrace or eschew rhyme. I doubt that many of today's fifth-graders know what "harmony" and a "refrain" mean, or sing many songs from outside their own culture, and yet I imagine that they are certified to be "sensitive," "nonjudgmental" and "diverse," and that they do sing anthems to universalism.

Most of the kids I saw every day - like most of the adults that I now see daily around the farm - were from Mexico, and there was nothing held back about race. Skin color and national origin were quite out in the open in conversation. We few Anglos in our class of forty at the rural elementary school were labeled "white boys" or slurred as gringos, gikros or gabachos. In turn, we knew the majority as "Mexicans," cholos, vatos or chuks, and their parents more respectfully as "Mexican-Americans." In those days I assiduously sought the etymology of "gringo." My dad didn't know, though he was furious that other kids called me such a thing. My mother said it came from having green American money and left it at that. My friend Luis Cortez shrugged and assured us that we were "greener" than Mexicans, and that "gringo" wasn't as bad as "white trash" or "Okie" - and less a cut anyway than "beaner," "wetback" or mojados.

Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, La Raza and all the other cachet words were as yet unknown. We never knew what malinchismo was (purported betrayal of the Mexican people) or Tio Tacos or pocbos (like Uncle Toms), much less La Raza Unida, MAPA or MEChA. I never heard the rubric "minority" until high school. "People of color" was two decades away; our biggest worry was avoiding the odious "colored people" and especially the N-word - which the Mexican kids were far more prone to use than the few whites against our half-dozen black schoolmates. Few of the professors today, whose smug moral universe is confined to the city limits of Berkeley, La Jolla, Palo Alto or Santa Barbara, would believe that in I960 using the N-word twenty miles south of Fresno in a rundown schoolyard would send any Mexican kid to the office in a way "gringo" or "wetback" would not.

Most fights were not racial. We in the miniscule white minority fought with and against Mexican-Americans. As I remember it, the great dividing line for most rumbles was whether you were born in Selma or Fresno. Fringe racists, of course, were around. Mr. Martinez, the fourth-grade teacher, told me in 1963, "Whitey is through in
California
. Some day, Victor, the whole town here will be Mexican, even the principal and the cops." He was, of course, prophetic, perhaps in ways he never imagined. As if to counter such chauvinism, Mrs. Wilson, a
Texas
native, complimented those in the art class who were "lighter than most from Mexico" and "could easily pass." I remember even at twelve thinking that her racial categories were absurd. Why should her own liver-spotted, wrinkled and blotted white complexion be the vaunted standard of hue, when half the Mexican girls in the class had beautiful, smooth olive skin that any Parisian connoisseur of beauty could call flawless? Yet on the other hand, it was Mexican students, not white, who insisted on calling Hector Bacho "chocolate" because of his nearly black skin. And they, not we, were cruel to Jeronimo Chapas, the only Puerto Rican among four hundred fifth-graders with truly black features, calling him "black Mexican" daily and even "Chino," as if he were some sort of bizarre Asiatic.

There was nothing of the contemporary multicultural model - bilingual aides, written and spoken communication with parents in Spanish, textbooks highlighting the majesty of the Aztecs and the theft of northern Mexico, or federally funded counselors to warn about drugs, gangs and teen pregnancy, and propagandize students that "The borders crossed us, not we the borders." Excused absences for catechism classes at the Catholic Church emptied our classrooms, giving us five or six Anglo Protestants a much-welcomed three-hour recess. (We also suffered through fish sticks on
Friday,
the public school's other concession to the vast Catholic majority.) Our principal worried that between Catechism classes, speech therapy and music
appreciation,
the students were losing two or three hours a week of reading and writing.

Growing up in multiracial rural
California
in the early 1960s, we did not merely review the nuts and bolts of the Constitution, or learn patriotic songs and brief sketches of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. Our discussions and lectures about American exceptionalism were not the triumphalism of a particular white race or Christian religion, but rather emphasized our own deep appreciation for just how distinctive the culture of the United States had proved to be over some two centuries. William Saroyan's short stories were much in vogue in our English classes. Much of his landscape was familiar, and his references to places in his native Fresno and the surrounding towns were known by most of us. Our teachers seemed to take for granted that Saroyan was critical of American society, and did not mind at all that non-Armenians in his stories could be portrayed as hysterically hypocritical and silly in their insularity and insensitivity toward darker others. None of us quite knew what the big deal about Armenians was anyway - since dozens of second- and third-generation Armenian-American kids were in our classes - only that they had apparently once, in ignorance, been treated unfairly as darker-skinned people.

Education was presented to everyone as the great escape from "the fields." The Japanese and Chinese had picked grapes and peaches at the turn of the century, before moving on to better lives. The Okies took their place before assimilating and leaving farm work. Armenians now owned the very farms they had once labored on.
Education, unions, intermarriage, assimilation - all these forces and more made grape pickers into prosperous middle-class suburbanites.
Mexicans, we trusted, were doing the same thing: those who were educated did not chop cotton; those who were not, did. And chopping cotton, while noble, paid little.

In fact, agricultural labor was presented as the great evil by our mostly Anglo teachers, many of whom themselves owned small vineyards! Cutting grapes was the specter by which they attempted to scare us into studying: "Okay, keep talking during class, Esperanza, and you will end up picking grapes the rest of your life." When farm-laboring parents at public schools week came into the classroom, the teachers politely but firmly reminded them that as fathers and mothers they had to monitor their children's homework so that the latter might have a better life than that found in the fields. "Make sure Juanito speaks English at home, so that he can sharpen his American accent," they would lecture these exhausted and sometimes bewildered farm workers.

Today we would call such pretentious do-gooding a wicked sort of "cultural genocide." Yet contemporary advocates of state-sanctioned bilingualism err when they claim that assimilationists wish to destroy knowledge of Spanish. The problem, instead, is not that our aliens know two languages, but that often they are not literate in even one.

What, then, did we actually learn in school that so quickly helped all of us assimilate - or rather, what made the other forty students in our homeroom class of 1961 become more like us six Anglos than we like them? Take our lessons on the Civil War: We all were told that thousands of Americans had died to end slavery, an evil institution that was as old as civilization itself. We admired the romance and pluck of the South, but concluded that its cause was inseparable from slavery and so morally wrong that it had to be ended - if need be, through bloodshed. Americans, it seemed, could be terrible to one another, but eventually there were
more good
than bad people, who could use a wonderful system to eradicate man's sins. The "North" or the "Union" was presented as the spiritual predecessor to our own efforts to get along and overcome race in the turmoil of the early 1960s. Our class often sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - with a heavily accented Mexican English.

We all got the message of racism, slavery and oppression clear enough while still learning something of Grant and Sherman and Jefferson Davis. I don't think we needed to be told that humans were imperfect - how else could the Constitution of the United States have tolerated slavery for nearly a hundred years? We had all seen the demons within our very selves out on the Darwinian playground and knew that their exorcism was the work of all good citizens. Even in rural
California
of the 1960s, "racial prejudice" was stigmatized as a great sin, something "unfair" that gave "advantages" to those who had not earned them. "You're prejudiced" was a charge whose sting was the assertion that one was dishonorable rather than merely bad.

Jimmy Hall was the class racist with a strong southwestern accent, rotten teeth and battle scars. He lived in a shack in a subsection of the barrio at the edge of the school, a rural shantytown ("Sunnyside") where Okies and blacks had settled in the 1940s and not yet fully abandoned by 1963. If there was hostility shown to students by our tough faculty composed of World War II veterans, it was usually directed against him. "Be nice to Jimmy - his family is ignorant and doesn't know any better," we were told in condescending tones. "They are white trash who never made it," our Texas- and Oklahoma-raised teachers said about Jimmy. "I've seen his kind back home, so be careful, you guys," our principal warned.

The underlying assumption in making such comments to our majority of Mexican students was that they had a real culture and family stability that could lead to success, while white-trash, dysfunctional families like the Halls - a "needle and syringe," the rumors went, had landed Jimmy's sometime father in the "state pen" - were beyond redemption. The prejudice toward Okies is now romanticized and airbrushed, but I remember it as visceral and unending until the 1960s.
My wife, who has this drama in her family background, claims that it persisted well into the 1980s.

Did our education neglect the labor unions and the struggle of the oppressed?
Not at all.
As the nascent United Farm Workers movement was capturing national attention by staging strikes daily right outside town, our seventh-grade history teacher was sketching out the dreadful struggle of the coal miners and steel workers, and reminding us how in a free and capitalist society the poor always had to organize to find redress from the powerful. Other mentors explained the unhappy saga of the immigrants - Irish, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans - not to teach the cheap lesson that America was racist and oppressive, but in the belief that our country was better than others because our parents and grandparents had taken it upon themselves to improve an unjust situation.

Caesar Chavez was, of course, hated by the local farming establishment - unreasonably so, for his initial cause was just and long overdue. At ten, I saw him walk with his followers along the old Highway 99 with a bullhorn and banners. At seventeen my brother and I once, out of curiosity, drove out to one of his rallies, got lost, ended up at a disputed orchard, and were roughed up by Tulare County sheriffs who appeared out of nowhere, drawling, "What are you white boys doing on this side of the picket line?" The less vehement slurs from small indigent farmers were mostly that Chavez was "lazy" and "never worked," rather than the corporations' wild charges that he was a "communist" or a "Marxist." Tad Abe, who had helped form the Nisei Farmers' League - a group of Japanese small grape growers and family tree-fruit farmers who wished to stop UFW vandalism - said that if he was once forced to live in an
Arizona
internment camp at fifteen, then by god the union agitators should be put there too.