I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but I've had a series of second
homes in my life. For a time, it was the beaches of Venice, California,
where I prowled for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Later, I searched
for the Revolution in my mother's home country, El Salvador. There were
a few pilgrimages looking for God in the endless skies and atop the
mesas and buttes of the Southwestern United States, and. . . .
I still haven't settled down. Today, my second home is Mexico City,
where my father and his father lived off and on in the 1940s and '50s.
I shuttle back and forth between Los Angeles and this, the smoggiest,
most populous, and, for me, the most beautiful city on earth. I move
back and forth because I don't feel completely at home anywhere--I miss
a bit of Los Angeles when I'm in Mexico City, and vice versa.
The distance between L.A. and "el D.F.," as the capital of Mexico is
known, is growing shorter by the day. Perhaps in some as yet only dimly
imaginable future, it won't matter if I'm in the North or the South.
Perhaps one day "south" and "north" and "east" and "west" will be archaic
references to a primitive, bordered world where nationalism and economic
tension pitched the planet into chaos.
The world over, distances are growing shorter between our cardinal
points because of the global forces of high technology, free trade,
and immigration. Information moves. Commerce moves. People move. The
world appears to be spinning faster everyday; analyzing the dizzying
pace of the movement is an ever more daunting task. Indian rebellion
in Chiapas, President Mandela in South Africa, race riots in Los Angeles,
a holocaust in Bosnia, Communist Hong Kong. . . . It is an appropriate
way to end the second millenium. Ends of centuries always bring out
the apocalyptic--and the idealistic--in human beings. For our end-of-century,
the apocalyptic can be seen in the religious and ethnic conflicts, in
the growing intolerance of "otherness." The idealistic is the impulse
towards "one world" that embraces its diverse "others." The collision
of these visions has brought us to the brink of a global civil war.
"Distant Relations" features artists from two regions that epitomize
the global crisis, and that also point towards the kind of cultural
and political negotiations necessary to achieve a peaceful resolution
of our conflicts. Like most Americans, I know few particulars of the
Irish conflict. I know that until recently we only heard a British perspective
of what was happening, and because I'm Catholic, I naturally sympathize
with my spiritual brethren. Perhaps romantically, I see in the IRA a
European corollary of the revolutionary movements on my continent: the
FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación) in El Salvador,
the Indian rebels of Chiapas. While I abhor violence, I intimately know
histories of peoples who arrived at armed struggle because all other
avenues of negotiation had failed. Such was the case in El Salvador.
Such is the case today in Chiapas. I suspect that such has been the
case in Ireland. The tragedy of conflict on the military level is that
all sides ultimately lose their humanity. Each side assumes that the
"other" must be destroyed, when the truth is that the moment a settlement
is reached, we'll probably have to learn to live with the "other" all
over again. . . .
But back to Mexico City. I told you that I am here because I didn't
feel completely at home in my first city, Los Angeles. I'm also here
because I want to join the people who cross frontiers in the Americas--the
immigrants from the south, the new pilgrims. Since I grew up between
Latin America and the U.S., between English and Spanish, between the
Catholicism of the South and the Protestantism of the North, I feel
it's my birthright to be part of that frenetic movement. Everything
and everyone is crossing the line that stretches for 2,000 miles between
Mexico and the United States. AT&T and the Indian teenager from
Oaxaca, Mexican-produced automobile parts and MTV en español.
The issues of free trade and immigration have sparked one of the biggest
political and cultural debates in the history of the United States.
There are only two sides to this conflict. There are those--mostly older,
white Americans--who would seal off the border with Mexico and the rest
of Latin America, because they fear being overwhelmed by the immigrants.
And there are those--the immigrants themselves and a few visionary Americans--who
see in the future a borderless world, a continental identity.
It is an old dream. There've been hints of it in great thinkers of
both the U.S. and Latin America. Simón Bolívar, the "liberator"
of the independence movements of the 19th century, dreamed of a unified
Latin republic stretching from the Southwestern United States to Tierra
del Fuego. And one of the Americas' greatest bards, Walt Whitman, poeticized
a cosmic, international vision of the continent.
At this point, it is the nativ-ists of the U.S. who are winning the
debate, as they have on so many occasions in the last 150 years. Catholic
immigrants were suspect from the mid-19th century onward. Asians were
barred from entering the country at the turn of the century. And Mexicans
have been deported en masse on two occasions in the last seventy-five
years, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in the postwar
economic decline of the 1950s. We are on the verge of yet another such
tragic chapter today.
In California last November, voters passed Proposition 187, a measure
that will bar "illegal aliens" from receiving most forms of public assistance
(including education and health care), should it ever be approved by
the courts currently reviewing the law's glaring constitutional contradictions.
Many otherwise reasonable people, mostly white, but also black and Asian
and even a smattering of Latino U.S. citizens, voted in favor of Proposition
187. Most of them would deny that they are racists. And yet they voted
for a measure that clearly targets one ethnic group, and that sets in
motion forces that have already begun to affect not only those "illegals"
that the law singles out, but anyone with brown skin or with a slightly
accented English. Since the election, there have been hundreds of reports
across the state of zealots attempting to enforce the law in vigilante
fashion. At a restaurant in Santa Paula, a customer asked the Mexican-looking
cook for his "green card" (the identification that legal residents carry).
At a Palm Springs pharmacy, the mother of a sick child was asked to
show her daughter's proof of citizenship. In these and countless other
cases, the people targeted were U.S. citizens.
The California middle class has come to view immigration, free trade,
and the failure of the old aerospace and automobile industries (the
state's economic backbone up until the mid-1980s) as, at the least,
interrelated, and, at worst, cause and effect. Californians voted through
the distorted prism of their fears last November, fears born out of
economic uncertainty that were expertly exploited by the tiny minority
of full-fledged racists that promoted Prop. 187. Wherever we look these
days--in the former Soviet Union, in Europe, in the Americas--voters
seem to be sending desperate messages. The pendulum swings back and
forth rapidly, a sure sign that fear is moving people, rather than visionary
thinking or even just plain common sense.
Mexicans also voted their fears. In last year's presidential election,
they voted the status quo; in Mexico, the status quo, the ruling PRI
party (Institutional Revolutionary Party), is synonymous with the forces
of reaction. I spent the summer months of 1994 in Mexico, writing about
the dramatic changes occurring in my second home. Long viewed by the
rest of the world as a colorful culture trapped in a folkloric past
of mariachis, macho heroes, and lascivious señoritas, I found
a Mexico on the move. Seventy years of authoritarian rule are giving
way to a more open, democratic society. Mexican teenagers are experimenting
with cultural influences from their northern neighbor and creating hybrids--rocanrol--that,
far from being a sign of cultural death, show the country to be on the
cutting edge of urban popular culture. Meanwhile, the rebellion in Chiapas
finally brought to the forefront the condition of the Indian and the
responsibility of the mixed-race, or mestizo, castes.
It was a year of living dangerously in Mexico. Political assassinations
shook the country's sense of security, and Chiapas raised the specter
of all-out civil war. Above all, 1994 revealed the true Mexico: a country
rent by class and ethnic tension. Last year's events told us that Mexico
is not one, but many; that the benefit of economic liberalization (under
former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, nearly all of the government's
state-owned companies were sold off to private interests) has so far
been for the elites, and not for the tiny middle class or the vast,
impoverished masses, such as the Indians of the south. Mexico will either
learn to live with its new, heterogeneous self, by bringing social and
economic justice to all its regions and ethnic communities, or it will
crumble into chaos.
I opt for the optimistic view of Mexico. After nearly a century of
government-controlled, ultranationalist rhetoric that stifled critical
thinking, independent artists and intellectuals, Indian guerrillas,
and growing legions of urban activists are now powerful protagonists
in the country's intense debate over its future. Seen in the best light,
Mexico is embracing the otherness that it had rejected for so long,
both the other of the North (the United States, with its culture of
individualism and tradition of democratic debate) and the other of the
South (the Indian's mystical and communitarian millenary culture).
Yes, Mexicans voted for the PRI last August. But they didn't vote for
the party's infamous corruption and anti-democratic traditions. Mexicans
appeared to be saying one thing in the voting booth but quite another
in their everyday lives. They voted for the PRI, but they are participating
in protest marches more than ever before. They voted for the PRI, but
most Mexicans are sympathetic to the rebellion in Chiapas--long as it
doesn't cause an all-out civil war. The message is: we are changing,
we want to continue changing, but we don't want change so radical that
we spin out of control.
California's vote for Prop. 187 is more problematic, because it calls
for change, but in a clearly reactionary direction. It seeks to turn
back the clock of the continent's movement toward cultural and economic
integration: keep those dirty Mexicans out of the States. The only hope
that I can glean from the electoral results is that the majority who
voted for this vicious legislation are rapidly becoming the minority
in California. Even if 187 is fully implemented one day and massive
deportations begin, everything the law seeks to detain has already,
in effect, occurred. The vast majority of Latino immigrants in California
are legal residents, and they will become citizens shortly. Mexican
political theorist Jorge Castañeda has said that an "electoral
apartheid" exists today in California, where a minority of white voters
dictate the conditions that the Latino working-class majority lives
under. The revolution that will overturn this system will be a demographic
one.
The minority-becoming-the-majority could be seen on the streets of
Los Angeles during the days leading up to the November elections. In
the biggest political demonstration in the city's history, some 150,000
activists turned out to protest Prop. 187. Spontaneous walk-outs at
dozens of middle and high schools in the Los Angeles area peaked a few
weeks before the election when 20,000 students left classes and took
to the streets waving Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan
flags as a sign of pride in a culture the students felt was being denigrated
by the pro-187 campaign.
The flag-waving was quickly denounced by the nativist forces, who outrageously
alleged that the immigrant students were proclaiming allegiance to foreign
powers. While the flags may indeed have been a political wash for the
students, they were also a sign that Latinos were coming together as
never before in California. For in the October Movement, as the anti-187
campaign came to be called, the recently arrived Mexican joined the
third-generation Chicano, and the Central American immigrant was recognized
by those of Mexican origin as an obvious ally rather than as competition
in the job market.
The real test of the October Movement, however, was in taking this
newfound Latino unity and creating a viable coalition with other ethnic
groups. If the ultimate lesson of the rebellion in Chiapas is that Indian
and mestizo must work together to achieve social justice (as black and
white did during the U.S. Civil Rights movement), the battle over 187
in California once again showed that multiethnic coalitions based on
mutual self- interest are the only way progressive forces can achieve
their goals. On this count, the October Movement failed. Nearly 80 percent
of Latinos voted against Prop. 187, about two-thirds of whites voted
for it, while Asians and African Americans each voted about fifty-fifty.
Had the Latino student vanguard been able to sway significant numbers
beyond its ethnic borders, the outcome of the election would have been
far different.
Yet, like the rebels in Chiapas, the student movement in California
--the most significant political mobilization in the United States since
the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the early 1980s--remains a powerful
political and moral sign. If the greatness of the U.S. Civil Rights
movement of the 1960s was the way in which African Americans convinced
a plurality of white Americans that equality in a democracy must indeed
be for all, the October Movement has the possibility of doing the same
in the 90s. The Chicano activist must not only defend the Mexican immigrant,
he or she must also decry the erosion of civil rights for African Americans
and the sinister, latent anti-Asian sentiment in California. The Chicano
in California can serve as the same moral example as the Indian in Mexico.
In the weeks following the electoral debacle of November, I sat in
on a number of student movement meetings. Besides the understandable
frustration and depression over the results, a battle for the soul of
the movement was taking place. Fervent Chicano nationalists espousing
separatist ideals clashed with their "internationalist" counterparts
who pleaded for a broad-based coalition. The latter emerged as the leading
ideology. One powerful contingent of the original October Movement rechristened
itself the "Four Winds Student Movement," a name that refers as much
to Native American mythology as to the concept of multiethnic organizing.
I write this from Mexico City, a few days before I return to Los Angeles.
After a month back in my first home, I will return again to Mexico.
This is my future: to endlessly cross the false frontiers that separate
us politically and that keep us from seeing the continent as it truly
is. Personally, I can no longer see the struggles in Mexico and California
as politically or even contextually different. Rather, I see the continent
as one in its many-ness. The rebellion in Chiapas is the Student Movement
in California.
Through its year of living dangerously, Mexico has begun, however tentatively,
however painfully, to embrace its northern and southern othernesses.
Chicanos, African Americans, white Americans, and Asian Americans in
the U.S. must do the same. There are only two futures possible for the
Americas as we approach the millenium. There is a Mexico coming to understand
its Indian-ness and regional complexity, a U.S. learning to embrace,
once again, its immigrant self. Or a Mexico that turns its back on both
Chiapas and democracy, and a U.S. that denies its multiracial soul.
We can embrace or avoid this truth: that the Mexican conflict is the
"multicultural" struggle in the U.S., that the Indian in Mexico is the
native person or the immigrant in the U.S., that the racist in the U.S.
is the one who delivered the Indian into near-slavery in Mexico.
We catch glimpses of our possible futures. One day, the Latin American
presidents and Bill Clinton announce the formation of the biggest free
trade zone in the world; the next, we hear that the proponents of Prop.
187 in California are now poised to make theirs a national campaign
against the immigrant. In one moment, we hear Mexican president Ernesto
Zedillo proclaiming that there will be no more armed conflict in Chiapas;
the next, we are told that some 60,000 federal troops have surrounded
the Indian communities in the jungles.
These are the contradictions and lies that artists and intellectuals
the world over must grapple with as we near the millenium. We must overcome
the distortion of the politics of separateness, which is the politics
of the old order. We must be the visionaries, the ones who dare to compare
the Irish situation to the Mexican and Chicano contexts, the ones who
dare to recognize ourselves in the "other."
John Valadez, Clavo, 1983; courtesy of Daniel Saxon Gallery,Los Angeles
John Valadez, Going Out of Business, 1991; courtesy of Daniel Saxon
Gallery, Los Angeles.
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