The Eagle Rock Trompers is a vintage car club founded in 1945 in the Northeast Los Angeles community of Eagle Rock. Originally created to race hot rods, the club has since evolved into a club of classic car enthusiasts. Latinopia visited with the club members and learned about their great passion for classic American cars.

This photograph commemorates the painting of an international mural on a wall in Belfast, Northern Ireland coordinated by a Chicano muralist, Victor Ochoa, in July of 1997. How a Chicano from San Diego found himself heading up an international team of muralists is the story behind this Moment in Time.

Victor Ochoa, who was one of the initial co-founders of San Diego’s Chicano Park mural complex in 1970, had been invited to work on a mural in Barcelona, Spain in the 1990s. The Spanish and Catalan muralists he met there spread the word about Chicano Park across Europe. Muralists aligned with the Irish Republican Party invited Victor to work on a mural in a working class neighborhood of Belfast, Ireland. Victor’s skill and experience earned him the role of coordinator of a mural project created by an international group of muralists that featured images of Che Guevara, Steven Biko and other heroes of nationalist struggle.

Victor recalls, “When I got to Belfast and saw the plight of the Catholic Irish I realized they were the white Mexicans.” News of Victor’s mural painting quickly spread. “When the Mexican Consul in Dublin heard that there was Chicano from Tijuana/San Diego painting a mural in Belfast, he couldn’t believe it. He invited me to do a presentation at the Mexican Consulate which I did. I was on the same program with Irish national poet and nobel laureate, Sheamus Heaney!”

Victor decided he would share the documentary, “The San Patricio Batallion” by Mark Day, with the audience. “People were in tears as they saw the names of the San Patricios appear on the screen–they were family names they knew. They asked us to screen the film again, and we did, and the next night there was a line a block long of people waiting to see the film.”

Jerry Adams, head of Sein Finn, the Irish Republican political party, visited the mural site on several occasions. In this photo we see Victor Ochoa standing next to Jerry Adams in the center of the picture.

A Chicano in Belfast…another LATINOPIA MOMENT IN TIME.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul
by Oscar Hijuelos

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com.

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Oscar Hijuelos, acclaimed Cuban-American author of eight books, wrote Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) as a prequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1986). In the prequel, Hijuelos gives readers the back story of the supremely beautiful woman who broke musician Nestor Castillo’s heart in The Mambo Kings.  And what a back story it is!

The book covers 45 years, starting with Maria in Cuba at the age of 17 and ending with her in Miami, Florida, at the age of 62. In this span, we see the pre-Castro island nation in all its glory, beauty, and seediness. We learn about the decline of life for Cubans once Castro assumed power, and we follow Maria and her toddler daughter, Teresita, when they emigrate to America with hundreds of others and struggle to build a new life.

Author, Oscar Hijuelos

In this span, Hijuelos lays the seeds for his themes and slowly unwraps each one like gifts we anticipate but also dread: the fleeting nature and complexity of love, even true love; the losses and suffering that even the good endure; the seeming indifference and cruelty of God; the importance of memory in our lives; and the essential role of family.

Beautiful Maria Garcia y Sifuentes is a 17-year-old naïve, illiterate country girl living in extreme poverty in a tiny village in western Cuba. Her two brothers, teenaged sister, and beloved mother have one by one died untimely deaths, leaving her broken-hearted and alone with her sometimes-abusive, sometimes-tender father. In 1947, Maria decides that she must seek her independence and leaves the only world she’s ever known to travel to Havana, a bustling, frightening city filled with goodness, coarseness, and evil. She becomes a dancer in a rundown nightclub and alone must navigate the dangers and temptations of the city’s night life.

Her gift—extreme beauty of face and body that draws barrages of attention—is likewise a curse. She tires of men trying to seduce her, trying to impose their coarseness upon her, and wonders if it’s possible to find a good man who can love her for more than beauty. She appreciates her gifts, however, and uses them to advance her career, rising to be the featured dancer in the club and working as a model.

Virginal Maria eventually takes up with an older man, Ignacio, who has a shady reputation as a small-time gangster but who is generous with his attention and money and provides her with respectability and stability. Like her father, however, he sometimes beats and denigrates her; and Maria decides to leave him. During a violent argument with Ignacio, she meets Nestor Castillo, a poetic, soulful, handsome musician who rescues her from Ignacio’s rage. Nestor’s humility and saintliness, as well as his physical beauty, immediately appeal to Maria; and she and Nestor soon become lovers. Their passion is intense and endless, depicted by the author in highly graphic, explicit detail.

Nestor, for all his talents in and out of bed, is poor and simple. His gifts—besides the anatomical ones well-documented by Hijuelos—lie in his songwriting and his undying commitment to Maria. But Maria, accustomed to luxury after living with Ignacio, can only imagine a life of poverty if she marries Nestor, who proposes to her repeatedly, each time being rebuffed. Although enamored of Nestor sexually, she is not sure she truly loves him, plus her financial comfort trumps life with Nestor. She thus returns to Ignacio, and the broken-hearted Nestor eventually leaves with his older brother, Cesar Castillo, for New York to start a new life. (The Mambo Kings depicts the brothers’ lives from this point forward.)

Maria takes pride in her rise from poverty and learns to read and write. As the years pass, her father, her last surviving family member, dies. Maria feels the loss of this last link with family very deeply. She also misses Nestor and realizes that she made a mistake in rejecting him. He writes her wistful letters of undying love, and reminds her of a song he’s perfecting in her honor: “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” Regarding Ignacio, she discovers several secret affairs. Each loss oozes a layer of hardness on Maria’s soul. Once devout, she now questions God and mocks him. She realizes that even love is “ephemeral and useless….like air.” The sweet, soft-hearted girl has become taciturn, critical, and jaded.

Maria comes to believe that having her own child will bring her happiness, and she wants Nestor to be the father. Although she learns that Nestor is now married and has two children, she believes Nestor still loves her, since he’s been writing letters to her since his departure to New York. She travels to New York to reunite with him and, hopefully, to be impregnated by him. Despite great qualms, Nestor agrees to meet Maria secretly and proceeds to ravage her like in old times. What happens after this secret reunion changes their lives forever and leads to great tragedy for both of them.

Hijuelos’ book is beautifully poetic in language and insights. He writes in a conversational style, filled with Cuban dialect, slang, and code-switching (alternating between English and Spanish), which makes his writing full of color and authenticity. Hijuelos creates memorable characters who are imperfect, who fill us with admiration and with revulsion. We can admire the tender-hearted Maria, but we can’t admire the young woman who chose money over love, or who, at the age of 50 and 60, is vain and largely unemotional. Nestor’s modesty as a young Cuban fills our hearts with respect, but his sexual foray as a married man shows his weakness. Still, these characters are human, and we can relate to them and learn from them.

Hijuelos has been criticized in the past for filling his books with too much sex, oftentimes in crude depictions. In this book, he can indeed be faulted for this. Although some sex scenes are described in evocative, literary language, the book could easily be reduced by dozens of pages with the elimination of redundant erotica that sometimes seems gratuitous. Hijueolos can also be faulted for his relentless repetition of “beautiful” throughout the book, and his descriptions of Maria’s beauty so oversaturated to the point of caricature. Again, this book could have been slimmer and still have been convincing.

No book is perfect. The importance of Beautiful Maria of My Soul  is the author’s deft, unique treatment of how loss and unrequited love cut mercilessly into the human spirit; but also of how extremely humanizing family connectedness is, and how time and memories can mellow us out, if we remain open to possibilities, and we can find love in the most unexpected places. Hijuelos’ book expertly convinces us of this.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

During the 1970s a vibrant Chicano theater movement spread across the United States. Inspired by the success of El Teatro Campesino, dozens of theater companies began performing for Latino audiences in parks, community center, churches and other public venues. One such group was El Teatro Espiritú de Aztlán (The Spirit of Aztlán) based in Fullerton, California. César Flores, the director of this theater company, explains how it was made up of at-risk youth and how the experience changed their lives.

During the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the term “Aztlán became popular as a way of referring to the American Southwest. Many Chicano artists adopted the term in their art works. Artists Gilbert Lujan, Ester Hernandez, Amalia Meza-Bains, Zarco Guerrero and Jose Montoya explain why the term “Aztlán” was so important for them.

“Before the End, After the Beginning”
Written by Dagoberto Gilb
Published by Grove Press
195 Pages
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Reviewed by Luís Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

You would think a collection of short stories imbued with meditations on mortality and the fragile nature of human existence itself would be ponderous and moribund. But that is certainly not the case with the latest book by celebrated writer Dagoberto Gilb. He deftly explores such issues through the perspectives of intriguing, complex characters and masterful sculpting with words. And there is subtle humor and sly wordplay as well, all adding up to a satisfying and heartwarming experience for the reader.

Gilb’s new book is an engaging and thought-provoking collection of short stories titled “Before the End, After the Beginning.” It’s a pity the short story, in the view of many, is a dying art form. This collection is a lively counterpoint to that assertion. Here’s a recommendation: turn of the TV tonight, settle into a comfortable chair and spend a pleasurable evening with this little treasure trove of a book.

Los Angeles-born Dagoberto Gilb is a prolific writer who has won the accolades of critics for more than twenty years. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking novel “The Magic of Blood.” It has been regarded as a landmark of Chicano literature. But it is much more than that. It transcends any pigeonholing of genre. It is an example of fine literature – period.

His new book was created under somewhat unusual circumstances. About two years ago Gilb was knocked for a loop when he suffered a debilitating stroke. Dogged persistence helped him gradually recover. And the stories in this collection were crafted during the process of his recovery. That process informs some of these stories, sometimes overtly and sometimes a bit more subtly.

Dagboberto Gilb at La Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

The collection begins with a story titled “Please, Thank You.” It is told from the point of view of a young man in the hospital, feeling like a fish out of water. The character wakes up and finds he’s survived some severe medical trauma. He has trouble focusing. He has trouble remembering. He’s uncertain about the tactile world around him. He struggles as he tries to get his mind and his body to work in unison. And the tale is told in a style that befits the confused perspective of someone undergoing such an ordeal. It is all written in lower-case, with sparse and inconsistent punctuation. Again, a style that reflects the perspective of the character as he tries to make sense of his surroundings and sense of his own identity and personal history.
Gilb is quite the wordsmith. When he is at his best as a sculptor with words, he invites comparison to the lofty, magical prose of Salman Rushdie, among the most masterful of wordsmiths.

Another story in Gilb’s new collection weaves a tale of a man who goes to Mexico, seemingly with the intention of living out his final days. The gradual degeneration of his memory and ability to navigate the world around him evoke essential questions about who we are and what makes us what we are. Heady stuff. But woven in beautifully literate and accessible fashion. It is typical of the stories in this fine collection from one of this country’s most emerging innovative writers.
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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

The late Dr. Shifra Goldman (1926-2011) is considered by many as the foremost scholar and historian of Chicano Art.  Beginning in the 1960s,  she was instrumental in putting Chicano Art movement on the map through her articles, essays, books, lectures and her mentoring and dialog with Latino artists throughout the United States and Mexico.  Latinopia visited with her in 2003 before she became incapacitated due to Alzheimer’s disease.  For more info on Shifra Goldman check out the Abel Salas article in the L.A. Weekly.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com .

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Two milestone events regarding the vaunted Puerto-Rican American author, Piri Thomas, occurred recently: He passed away last month in Northern California at the age of 83; and his iconic memoir, Down These Mean Streets, celebrated its 44th birthday. Though the first event breaks our hearts, and the second uplifts us, both attest to the longevity of Thomas’ artistry and influence and the wonderful luck our society has had in having Piri Thomas in our midst for all these years.

He died an icon, a proverbial legend in his own time. When Mean Streets was published in 1967, Thomas was one of the first modern-day Latinos to publish a book in English. He followed this break-out with two novels, a collection of short stories, and many poems, which he termed “wordsongs” and performed in varied venues all over the world. Yet it’s Mean Streets, which has been continuously in print, that cemented Thomas’ reputation as a literary tour de force and which readers most associate with Piri Thomas.

The book’s enduring fame is strongly warranted. One reviewer calls it “three books in one”: a coming-of-age saga chronicling the tragedies, crimes, and entanglements in Thomas’ life; an examination of the identity crisis many disadvantaged, mixed heritage youths undergo; and a story showing readers the bristling underside of Piri’s six years in the infamous Sing-Sing Prison of New York. Yet the author expertly weaves these separate themes together in his fast-paced, brutally authentic recreation of his difficult life growing up poor, half-Black, half-Puerto Rican, in an era of entrenched racism uglier than it now is.

The book begins in 1941, shortly before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into World War II. To 12-year-old Piri in New York’s Harlem during the “Great Hunger called Depression,” the big “rumble” means that his father now has a decent job in an airplane factory. Otherwise: “Life in the streets didn’t change much. The bitter cold was followed by the sticky heat….War or peace—what difference did it really make?” Indeed, there is no distinction between Piri’s world before and after the great rumble, because his wars with his family, peers, racism, violence, drugs, crime, and society in general are just beginning and will disrupt his world for decades to come.

Author, Piri Thomas

Piri is a dark-skinned child in a bi-racial family where, other than his Black father, everyone is light-skinned and can pass for White. He frequently clashes with his father, who treats him with less love and harsher physical discipline than Piri’s four younger siblings receive. Convinced that his father doesn’t truly love him because of his darkness, Piri seeks solace in the streets, where he navigates the unwritten laws of survival in the barrio: Prove yourself to be tough. Survive beatings at the hands of racist kids and rival gang members. Fight back hard. Don’t rat out enemies, and be “cool.” Above all, be loyal to your friends, going with the flow, “playing it smooth.” He emphasizes: “Never punk out.”

So by the time Piri is 16, he belongs to a gang, beats up rivals, uses drugs, slugs a teacher, engages in homosexuality, and robs a store: all in the name of group loyalty. When his parents move the family to Long Island for “better opportunities,” Piri is reviled by racist schoolmates, and he drops out of school to return to Harlem, often living on the streets. It breaks his mother’s heart, but Piri yearns for the security of the old neighborhood. His life of crime in Harlem, filled as it is with hunger, poverty, drug addiction, and isolation from family, is nonetheless tied to camaraderie, to unconditional acceptance, and is a siren’s song Piri cannot resist. He states: “All for the feeling of belonging, for the price of being called ‘one of us.’ Isn’t there a better way to make the scene and be accepted on the street without having to go through hell?”

Piri undertakes a double-layered odyssey to discover who and what he is. On the one hand, it’s a physical journey that takes him, as a teenager, through the Deep South, around the world with the Merchant Marines, and back and forth between Harlem and Long Island. Outside of Harlem, he faces discrimination almost everywhere he goes. It seems that Piri seeks a place that will prove his worldview wrong, that he wants proof that his skin color does not determine his value as a human being. Unfortunately, in these journeys, Piri does not find such a place.

On another layer, his odyssey is highly personal and emotional as he struggles to believe that he is loved fully in his own family. He tries to reconcile his affection for his family with his bitterness toward their “whiteness.” It’s an eternal battle in his heart. His utter devotion to his mother opposes his antipathy toward his father, whom he sees as having rejected his own Black heritage with lies about his lineage. Piri’s hatred of Whites is profound, but this creates immense conflict. He says: “It was like hating Momma for the color she was and Poppa for the color he wasn’t.” He also states: “It ain’t just that I don’t wanna be what I’m supposed to be, it’s just that I’m fightin’ me and the whole goddamn world at the same time.” It’s one of the book’s great ironies that, as Piri struggles to win full acceptance from his family, he rejects them and ostracizes himself.

An armed robbery in which Piri shoots a police officer and is almost shot to death lands him in prison, where, with time, he finally finds himself—through carefully choosing his con friends, studying every major religion, attending classes, and eventually turning to writing. “Every day,” the author writes, “brought a painful awareness of the sweetness of being free and the horror of prison’s years going down the toilet bowl.” He sought “a release from the overpowering hatred against a society that makes canaries out of human beings.” In a heart-wrenching reflection, he adds: “I wanted to tell somebody I wanted to be somebody.” The peace and release he ultimately finds are an apt denouement to his evolution.

Down These Mean Streets is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of one man’s decline and renascence. Piri Thomas’ rat-a-tat-tat dialogue injects a sensual immediacy that grabs the reader and doesn’t loosen up. The economical descriptions of the people, good and bad, who cross Piri’s path and fill his life are true-to-life. But the greatest treasures between the book covers are Thomas’ thoughtful, lyrical passages that underscore his renown as a poet. When Piri most doubts himself, when he most fervently fishes in his mind for answers to his fears, when he most reflects upon his learnings in prison—and his realization that, as he says, “Nothing is run the same, nothing stays the same. You can’t make yesterday come back today”—the author’s poetic words soar through the air and lend a gentle, almost spiritual layer to his book.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com .

Elsa Flores Almaráz is an accomplished visual artist who works in paint and photography. She is also the widow of the late celebrated Chicano artist Carlos Almaráz (1941-1989). All the time she was married to Almaráz, she was also pursuing her own artistry. This has culminated in a one-woman show at the Fremont Art Gallery in South Pasadena, California, in 2010. Latinopia was there to cover the event and ask about how the exhibit came about.

Danny De la Paz is a celebrated actor of stage and screen. With a career that spans decades, he is perhaps best remembered for his riveting portrayals of”Chuco” in the movie “Boulevard Nights” and “Puppet” in the movie “American Me.” Latinopia asked Danny the difference in these two iconic roles and how he came to be cast as “Puppet.” To find out more about Danny De La Paz visit his website: www.krazyvatosemporium.com

Carmen Tafolla is a playwright and performer based in San Antonio, Texas. In her one-woman show she portrays many different barrio personages. In “Occupation None,” she embodies the voice of a 91-year old barrio grandmother answering questions of a census taker.

The term Aztlán is used throughout the barrios of the Southwest to refer to the ancient homeland of the Mexica people–the ancestors of today’s Mexicans and Mexican Americans. But what exactly is Aztlán? Here Prof. Fermín
Herrera, a professor of nahuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs, explains the origins of the name “Aztlán” and how Aztlán was the home from which the Mexicas came when they finally settled in the Valley of Mexico, sometime around the year 1325 A.D.

Dagoberto Gilb is a Mexican American writer of short stories and novels whose short story collection The Magic of Blood won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway award. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Best American Essays. Latinopia was delighted to interview Dagoberto and ask him about  the “voice” of the characters in his writings.

MOMENT IN TIME “TIJERINA MEETS GALARZA”

What happens when two celebrated Chicano leaders, whose fight for justice and equality of Mexican Americans is legendary, meet for the first time?  This is the topic of this Latinopia Moment in Time.

Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) is one of the most respected of pioneering Chicano leaders. Born in Nayarit, Mexico, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and settled in Sacramento, California in 1913. He wrote about his early childhood in his acclaimed memoir, Barrio Boy (1971) Though poor, Galarza’s talent earned him a scholarship to Occidental College from which he obtained a B.A. degree in 1927. He later earned a M.A. degree from Stanford University in 1929 and a doctorate in history from Columbia University in New York City in 1944. A labor organizer, historian and community activist, Galarza worked with the Pan American Union from 1936 to 1947, focusing on labor and education in Latin American. An advocate for the rights of farm workers and an organizer for the National Farm Labor Union, he was a leader in one of the first union strikes against California grape growers from 1947 to 1950.. The union’s strike was defeated by unscrupulous machinations between California grape growers and a then up-and-coming California Congressman named Richard Nixon. Galarza wrote about this collusion in his 1970 book Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field.  Galarza continued as a social activist, advocating for the rights of Mexican Americans and writing bilingual children’s books until his death in 1984. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature in 1976.

Reies López Tijerina was born on September 21, 1926 of migrant farm worker parents in Falls City, Texas. A fundamentalist itinerant preacher, he created the Valley of Peace religious center in Southern Arizona in 1956. At about this time Tijerina learned of many families in the state of New Mexico who had been dispossessed of their ancestral lands. Tijerina had a mystic vision which he interpreted as a calling to move to New Mexico to help the Hispanos there reclaim legal jurisdiction over ancient land grants. In 1962 he formed the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The National Alliance of Towns) in Albuquerque. His activities soon attracted the attention of New Mexico authorities and in 1967, a public meeting that Tijerina had convened was disbanded by the District Attorney of Rio Arriba County, Alfonso Sánchez. In response Tijerina led an armed assault on the courthouse at the town of Tierra Amarilla seeking to place a citizen’s arrest on the District Attorney for abridging Tijerina’s freedom of expression (see Latinopia Event 1967 Tijerina Courthouse Raid). Tijerina later served time in prison for his activities but by the 1970s was lauded as an advocate for Chicano rights.

This photo of the historic meeting between Tijerina (left)  and Galarza (right) was taken on May 5, 1972 when Ernesto Galarza and Reies López Tijerina were invited to speak at the University of California at San Diego. The photo was taken by Dennis F. Hernández who graciously granted Latinopia permission to post it. The tantalizing question that comes to mind: “What are these two Chicano activist leaders talking about?”

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California”

by Carlos Manuel Salomon

University of Oklahoma Press

223 pages

Luis Torres luis.r.torres@charter.net (626) 577-5664 March 10, 2011

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Have you ever visited the stately and ornate Pico House near Olvera Street, in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall? Ever wondered what went on in that building and how it got its name? A new book about Pio Pico, the last governor of California during the Mexican era will inform you and will give you a fascinating glimpse into the early history of California, a time when it went from being part of Mexico to becoming the 31st state in the United States of America.

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California” by Carlos Manuel Salomon uses the intriguing and often quixotic life of Pio de Jesús Pico as a thread for revealing remarkable historical, political and cultural trends that marked California’s often rocky transition from Mexican to United States sovereignty. It is a tale of military heroism, political maneuvering, far reaching real estate shenanigans and efforts to overcome prejudice and injustice. All the tale needs is a comely heroine or a rescued damsel in distress. But it is history, not fiction. And it is a briskly-told tale in the hands of Salomon who has devoted years of study and painstaking research to the life of Pio Pico who was born in 1801 and died 1894.

Pio Pico was twice the governor of California during the Mexican era. He at times was a rebel leader of a militia. He was an astute politician. He was a rancher with vast tracts of property, including his beloved Whittier Ranchito. He was an aggressive, yet sometimes naive, businessman who built and ran the elegant, bustling hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which now bears his name and is a meticulously restored historical landmark — the Pico House.

Pio Pico first became governor of California in 1831 after he was among the leaders of a revolt against the incumbent Mexican governor. That popular rebellion swept him into office for the first time. During his second term as governor, in 1845 he “fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States,” according to Salomon. It is Pico’s role in the transition of California that is particularly noteworthy historically.

Gov. Pio Pico and Wife

Relying on sources in both English and Spanish, Salomon chronicles the achievements that made Pico an extremely rich man and patriarch as well as the miscalculations that ultimately led to his political and financial downfall. Pico lost his huge Ranchito Whittier when he lost a series of lawsuits originally filed by adversarial investors and businessmen. In his old age he was left penniless.

Salomon concludes that Pico’s losses in court resulted from demonstrably false testimony and legal underhandedness. Something other Californios (original Mexican settlers) encountered in the transition. “But along the way, Pico also made some unwise business transactions and his ultimate demise was more associated with corrupt and cunning individuals who conspired to destroy the old governor than a systematic process aimed at destroying all Californios,” he writes in “Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California.” Pico died a pauper, but when he was at the top of his game, he had been undeniably been a wealthy and influential force in California.

California, of course, had long been a territory of New Spain and then of Mexico. Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, a time when a young Pio Pico was making his way as a young man in southern California. Twenty-five years later Mexico and the United States (which was caught up in the intoxicating jingoistic wave of “Manifest Destiny”) went to war. When the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) was over, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory to the United States. California was perhaps the biggest prize.

Pio Pico was governor at that time and although he and other “Californios” failed in their efforts to forestall the acquisition of California by the “gringos,” he became, for the most part, a force of peaceful reconciliation in the years of the transition. Salomon writes, “Pico was able to continue investing in real estate well into the 1870s and his survival as an important economic force following the U.S.-Mexican War, his centrality in the politics of early California, and his place among Californios help illuminate the larger political, economic and racial transformation taking place in nineteenth-century California.”

Pio Pico was of African and mestizo heritage, as were many of the settlers in early California. He worked to mitigate some of the harsh policies and practices that subjugated the indigenous population, including Gabrielinos, or Tongvas as they called themselves. His own life was a reflection of the changes — both good and bad — that occurred in the transition from Mexican to American rule in California, as Salomon ably demonstrates.

The book is fundamentally the life story of an interesting and historically significant individual. However, Salomon generally uses Pico as the vehicle for looking at the events of his era. One book can’t cover every issue, of course, but the book might have been enhanced with a closer look at the role the church, the military and the state played in subjugating the indigenous populations of California. Pio Pico was, after all, an eyewitness to that phenomenon. And it is an important, if painful, chapter of early California history.

You might want to consider these historical threads next time you visit the stately Pico House in downtown Los Angeles.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

Roberto Olivares is a member of the “Ojo de Agua” (Eye of Water) film collective based in Oaxaca, Mexico. The group produces documentaries about the indigenous communities of Mexico while also empowering these communities with instruction on video production so that they can tell their own stories. Latinopia asked Roberto to tell us about “Ojo de Agua.”

“The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940″
University of Arizona Press
(www.uapress.arizona.edu)
Roberto Chao Romero

Reviewed by Luis Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

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The first “illegal immigrants” to cross into the United States from Mexico weren’t Mexicans. They were Chinese. A new book by a professor of Chicano studies at UCLA reveals that and other salient and startling anecdotes about borderland history.

In “The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940” Robert Chao Romero examines a little known realm of United States-Mexico social history. It’s a safe bet that very few Americans know about the rich, intriguing (and sometimes unsettling) story of Mexican Chinese.

It is a social history that is joined at the hip with the story of Chinese Americans. There was a substantial wave of immigration from China to Mexico in the late nineteenth century. The social and cultural consequences of that wave of immigration still reverberate in Mexico and the United States today. As a minor, benign example of that, ever wonder why the best Chinese restaurants in North America are arguably not in San Francisco but in Mexicali? It’s one remnant of a long legacy of a borderland phenomenon of Chinese immigration and transplanted culture.

There are parallels between the way Chinese immigrants were treated in the United States and the way they were treated in Mexico. And there are historical parallels between the way Chinese — as newcomers — were treated and the way in which many Mexican newcomers to the United States were treated. Often, it is an unpleasant story. But it is part of our collective experience. And the Chinese in the U.S. and in Mexico have endured, owing to their perseverance, resourcefulness and strong sense of community.

The Chinese in the United States, of course, provided valuable service in building the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese were encouraged to come here for their cheap labor. There were organized commercial recruitment campaigns, championed by the governments of both the United States and China. But anti-Chinese resentment soon built to a crescendo in the late 1880s. Finally the U.S. sought to ban all Chinese immigration when it passed the nefarious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It made it illegal for Chinese to come to the United States.

But the turmoil and landlessness in such regions as Guangdong (Canton) still forced Chinese immigrants to seek new opportunities outside China. So, many shifted their target from California to Mexico. Streams of immigrants poured into Mexico, beginning in 1882.

Some immigrants intended to seek their fortunes in Mexico, but many used the passage to Mexico as a stop on their clandestine way into the United States. Romero argues that those Chinese, who paid smugglers to get them into the United States and used a variety of sophisticated ruses to enter the U.S., became the first “illegal immigrants” making their way into this country.

Romero writes, “Unknown to most people, the Chinese were the first ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Mexico, and they created the first organized system of human smuggling from Mexico to the United States. As part of their efforts to circumvent the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Laws, Chinese immigrants created a vast transnational smuggling business that involved agents and collaborators in China, Mexico, Cuba and various cities throughout the United States.”

History repeats itself as today we see Mexican undocumented immigrants determined to make their way across the border, often at great risk to their lives.

And history repeats itself in the manner in which anti-Chinese sentiment lead to violent persecution of Chinese — in both Mexico and the United States.

Throughout their history in the Americas, Chinese immigrants were victims of virulent racism and violent attacks. It is a shameful part of Los Angeles history that saw lynchings and wanton murders of Chinese. The most egregious example of that is the infamous Los Angeles massacre of October 24, 1871.

As quoted in Jean Pfaelzer’s seminal book “Driven Out,” the “Alta California” newspaper of the period printed this account: “Twelve hours ago…fifteen staring corpses hung ghastly in the moonlight, while seven or eight others, mutilated, torn and crushed, lay in our streets, all of them Chinamen.”

Actually, when the tally was complete, it was revealed that seventeen Chinese were lynched and two others were knifed to death on the night of October 24, 1871. Pfaelzer writes: “Their mangled bodies were found hanging from a wooden awning over a carriage shop, from the sides of two prairie schooners parked around the corner, from a gutter spout, and from a beam across the wide gate of a lumberyard. One of the victims wore no trousers and a finger had been severed from his left hand.”

A hostile lynch mob attacked the residents of L.A.’s Chinatown, which was then located where Union Station stands today. It was the culmination of growing anti-Chinese hysteria. The Chinese were accused of spreading crime and disease. They were accused of “taking our jobs” and of unfair competition in business.

Familiar accusations aimed at Mexicans by Anglos in the years to come.

But anti-Chinese bigotry reared its ugly head not only in the United States, but in Mexico as well. Romero documents the pernicious case of the Torreon Massacre of 1911 in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. As in the United States, racist hatred of the Chinese was growing. Romero writes, “The most horrendous incident of Mexican subaltern violence perpetrated against Chinese immigrants during the early revolutionary years took place in the city of Torreon, Coahuila, on May 14 and 15, 1911.”

More than 300 Chinese were summarily and brutally murdered by soldiers of the Mexican revolution. Their only “crime” was that they were Chinese. With meticulous research, Romero unearths documents and contemporaneous accounts that name names and provide gruesome details. Romero writes, “The massacre of Torreon was the worst act of violence committed against any Chinese diasporic community of the Americas during the twentieth century.”

All part of a legacy of xenophobia and intolerance.

Not a pretty picture, of course. But it is part of our collective history. And it is something we should know about and bear in mind to help us keep contemporary issues of immigration and “otherness” in perspective.

One significant difference between the Chinese experience in Mexico and in the United States involves intermarriage. Eventually in Mexico many Chinese men married Mexican women. Families of “chino/mexicanos” thrive in Mexico today. By contrast, because of strictly enforced anti-miscegenation laws, mixed race marriages were almost non-existent in the U.S.

Robert Chao Romero ably provides the documented evidence of the treatment of Chinese immigrants. His prose doesn’t have the flair of others who have written memorable social histories, such as Jean Pfaelzer and the unparalleled storyteller Simon Winchester, who makes social history come alive with his finely tuned narrative touches. Yet,“The Chinese in Mexico” provides us with a valuable look into relatively unknown, and significant, chapters of our borderland history.

It is an important milestone in the field, and could serve as a catalyst for further study and illumination about the Chinese in the Americas.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

By 1967, the protracted strike by farm workers against California grape growers has reached national proportions. The Teatro Campesino, whose principal members now included Luis Valdez, Daniel Valdez, Agustín Lira and Felipe Cantú, was now an indispensable arm of the struggle. But soon other issues began to intrude into the teatro. Foremost among these issues was the war in Vietnam.

Los Lobos is the premiere band of East Los Angeles. Formed in 1973, the band has won three Grammys and an international following. Latinopia asked the group’s drummer and songwriter, Louie Pérez, how the band was formed and what led to their first album, “Just Another Band from East L.A.”

David Garza is a truly original song writer and singer from Austin, Texas. His songs are sparse, emotive and his lyrics are evocative and full of nuance and meaning. Latinopia filmed him at an outdoor venue where he was singing his original composition, “Minority Boys Got Cash” from his album “Dream Delay.” We’ve subtitled the song to make sure you catch all the cool lyrics.

Dr. Rodolfo Francisco Acuña

Dr. Rodolfo Francisco Acuña is a historian, educator and social activist. In 1969, he co-founded the Chicana/o Studies Department at San Fernando Valley State College (later called California State University at Northridge). This was arguably the first department of Chicana/o Studies in the nation. Dr. Acuña served as its first chair. Because of his pioneering role in developing Chicano Studies as a respected academic discipline he is often referred to as “the father of Chicano Studies.”

Rodolfo Acuña was born to the Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights on May 18, 1932. His mother was Alicia Elias, originally from Sonora, Mexico and his father was Francisco originally from Jalisco, Mexico. Acuña attended Loyola High School and graduated in 1951. He earned his B.A. degree in social sciences (1957), a General Education Credential (1958) and Master’s Degree in history (1962) from Los Angeles State College (now called California State University at Los Angeles). He received his doctorate in Latin American Studies in 1968 from the University of Southern California. Married and with children Acuña pursued his education at night, working 50/60 hours a week and carrying 16/18 units.

While earning his doctorate degree, Acuña was actively engaged in the emerging Chicano civil rights movement. In 1961 he was involved in the Latin American Civic Association, a grass-roots organization of Mexican American parents, students and educators concerned with improving educational opportunities for Mexican American youth and founding headstart programs. Through the years, he was involved to reforming education for Mexican American students.

In 1968, Dr. Acuna was recruited to start a Chicano Studies curriculum at the college level, creating the first Chicana/o Studies department at what is today the University of California at Northridge. Previously he had taught Mexican American studies classes at Mt. St. Mary’s and Dominguez Hills State College. He had previous to that published two elementary school books and a high school/community college text on Mexican Americans History.

Dr. Acuña is perhaps best known for his landmark history of Mexican Americans in the United States, Occupied America, A History of Chicanos, first published in 1972 and currently in its 7^th edition. This exhaustive chronicling of Chicano history has become the standard text in Chicano Studies classes throughout the United States.

Dr. Acuña with students

In addition to carrying on a full teaching load for more than forty years at California State University at Northridge, Dr. Acuña is a prolific author. Besides Occupied America, his more notable books include, The Story of the Mexican American (1969), Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975 (1984), Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (1996), Sometimes There is No Other Side: Essays on Truth and Objectivity (1998), U.S. Latino Issues (2004), Voices of the U.S. Latino Experience (2008). His current work is The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe, will be published in 2011 by Rutgers University Press

In addition to his books, Dr. Acuña has authored chapters in dozens of anthologies and scholarly texts, and has written hundreds of book reviews, scholarly articles and opinion editorials in numerous academic journals, newspapers and magazines.

In 1989, Dr. Acuña was one of the founders of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, “a multiracial anti-corporate ‘think tank/act tank’ and national school for organizers, committed to building democratic international social movements.”

In 1990, Dr. Acuña applied for a senior professorship in the Chicano Studies Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, but was denied the position by a faculty review committee–this despite the fact that his application had been solicited from the department and that he was the only person recommended for the position.

Dr. Acuña sued the University in 1992 for racial, political and age discrimination in federal court. The political cause of action was dropped because it missed the statue of limitation by one week and the race discrimination cause of action was dismissed by the federal trial judge after three years. It was on appeal and among other things judicial bias was claimed. The judge a agreed to hear the age discrimination case. On October 30, 1995 a jury determined that Acuna had been discriminated against because of his age and awarded him $326,000. Dr. Acuna used the funds to create a non-profit foundation, the FOR Chicana Chicano Studies Foundation, which initially awarded grants to victims of discrimination in higher education but now also awards educational scholarships.

Dr. Acuña with Congressman Raul Grijalva (AZ)

Dr. Acuña’s list of awards and recognitions is impressive. He has received Ford and Rockefeller Foundation research grants, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Association of Chicano Studies, the 2006 National Hispanic Hero Award from the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, the 2007 Labor Strategy Center Award, the 2008 Lifetime Achievement award from the National Hispanic Institute and the 2009 Lifetime Achievement award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). Black Issues in Higher Education recognized Dr. Acuña as one of the “100 Most Influential Educators in the 20^th Century,” and the LA Weekly featured him as one of the 100 Los Angeles shakers and movers.

He has also been honored for his writings. Three of his books were each recognized with the Gustavus Myers award for Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America; he has also received the CHOICE award from the American Library Association. His community activism has been recognized by the Emil Freed Award for Community Service from the Southern California Social Science Library, the Founder’s Award from the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Historian of the Lions Award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and the Activist/Scholar Award from the Community Coalition of South Central Los Angeles.

Throughout his career as historian and educator, Dr. Acuna has maintained a public presence as a scholar/activist, speaking out on issues such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the plight of undocumented Latino workers in the United States. and the censorship of ethnic studies in the public schools of Arizona. Most recently, Dr. Acuña has been involved in defending the banning of books and Mexican American studies from the Arizona public schools.