REMEMBERING SAL CASTRO.

Some 45 years ago Sal Castro told me, “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders – for a guerito – go out and do something good for yourself and for your gente.” He said it with a wicked smile and a knowing nod of his head. That was back in 1968 when I was a student of Sal Castro’s at Lincoln High School. I had just learned that I’d been accepted to college and stopped by his classroom after school to share the news. I never forgot what he said to me all those years ago – through college and through a professional career in journalism. He always good-naturedly kidded me about being a blondish, fair skinned Chicano. (The hair is long gone.) Sal was always alternately serious and playful. He had a great sense of humor. And he had a steely determination to stand up for equality and justice, and he tried to instill that determination in his students.

We lost Sal recently. He was 79 years old. He fought cancer for the last few years of his life. Cancer eventually won that battle. But Sal won many battles throughout his life. He was the catalyst and inspiration for the 1968 Eastside high school walkouts. He fought against racism and discrimination throughout his professional life. He stood up to school administrators and school officials whom we can charitably describe as “insensitive” to the needs of Chicano students. He had courage, the trait I admire most.

He urged students in 1968 to walk out of school, to stage a massive student strike. It took courage for the students to do that, inasmuch as we were threatened with expulsion – or worse—by school administrators who knew the walkouts were likely coming. I certainly wasn’t a leader or organizer of the walkouts. Others in my class took on that role. They were often clumsy and unsophisticated as leaders, but they ended up doing an admirable job when all was said and done. It was a remarkable achievement. Sal helped the students realize that something was wrong and that we could do something about it. Because of the walkouts, the city of Los Angeles, and the country, had to sit up and take notice of Chicano students and their desire for a better education than they were getting in the segregated schools. And Sal was the spirit and conscience of that entire endeavor, at great personal cost to him. I walked out with a notebook and a tape recorder. I was the editor of the student paper, “The Railsplitter,” and the walkouts were my first Big Story.

But the walkouts were just the beginning of the story for Sal. He was fired. He faced criminal charges and his personal life was shattered in the immediate aftermath of the walkouts. But the Chicano community rallied around him and with a great deal of effort and, yes, with a good amount of courage, the community was able to get Sal back into the classroom and force school authorities to begin the process of improving education for Chicano kids. We owe a great deal to Sal.

His tireless work sparked a process of change within the Los Angeles Unified School District and beyond. It was a glacially slow process for some, but it was clear things would not be the same after the walkouts. Some of that change was evident when I attended a ceremony at the hearing room of the LAUSD School Board on March 4, 2008. It was organized by Monica Garcia, president of the school board. (Imagine that. A progressive Chicana as head of the school board; that would have been unheard of in 1968.) Along with Sal Castro and other students from Lincoln and from Garfield we were there to receive certificates celebrating our participation in the walkouts. Again, something seemingly unheard of. What I remember about that day a few years ago was how the Earth seemed to be turned upside down.

In the late 1960s Sal was vilified by the school authorities. He was a “trouble-maker.” He was a “destructive force.” And he was called much worse. On that day commemorating the 1968 school walkouts in 2008 Sal was extolled as “a great leader and a visionary.” My, how things had changed. In 1968 school officials wanted his head. Now, he was being praised for his work, and deservedly so. But the surreality of the change from then to now always stuck with me. When he spoke at that commemoration, Sal talked about the work that was still ahead to ensure equal opportunity for all kids in public school. There was still a lot to be accomplished, he said.

And he was right, of course. After I left Lincoln High, went to college and graduate school and began a long career in broadcasting and journalism, I stayed in touch with Sal. He became a friend and a trusted source on educational issues. He never lost the fire in his eyes for the battles to be fought. He never lost his enthusiasm for the task of encouraging Chicano students to do well and to embrace their proud heritage. I’ll always remember his commitment to justice. And I won’t forget his sense of humor either. Even though he sometimes playfully gave me a hard time for being a guerito among a sea of morenos.

____________________________________________________________________________

 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.

He can be reached at  luis.r.torres@charter.net

JACKIE ROBINSON.

Not long ago something happened that really had me scratching my head.

I accompanied a friend of mine who went to Tucson to shoot a little film about the political scene in Arizona, a state where Latinos seem to be under siege. The first stop on that little tour was the office that been the campaign office for Congressman Raul Grijalva. A group of Chicano students from Cal State Northridge had gone down there to help with some street canvassing. The office walls were decorated with a number of photographs of iconic American figures.

I walked up to a wall where a photo was hanging. It was classic black and white photograph of a Major League Baseball player sliding into home plate, his Brooklyn Dodgers cap flying dramatically off his head. I’d seen that photo lots of times. When I was seven or eight years old I remember first seeing it in Life Magazine. A young Chicana was staring at the picture when I walked up beside it, admiring it – and admiring the thought of this young Mexican American woman being impressed with what the photo evoked. I said to her, “Well, there he is, amazing to think about what that represents isn’t it?” She stared at me blankly. Her eyes seemed to say, “What the heck are you talking about?”

Immediately,  I started thinking, “Maybe this print is just to blurry and out of focus for her to see clearly who that baseball player was.” I was wrong. I said to her, “That’s Number 42.” Now she looked at me as if I was from another planet, or smoking something that’s now presumably legal in Colorado.

A bit exasperated I said finally, “That’s Jackie Robinson.” Then, astonishingly to me, she said, “Who is that?” Then I looked at her as if she was from Mars.

I ended up giving her a two-minute history of Jackie Robinson and the trancendent social-historical-political significance of his breaking of the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947. “Really, I didn’t know that,” the college student replied.

I walked away from that conversation stunned.  I stood there as if I was frozen at the plate, bat in hand, having taken a called third strike hurled with blinding speed by Sandy Koufax.

A dozen questions bounced around in my head. How could an apparently intelligent college student not know who Jackie Robinson was? Is it a generational thing? Is it just that I’m heading into codgerdom; maybe I’m making the wrong assumptions about what young, educated people should know? Am I just assuming too much about our collective contemporary American history? And the final question I asked myself: where did we go wrong that someone in this country just wouldn’t know something as basic as who Jackie Robinson was and what he represents – to all of us?

That incident happened a while back, but thoughts of it were rekindled recently when I saw a trailer online about the new biopic “42”. The film opens to coincide with opening day of the baseball season.

For days I seemed a little bit obsessed with that encounter with the college student in front of that iconic photograph. I went out of my way to ask people what they thought about it. I found myself asking twenty-somethings at Starbucks or at Vons or at the library if they knew who Jackie Robinson was. Nothing scientific about my “survey” of course, but I was astonished again and again the more I probed. Young folks – black and white, Latino and Asian American – didn’t seem to know who I was talking about. (At one point at dinner my wife chided me, “Just give a rest.”) Yet, I was a bit obsessed by all this.

Who else doesn’t register with young people? Do young people also not know about Rosa Parks? Cesar Chavez?  Neil Armstrong? Goodness, even president Kennedy and the assassination? Individuals in history are mileposts in our collective experience. They’re the catalysts into historical epochs. Stuff, it seems to me, we should all know and share. I wanted to fault the school system, which let’s face it, is under attack for seemingly doing everything wrong. That’s not entirely fair, of course, given that public schools have their share of problems and are probably earnest in doing the best they can. But something is wrong somewhere. I certainly don’t know the answer, but I am troubled by the consequences.

Maybe it’s just that I live in Pasadena, the mecca of all things Jackie Robinson and my perspective is skewed. No I don’t think that’s it. I grew up in East L.A. and I certainly knew who he was. Maybe it’s because I played baseball as a kid and that’s why I knew. No, that can’t be it. It’s something I grappled with and still grapple with.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, after all and maybe I should stop fretting that some young people just don’t know who Jackie Robinson is and what his accomplishments mean to this country. Maybe I’m just getting old and maybe I’m losing perspective. One young person I quizzed at the grocery store told me, “That all happened before I was born, how should I know about it and why should I know about it.” That did it. Hey, I wasn’t around when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, but books have told me who he is. So that explanation by that kid in the grocery store just doesn’t wash with me.

Where have we gone wrong?
__________________________________________________________________________________

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.

LET’S GET TOUGH ON ILLEGAL BORDER-CROSSERS!

That’s it! I’ve had enough. All this talk about immigration reform. All this talk about “Let’s just accept the fact that they’re here and let’s give them a path to citizenship.” Amnesty? I don’t think so. Enough already! The fact is they brazenly broke the law by coming here without papers. They sneaked across the border into the good ol’ U-S of A. They are criminals – plain and simple. Enough of these sob stories about how resourceful and determined they are to seek a better life in America. If they want a pathway to citizenship, I say they should go back across the border and come into the United States legally. I’m tired of all these illegal border-crossers. I say, “Go back to where you came from!”

Canada!

Yeah, I’m talking about all those illegal aliens from across the border who talk funny. They don’t even speak American! What’s that stuff about putting “Eh” (or is it “ay?”) after every sentence? And they’re taking our jobs, jobs that good Americans would take if they could get ‘em. And they’re diluting and polluting our American culture. All this allegiance to hockey! Why it’s un-American, I tell you. Pretty soon we won’t be celebrating Independence Day on the Fourth of July. Before you know it we’ll be celebrating some weird holiday like Dominion Day on the First of July.

And it’s all because of those illegal border-crossers who have nestled here in the United States, hoping no one will notice. They’re sneaky, this bunch of illegals. I say send them back where they came from. Them damn foreigners.

Them damn Canadians.

They just keep sneaking across the border, “blending in” to America, taking our jobs and slowly transforming our American culture. To show you how sneaky they are, I bet you didn’t know some of the familiar faces you see on TV and in the movies are those sneaky alien Canadians. Here are some of them, in no particular order, no más para que sepan: Pamela Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Paul Anka, Bryan Adams, John Candy (okay he’s already dead, so never mind him), Raymond Burr (ditto), Jim Carrey, Kim Cattrall, Cirque du Soleil, Celine Dion, Michael J. Fox, Nelly Furtado, Monty Hall, William Shatner, Robert Goulet, Rich Little, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young (Okay, we’ll look the other way on Neil Young because of his great contribution to pop music.) Get the picture? They’ve infested our country, these aliens.

Okay, okay – some of these Canadians have been here a long time and it would be hard to deport ‘em. But what about the other millions of less-well-known Canadians who have insinuated themselves into the United States of America? I say we take immediate steps to develop a comprehensive immigration reform policy to deal with them. Sure, some of these alien Canadians may claim they were brought here by their parents as children and had no say in the matter. Okay, if they are now law-abiding adults and have either gone to college or served responsibly in our armed services, let’s consider a kind of Dream Act for them. They could stay here, if they pay a fine, admit their guilt and pledge to be good Americans, forswearing hockey for baseball and pledging to learn all the verses of “The Star Spangled Banner” and the names of The Three Stooges. (And pledging to never sing that “O Canada” thing ever again.) That kind of reform can lead to a path to citizenship for those kinds of alien Canadians.

And for the rest of those Canadian aliens, those who knowingly crossed the border illegally as adults, well they have to pay to stay. Immigration reform for them would mean that they go back to Canada voluntarily. They apply to come into the U-S of A legally.

Short of that, we could put them on a pathway to citizenship by making them admit their guilt (breaking the law to come here in the first place), submit to a public flogging to show their general contrition (and to add humiliation to their admission of guilt), then pay a huge fine to compensate for using public services, like public roads, public transportation and public schools. And watching PBS without paying for it; what do they think it is, the CBC? Then they could be allowed a pathway to citizenship, provided they promise never to utter the words “Celine Dion” in public. That’s the kind of immigration reform we need in this country, right now.

There are an estimated one-million “undocumented” alien Canadians in our country right now. And they keep sneaking across the border. I don’t see Arizona or any other state taking steps to round ‘em up. No racial profiling of Canadians by cops. They “look” American, unlike some other undocumented people. It’s a gross miscarriage of justice, I tell you. We need to face facts and get tough on alien Canadians.

Oh, and we would make some exceptions. For example, we could make an exception for everyone associated with productions of Cirque du Soleil. And maybe an exception for Joni Mitchell. But absolutely no exception for William Shatner.

Keep our borders secure, eh!
________________________________________________________________________________

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.

STARTING A SUPPORT GROUP CALLED “GUEROS ANONYMOUS.”

I’ve sometimes thought about starting a semi-secret organization, complete with decoder rings and speakeasy-like murmured passwords. I’ve fantasized about starting an organization called “Gueros Anonymous.” Or maybe “Gueros Unidos”. Or maybe “Rubios Are Us.”  I’d be the founding member. It would be a kind of fraternal organization made up of light-skinned Mexicans like me. Acclaimed artist Barbara Carrasco could be in it. Chingón Chicano writer Luís Urrea could be in it. My friend Yolanda Garcia, a nationally respected big time educator, could be in it. The possibilities for membership are huge, greater than you might think.

We’d have a kind of Pledge of Allegiance to the Raza and maybe even a theme song and a mascot.  Maybe some sort of secret handshake. What we’d have in common is that all of our adult lives we’ve fought for justice, supported raza arts, music and culture and – this is the key requirement for admission to the group – we’ve often been looked at quizzically and sometimes critically by more “typically-looking” mexicanos and Chicanos. You know, the more morenos and trigueños among us. “Are you really a Mexican?” they sometimes ask. Sometimes they ask silently with their raised eyebrows and near-sneers. Eventually they get around to asking out loud. “Que te importa” is an answer that comes to mind for me sometimes. But usually we gueros answer much more politely as reason and understanding eventually take hold.  Please, no jokes about “every family has a guero in the woodpile.”

But I must tell you it’s always been a bit annoying to have your “authenticity” somehow challenged, just because you’re a rubio. It’s about culture NOT color.

When I was in graduate school at Columbia University in New York I had a colleague who understood that well. And he wasn’t even Chicano. He was more light-skinned than I (and let me tell you, I’ve been mistaken for German, Polish, Italian – even Scandinavian).  The brother was African American. The “gueroist” negro you are ever likely to see. We used to joke together about being a Stealth Mexican or a Stealth Black, sharing experiences about when we innocently infiltrated gatherings of white folks. Let’s face it, whether you’re in a bank, in a courtroom or a business or professional meeting, chances are you will be surrounded by those of the Caucasian persuasion.

Throughout my life I’ve had encounters where I’m in a group of strangers and they start going on and on about “lazy Mexicans” and “dirty Mexicans” and that kind of pendejada. At first, nomás los oigo. They assume I’m white and one of them. As a stealth Mexican I hear lots of stuff like that. Then – ta da! – I reveal that I’m a Chicano, one of “them.” Their reactions would be hysterically funny if they weren’t so tragic. My African American colleague in graduate school shared similar experiences with me.

We got to hear lots of unfiltered talk from gringos about Mexicans and African Americans. It was like having a hidden microphone at a Klan meeting. Or at a PTA meeting, for that matter.

Gringos scramble to backtrack and spout things such as, “But you’re different.” Yeah, sure.” It’s about culture, not color. (Okay, I don’t have a good explanation for all the rubia modelo-types on Televisa and Univision. But that’s another discussion.)

I was lucky going through public elementary school and high school. Lucky in the sense that I happened to like reading and writing – and studying. The library was a sanctuary to me. School was not terrifying and it wasn’t an entirely hostile place for me. It wasn’t the torture chamber that it was for a lot of chicanitos. Teachers noticed that I enjoyed schoolwork and encouraged me. I’m grateful for that. But I can’t help but thinking I was also lucky, given that social context, in that I was a guero. I think it’s possible white teachers somehow thought I had more on the ball BECAUSE I wasn’t a dark-skinned or indio-looking kid. Who knows?

But I don’t think it was a coincidence that a lot of stereotypical looking mexicanos in my public school classes, especially recent immigrants, were a little less likely to get the encouragement from teachers that I did. It’s all about expectations. Study after study has shown that students rise to the level of the expectations of the teachers. If teachers don’t assume you have potential, for whatever reason including appearance, they won’t work very diligently to help students develop that potential. It all becomes a kind of perverse self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once wrote an op-ed essay for the L.A. Times about the stupidity of identifying criminal suspects in the news media as “Hispanic.” What the hell does that tell you about the appearance of a guy out on the street who the cops are looking for? A “Hispanic” can be as blond as Christina Aguilera, as indio as Danny Trejo, as African tinged as wild-and-crazy former Dodger Manny Ramirez. The word “Hispanic” doesn’t tell you a darn thing, when it comes to appearance. It’s meaningless. We are a double-helix arco iris when it comes to appearance.My family is half moreno and half guero, for example. It’s about culture and frame of reference, not color nor physical appearance.

And it isn’t just gringos who make assumptions about you and tailor their behavior toward you based on those assumptions. Back in the Pleistocene in undergraduate school Chicano “student leaders” with Zapata mustaches and fortified with viva la raza steroids would look askance at Chicano students who fell into the guero category. That nonsense would melt away after our “authenticity” was proven. But those first impressions were always very interesting, and telling, to me. It’s not about color it’s about culture. And experience and frame of reference.

By the way, most of those with Zapata mustaches were men.

I was born and raised on L.A.’s eastside. My parents came from pueblitos in the state of Chihuahua. I learned to speak Spanish and English simultaneously because I had older brothers and sisters who had survived the trauma of only speaking Spanish in Kindergarten – and being punished for it. And language has become a kind of litmus test for some, especially during the heady days of the Chicano Movement. Some poor Chicanos couldn’t speak Spanish very well, and they were snubbed by Chicano student “leaders” whose Spanish was solid. Tonterias. But somehow most of us reconciled these issues long ago.

Unfortunately, the “you can’t be Mexican because you’re so fair-skinned” mythology still persists to a degree. On the part of gringos and Chicanos. Somehow gueros are seen as individuals who “can’t be Mexican enough.” Tonterias. Hey, tell that to beautiful fair-skinned redheaded Mexican Rita Hayworth, whose actual name was Margarita Carmen Cancino. I would offer her a posthumous honored membership in this new organization I’m thinking of starting called Gueros Anonymous or Gueros Unidos or maybe …Wanna be a member?

Copyright 2013 by Luis R. Torres