Dear Mexican: Can you recommend a solid, accessible history of California and Arizona so I can learn what really happened when the United States gobbled Aztlán?
La Chica Confundida
Dear Wabette: The holistic classic in this genre is Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, but it's a bit pricey, a problem that the legendary profe has told the Mexican he is trying to rectify. For California, I recommend Leonard Pitt's The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californias, 1846-1890, which examines the tricks and treasons gabachos used in screwing over California's native Mexicans after the Mexican-American War; Hispanic Arizona, 1536-1856, by James E. Officer, does the same for the Copper State, and is a great chinga tu madre for the Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpayaso fan in your familia. But as much as you and I would like to think otherwise, the rest of this Mexican-obsessed country doesn't share the same fascination for Arizona, California or the American Intervention. Really, the best books you can purchase to teach people about the Reconquista are mine. Kidding...sort of.
In all honesty, the only libro people interested in the Mexican Question should buy this holiday season is one they should already have: Carey McWilliams's majestic North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. Though it celebrated its sixtieth anniversary this year, McWilliams's effort continues to beat any Pew Hispanic Center study, National Council on La Raza press release, or George Lopez monologue in explaining why Mexicans and their descendants en los Estados Unidos act the way they do, and why gabachos hate wabs so. Mixing little-known history with thoughtful analysis and wonderful prose, North From Mexico impresses with every reading and has spawned a thousand Chicano Studies monographs. More crucially, McWilliams was the first gabacho who cared for Mexicans not for their tithes, cheap labor, fecund wombs or taco specials, but as actual members of the American fabric. Seriously, cabrones: This guy deserves a spot in the Mexican Catholic pantheon alongside the Santo Niño de Atocha and Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, and if you don't have North From Mexico in your library already, you're no better than a Guatemalan.
Dear Mexican: Some columns ago, someone asked about Mexican comic books. How about going a little more highbrow? Which Mexican poets who aren't writing in English, contemporary or otherwise, would you recommend to a gabacho looking to expand his literary horizons southward? Right now I know of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Laura Solórzano, and there's about 300 years between them. I'm looking for translations, because I'm a lazy gabacho who doesn't know Spanish.
No Good at Coming Up With Witty Names, Either
Dear Gabacho: Highbrow, in this column? Who do you think I am — Ruben Navarrette? I can give you but two poetas: one old, one timeless. Ramón López Velarde died young in 1921, but his abstract, postmodern poetry influenced generations of Mexican writers, and my fellow jerezano's "La suave patria" (roughly, "The Sweet Motherland") remains as hallowed an artistic celebration of Mexico as the films of Pedro Infante or the Mexican national anthem. The University of Texas released a translated López Velarde anthology a couple of years ago, but his clever rhyming schemes, puns and references disappeared like decorum at a San Diego Minutemen meeting.
Easier to appreciate is the work of José Alfredo Jiménez, Mexico's greatest singer-songwriter. He understood the contradictory essence of the Mexican soul — the drunken prophet, the weeping macho, the embittered optimist, the jingoistic twerp — and captured it with somber yet stirring couplets. If you want to read his lyrics, buy José Alfredo Jiménez: Cancionero Completo (Complete Songbook), which comes with a wonderful essay by the Mexican intellectual (yes, they do exist) Carlos Monsivaís, but your gabacho ass needs to comprender Spanish first. In the meantime, buy Jiménez's albums (especially the one he recorded with Banda El Recodo), pour some Herradura and let the holidays flow. In their honor, some faith-based musings from the archives:
Dear Mexican: What's with the Mexican need to display the Virgin of Guadalupe everywhere? I've seen her in the oddest places, from a sweatshirt to a windshield sticker. As a Mexican, I find it a little offensive and tacky to display this religious symbol everywhere. You have all these fucking persinados who do their shit in front of the image of the Holy Mother.
Foxy Mujer
Dear Pocha: Among Mexicans, Virgen de Guadalupe product-sighting is a pastime as popular as sneaking illegals into the U.S. The beautiful 2002 pictorial anthology Guadalupe shows Mexico's patron saint on bandannas, booze bottles and car hoods; as tattoos, key chains and even soccer jerseys. I've seen her painted on murals, woven into fabulous silk shirts worn by Stetson-sporting hombres and — one holy night — in my bowl of guacamole. But while I share your disdain for the hypocrites who cross themselves in Her presence before they sin, I don't find public displays of the Empress of the Americas offensive. Mexican Catholicism is sublime precisely because it doesn't draw a distinction between the sacred and the profane. We can display our saints as comfortably in a cathedral as we do on hubcaps. Besides, the brown-skinned Guadalupe is a divine vete a la fregada, puto ("Go to hell, fucker") to the gabacho rulers of the world. Remember from the Sermon on the Mount that God loves the wretched — and what people are more wretched than Mexicans (besides the Guatemalans, I mean)?
Ask the Mexican at [email protected]; find him at myspace.com/ocwab and facebook.com/garellano or on Twitter.
