I have noticed that one trend that will get an aspiring Mexican American writer is to say you are gay. And you will get more attention. I read some article about a new writer whose name I forgot and the one point the Harvard article pinpointed was that he was gay and Chicano which are really two words that don't go together. Gay because any racial group can be a homosexual but not all racial groups can be Chicanos. And if anybody knows, Chicanos do not want to be identified as gay because most are not. So it is disingenious to try to lump both together when the majority don't want to be labeled in the popular Hollywood or Academia esqueness. Now if that is what is getting published, shame on the publishers for pushing that genre onto a community that believes in children, reproduction, legacy of blood and the beauty of the female body.
Normal Mexican Americans like women and considering US born Mexican Americans are of desert Apache to Mescalero to Yuma heritage, the love of women or polygamy was is part of the male cultural heritage for the simple reason more offspring kept expanding the group. And the women agreed to that cultural norm because unlike southern Mexicans who move north, Apaches and other Northern Mexicans were not Catholocized so the ideal of monogamy is not in my cultural lineage. We view women as having the ultimate power because they choose who to mate with and that is the ultimate power of the female line, even if they are old. Even the older ladies can reject the older men.
Thus to try to focus on Mexican Americans as gay ignores the vast Mexican American community that is anything but gay and are interested in normal struggles and questions of life with womanizing on the side. By accepting more gay writers, the publishers are identifying what is Mexican American in print and that is very dangerous. They are also saying that only gay narratives are worthy of publication whereas the others are not valuable lives worth mentioning or considering for analysis or acceptance. In the academic circle of Mexican American Studies, there is an overimposition of gay and feminist writers which amounts to one conclusion only: the hatred of macho culture. Gay and feminism in Chicano academic (if you can call it that) circles dominates the curriculum that people who fought for such fields of study feel excluded because the gays and female haters have taken over with complicity of the White academic world for they facilitated those hirings and curriculum imposition at the expense of 90% population that is not gay nor feminist. Gays can push their lifestyles but if a heterosexual male writer talks about wanting to have multiple women he is shun. Or if he counters feminist any male hatred he is called all the negative labels available and I don't have a problem with that but let me get my voice out. Gays should stay with their gay community because their lifestyle is important than race and so should feminist because they believe gender is more important than race which I disagree with both. Yet because they are accepted by the White circles as their tokens, their self centered lifestyles become sacred but ask us normal Mexican Americans and we'll laugh.
I don't want to be known as liking men nor as pro women at the expense of my gender because I don't see the gays or the feminist advocating on my behalf and my needs. Those people don't speak for me and I'm not politically correct nor religious, I believe my own mind and don't believe in a popularity contest. And because I haven't been annointed by the gay White literary circle my writings continue to go unnoticed but they are out there pushing for normal Mexican Americans who are trying to survive all these impositions who are only self centered.
Julian Camacho
