Some time ago I came across some books from UCSB Chicano Studies professors who are suppose to be enhancing the study of Mexican Americans because that is what Chicano means, but since I don't use that term I take a different approach. As I saw the titles from the female Chicano Studies professors, there was one I think from Chela Sandoval that stated something about loving and that if one didn't love there was a fault in that person. But then I thought if she practiced that philosophy how come I never got any love when I applied to teach part time. All I got was the cold shoulder even after Francisco Lomeli wrote a nice recommendation which I never get because I am not loved by the Chicano community but then again not even my extended family loves me and I don't love them either. I care for two brothers and the other two well lets just say they we mutually dislike eachother. At least we are honest with our dislike. So I didn't get hired and thought those titles were not realistic.
Then I came across Cornel West and his books which can go either way with me though I have read "Why Race Matters" though I'm not Black and many Blacks believe Mexican Americans are not really part of the racial question eventhough we are in the part of Northern Mexico that was conquered by the US have been in the deserts of California for much much longer. And he too has his share of Living and Loving Loud but as I have concluded, this is all mythical.
My most obvious reason goes back to my world view, I can't love strangers. How can one love someone they don't know? That is ludicrious and illogical. So because I see a stranger even if he or she is Mexican American I'm suppose to love them when I don't know their intentions. Talk about not being prepared for life. Someone might take advantage of such openness. I was raised to mistrust the world so when I had to sit through classes on the Multiethnic Experience at CSULB I couldn't take the fact that female professors kept insisting that they had to be shown respect when they were strangers. In my world view, you have to earn that it isn't given willingly and stupidly. So when I stated I was raised to not respect a woman or strangers it was with the intent that I could not trust someone I did not know and even if we were friends we could turn on eachother at any moment. Ask any guy about that. But according to the self serving make belief world of a Cal State University who were self serving, they got upset at my cultural perspective because it didn't suite their purpose. The female professors got mad but I didn't care because they weren't showing me any love so they were being hypocritical and self serving. As long as they were being served they were happy but when challenged at that warp thinking they got mad.
Which brings me back to these not so bright articles and books about loving when the word is a verb not a noun. And for UCSB, I never got any love for all I was requesting was to be judged on my merit.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Rampart Records
Some ten plus years ago I was at the now closed Towers Records on Atlantic Blvd. in East LA/Monterey Park whatever. I was in my cultural awareness era where I felt that to be Mexican meant that I had to follow musical influence from southern Mexico. I had bought my fair share of Mana, Jose Alfredo and other crap that I was beginning to grow tired of. So I returned to another era that reminded me of my pre teen and teen years. I looked for one of my favorite in Freddy Fender and didn't find his music in the Nortenho section. I assumed they had sold out and then I looked for Los Lobos because in my teenage years "Will the Wolf Survive?" was being played on KROQ plus they sang nortenho and ranchera songs in Spanish much like Freddy Fender. To my surprise I did not find either artist in the Mexico Spanish sections.
Then my curiosity took me to the English sections of rock and to my surprise I found Los Lobos del Este in the rocknroll section and when I couldn't find Freddy, I asked and found him in the country section. I thought damn, Los Lobos are in Rocknroll and Freddy Fender in country western. I was surprised to have found Mexican American nortenha songs in RocknRoll and in Countrywestern. It left me with alot of questions about how Mexican Americans were categorized and one of them was not in the Latin America section and not even in the Mexico section. I was confused.
Through the years I have realized that the separation and not inclusion would come to predict the future in directly. Now in my early 40's I have gone through a metamorphis of the sort that has epiphatized into the fact that I as a Mexican American am a different kind of animal apart from that Mexico section that does not depend on anything from Mexico or person to determine who I am, how I think and how I perceive others. This is not popular because the Chicano academic circles believe we are all the same when the fact US born and by generation and Apache heritage I have come to conclude that Mexico does not determine who I am. I do not depend on them for my cultural expression.
When I shared this belief with a person I met recently in the last year and a half by the name of Hector Gonzalez who I met through East LA College. Our unique distinction is that we were both forced out of East LA College by the Greek Chair of Chicano Studies. So we bonded under those tiring circumstances. But as I got to know him I learned that he inherited a music label by the name of Rampart Records when the original owner Eddie Davis passed away. Hector's connection was that he played with a music group called Eastside Connection and then later Lava and the Hot Rocks. Hector is a throw back to the 1970's kind of Mexican American who called themselves Chicanos. He is still kind of an original Chicano but because non Mexican Americans have stolen that identity including not just Mexico born but even Central Americans, the word has lost meaning.
When I expressed my thoughts with Hector that Mexican Americans have been thrown under the bus in this era because all brown people have been lumped as one with more attention given to those born in Mexico who succeeded and now those without documents plastering their faces all over television begging to be granted amnesty when they broke US law. The Mexican American like Hector or myself have been forgotten because we are easy to and their is this belief that we have it made because we were born in the US and also because we are lazy. We don't need White people to tell us we're lazy, the foreign born Mexicans will tell us we are not hardworkers.
Hector's response was surprising to me because I come across as some right wing nut but forget about the fact that I have a right to defend myself when he stated, "Paisa radio stations don't pay attention to Mexican Americans. Even if we sing in Spanish they won't play our music so we don't have an outlet". I don't know anything about music and radio play but I do know that I never heard Los Lobos or Freddy Fender on no KWKW or KLVE. "We don't get any radio play so all of our music is underground" only proves what I have been feeling for a long time. That the arrival of Mexican nationals endangers our American existence because our needs get pushed aside and forgotten along with our history. And nobody is advocating for us because we have no legal definition nor income and much less sympathy.
I remember once reading commentaries from a White woman in the LA Times over the direction at that time of Self Help Graphics, while a new guy advocated for Latin America by the name of Gustavo LeClerc who righteously thought it was time to include people like him, the White lady opposed it because she stated it hurt Mexican Americans and moved the focus away from the community. And was she ever right.
Lastly, even Hector has been told by a White person in the music industry that the arrivals of the "Paisas" have really hurt the Mexican Americans from the US. Was he ever correct.
And Hector continues to push the sound that existed way before the paisas arrived and the sound that was paid with through flipping burgers as the man funded the Eastside Sounds through his restaurant and who believed Mexican Americans had a vital cultural component. Eddie Davis proved that by giving ownership to Hector when he passed. And for me, I stopped listening to music from Mexico because my heart's not there, my heart is at home.
Then my curiosity took me to the English sections of rock and to my surprise I found Los Lobos del Este in the rocknroll section and when I couldn't find Freddy, I asked and found him in the country section. I thought damn, Los Lobos are in Rocknroll and Freddy Fender in country western. I was surprised to have found Mexican American nortenha songs in RocknRoll and in Countrywestern. It left me with alot of questions about how Mexican Americans were categorized and one of them was not in the Latin America section and not even in the Mexico section. I was confused.
Through the years I have realized that the separation and not inclusion would come to predict the future in directly. Now in my early 40's I have gone through a metamorphis of the sort that has epiphatized into the fact that I as a Mexican American am a different kind of animal apart from that Mexico section that does not depend on anything from Mexico or person to determine who I am, how I think and how I perceive others. This is not popular because the Chicano academic circles believe we are all the same when the fact US born and by generation and Apache heritage I have come to conclude that Mexico does not determine who I am. I do not depend on them for my cultural expression.
When I shared this belief with a person I met recently in the last year and a half by the name of Hector Gonzalez who I met through East LA College. Our unique distinction is that we were both forced out of East LA College by the Greek Chair of Chicano Studies. So we bonded under those tiring circumstances. But as I got to know him I learned that he inherited a music label by the name of Rampart Records when the original owner Eddie Davis passed away. Hector's connection was that he played with a music group called Eastside Connection and then later Lava and the Hot Rocks. Hector is a throw back to the 1970's kind of Mexican American who called themselves Chicanos. He is still kind of an original Chicano but because non Mexican Americans have stolen that identity including not just Mexico born but even Central Americans, the word has lost meaning.
When I expressed my thoughts with Hector that Mexican Americans have been thrown under the bus in this era because all brown people have been lumped as one with more attention given to those born in Mexico who succeeded and now those without documents plastering their faces all over television begging to be granted amnesty when they broke US law. The Mexican American like Hector or myself have been forgotten because we are easy to and their is this belief that we have it made because we were born in the US and also because we are lazy. We don't need White people to tell us we're lazy, the foreign born Mexicans will tell us we are not hardworkers.
Hector's response was surprising to me because I come across as some right wing nut but forget about the fact that I have a right to defend myself when he stated, "Paisa radio stations don't pay attention to Mexican Americans. Even if we sing in Spanish they won't play our music so we don't have an outlet". I don't know anything about music and radio play but I do know that I never heard Los Lobos or Freddy Fender on no KWKW or KLVE. "We don't get any radio play so all of our music is underground" only proves what I have been feeling for a long time. That the arrival of Mexican nationals endangers our American existence because our needs get pushed aside and forgotten along with our history. And nobody is advocating for us because we have no legal definition nor income and much less sympathy.
I remember once reading commentaries from a White woman in the LA Times over the direction at that time of Self Help Graphics, while a new guy advocated for Latin America by the name of Gustavo LeClerc who righteously thought it was time to include people like him, the White lady opposed it because she stated it hurt Mexican Americans and moved the focus away from the community. And was she ever right.
Lastly, even Hector has been told by a White person in the music industry that the arrivals of the "Paisas" have really hurt the Mexican Americans from the US. Was he ever correct.
And Hector continues to push the sound that existed way before the paisas arrived and the sound that was paid with through flipping burgers as the man funded the Eastside Sounds through his restaurant and who believed Mexican Americans had a vital cultural component. Eddie Davis proved that by giving ownership to Hector when he passed. And for me, I stopped listening to music from Mexico because my heart's not there, my heart is at home.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Mexican American?
So I'm at Cal State LA with the Chicano Rountable who are a group of individuals that range from Agustin Cebada and David Sanchez from the Brown Berets in the late 1960's to Saul Figueroa and Xihuan Montalvo both Chicanos from the South LA area and one generation younger than the Brown Berets. Saul and Xihuan represent the Mexican Americans that tend to be forgotten because they don't originate from East LA but as all should know, Mexican Americans don't just come from East LA though another compa Ruben Lopez does and he was also in attendance.
We were all there meeting with the Dean and chair of Chicano Studies, Henderson and Soldatenko attempting to prevent the destruction of the departmental name to the guilt ridden inclusive word of Latino. I decided to help because I believe that Mexican Americans, are spat on and stepped on while others benefit and we are ignored. The first issue is simple the administration hired 4 non Mexican Americans which is really part of the problem which is why they would push to change the name because they are not Mexican Americans and the others of one is also a non Mexican American but Mexican national who has been there so long everybody assumed he was but me. The other two females who are Mexican Americans don't have a pedagogical background in Chicano Studies or even a cultural relevant approach: Education and English is not Chicano Studies and the only qualification seems to have been some matching system the college liked.
So we argued not to change the name and the chair defended the name change and the notion that the Chicano Roundtable had a different definition to what Mexican American means which has always meant US born. And there we were being told by a non Mexican American that our definition was wrong, he's Ukrainian by his own admission, that us who are Mexican Americans by birth were wrong. I couldn't believe his arrogance and the dean arguing that Mexican American Studies should be more inclusive of other Latinos with the assumption we were being exclusive. When the continued life for Mexican Americans is that others are not inclusive of us.
Finally, our elder Luis Garcia who comprehends our argument asked him, "can you tell me what your definition of a Mexican American is". A silent reply and then a Che Guevara answer that the author of Occupied America would not fit our definition because he was not US born. And our answer was yes because those of us US born have no legal definition in Mexico and as we argued we were the ones outside looking in asking non Mexican Americans to keep the word Chicano for the department.
Whose really not included?
We were all there meeting with the Dean and chair of Chicano Studies, Henderson and Soldatenko attempting to prevent the destruction of the departmental name to the guilt ridden inclusive word of Latino. I decided to help because I believe that Mexican Americans, are spat on and stepped on while others benefit and we are ignored. The first issue is simple the administration hired 4 non Mexican Americans which is really part of the problem which is why they would push to change the name because they are not Mexican Americans and the others of one is also a non Mexican American but Mexican national who has been there so long everybody assumed he was but me. The other two females who are Mexican Americans don't have a pedagogical background in Chicano Studies or even a cultural relevant approach: Education and English is not Chicano Studies and the only qualification seems to have been some matching system the college liked.
So we argued not to change the name and the chair defended the name change and the notion that the Chicano Roundtable had a different definition to what Mexican American means which has always meant US born. And there we were being told by a non Mexican American that our definition was wrong, he's Ukrainian by his own admission, that us who are Mexican Americans by birth were wrong. I couldn't believe his arrogance and the dean arguing that Mexican American Studies should be more inclusive of other Latinos with the assumption we were being exclusive. When the continued life for Mexican Americans is that others are not inclusive of us.
Finally, our elder Luis Garcia who comprehends our argument asked him, "can you tell me what your definition of a Mexican American is". A silent reply and then a Che Guevara answer that the author of Occupied America would not fit our definition because he was not US born. And our answer was yes because those of us US born have no legal definition in Mexico and as we argued we were the ones outside looking in asking non Mexican Americans to keep the word Chicano for the department.
Whose really not included?
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