I am a photographer

"I photograph to satiate the primal urge to hunt, capture and possess." - Jesús Manuel Mena Garza, 01/04/17

Jesús Manuel Mena Garza's New Patreon Page

I am not getting any younger or richer. Currently, I am able to complete a few projects despite monetary obstacles, but your donation to Patreon can help me realize more and better projects. 

Feel free to contact me about any of my past, current and planned projects. Be one of the first to donate to my Patreon page. Thank you for your financial support!

http://www.patreon.com/jmmgarza

California Beaches and Types Part 3 of 3 (UHD 4k)

I have been producing (a hobby) videos and posting them on YouTube under Texas Moto Foto. Here is an example. Yes, you have gotta love California beaches. The variety is astounding. Their beauty, breathtaking. If you are visiting or moving to California ... check 'em out.

Thanks for checking out my UHD-4k video on the Best California Beaches and Types. I lived in California for more than 55 years and I have been to beaches up and down the coast. In this short video I am going to give you an intro into what to expect when you’re visiting the California Coast.

I shot most of the the pix in this video. They were captured using my Google Smartphone and my Nikon D800. I would like to divide this video into three segments. First are Urban Beaches, second are Casual Beaches and finally Secluded Beaches or off-the-beaten-path beaches. I will detail at least one example of each and suggest others to visit. Yes, I have been to these beaches.

This is Part 3 ... my favorite ... Secluded Beaches. Here is a YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Q4SDEdhijsY

Please like, subscribe and share. Thank you.

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Contact Information:

Jesús Manuel Mena Garza
JMMGarza2@GMail.com
www.JMMGarza.com
My website has my phone and other contact info.

Santiago Jimenez Jr.: San Antonio, TX

At a modest taco shop in a working class neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas, iconic Tejano accordion maestro Santiago Jimenez Jr. performs for the assembled. The pix were taken November 20, 2016 and are copyright 2016 Jesús Manuel Mena Garza · All rights reserved. Click photos to enlarge!

Jesús Manuel Mena Garza is a documentary photographer currently existing in Fort Worth, TX. You can Contact Jesús by calling (682)365-8702 or via email at garza@jmmgarza.com. His website is www.jmmgarza.com.

President Donald Trump ... oh my!

 By Jesús Manuel Mena Garza 

Barack Obama and the DNC supported streamlining the process of making Hillary Clinton the Democratic standard bearer. Essentially anointing the seriously flawed corporate candidate. Now Donald Trump is in position to dismantle Obama's legacy. Yes, the chickens have come home to roost.

In retrospect Hillary attracted few crowds on the campaign trail (unless Beyonce or Bruce Springsteen were performing). Bernie Sanders on the other hand spoke to gigantic crowds, over and over again. 

In the end, the energetic Bernie campaign was systematically derailed by a DNC hell bent on getting Hillary into the White House. In retrospect, Trump didn't become our president in a vacuum. The DNC and Obama in their blind obsession to get Hillary the job ... screwed up ... big time.

Out of office, Obama and the Clinton will continue to receive millions in Wall Street and Foreign largesse. They have and will continue to speak to the assembled, about the greatness of America. Corporate mercenaries, Obama and Clinton are flush with cash. It is the middle and working class who will suffer under Trump's misogynistic and racist regime. I pray the next four years won't be as bad as I imagine.

Photo courtesy of the Business Insider 

San José: Don't Park Here (True)

Uniforms marching towards the party
Dogs coming fast
I ran
Racist cops point their shotguns
Ran faster
Got inside
Back door bashed
15 year old girl crushed
Made it out, barely
Quinceñeras suck
Pendejo parked his car in the neighbor's driveway
Bringing out the riot squad
Meskins need to learn to follow the rules

- Jesús Manuel Mena Garza, Sept. 26, 2016

Chicano author speaks about importance of connection to roots

By Brittany Harborth, The Shorthorn Staff
The University Of Texas at Arlington

There were only two books Richard Gonzales knew of that were written by and about Mexican-American history in North Texas, so he decided to write his own.

The author of Raza Rising: Chicanos in North Texas delivered a speech on the importance of rising up and knowing personal history as part of the Center for Mexican American Studies’s speaker series.

“Who’s telling our story? Where is the Chicano voice?” Gonzales said. “You can see, then, my predicament. I had to take the challenge, so I wrote and wrote and wrote.”

Gonzales was a third-generation Mexican immigrant growing up in Chicago with a strong connection to his roots.

At 15 years old, Gonzales had a moment of self-reflection when he noticed he was the only person of color in the downtown library.

“I said, ‘I will learn to read, I will learn to write,’” he said. “I will be able to stand up against anybody.”

From 2001 to 2007, Gonzales wrote weekly columns for the Star-Telegramfocusing on Chicano, Latino and Mexican themes.

It was important to show the community Latinos could read and write just as well, he said.

When Gonzales attended UTA, he called Hispanic students together and formed the Association of Mexican American Students in 1970.

Veronica Lopez, social work graduate student, attended the event to learn more about Latinos in the political climate. Social work in many ways is tied to social justice, Lopez said.

Social work junior Sanjuana Gonzalez liked Gonzales’s words of encouragement to the community and his words about being proud about their roots, she said.

He called for the audience to stand up, and the room got on their feet.

“Please rise, raza,” Gonzales said. “Si se puede.”

@Its_brittany101

news-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu

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Evelina Fernandez’s Chicano Century Cycle

Article courtesy of www.americantheatre.org

In ‘A Mexican Trilogy,’ the actor/playwright tells the story of a family, and a people, with her own creative family, the Latino Theater Company.

BY ROB WEINERT-KENDT

Evelina Fernandez.

In the late 2000s, Evelina Fernandez began to write a play about an intergenerational Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, dealing with the loss of a son in Iraq, with the death of the beloved Pope John Paul II, and with assorted other challenges big and small. At the time she had no intention of joining the ranks of the epic durational play à la Angels in America or The Kentucky Cycle.

But she soon realized that there was more drama to be mined from the history of the fictional Morales family, which was loosely inspired by her own background. Soon a trilogy of plays took shape, and each part in the trio—Faith, Hope, and Charity—got staged in turn by the Latino Theater Company, which Fernandez runs with her husband, director José Luis Valenzuela, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Now all three are being staged together as A Mexican Trilogy at LATC, Sept. 8-Oct. 9, in an ambitious undertaking that represents a kind of culmination for the nearly 30-year-old company. We spoke to Fernandez from the midst of rehearsals (and the inevitable rewrites).

Three plays at once is a pretty big undertaking, right?
I know, it’s huge—it’s too much. We’re in rehearsal right now, and I’m realizing: My God, it’s massive. But it’s exciting. I don’t think anything has been done like this, following Mexican-American history through multiple generations.

Eduardo Machado did his epic saga about Cuba and Cuban Americans, Floating Island Plays, back in the 1990s, but I think you’re right about the Mexican-American experience. Though now that I think of it, you were also in the movie American Me. Speaking of which, are you acting in this trilogy too?
I am. We’re a theatre company, so we all wear lots of hats. Originally I was not in Part 2 when we first staged it, but it was too hard to sit out there and watch—I hate being in the audience. I was like, “Get me back on the stage!”

Did you initially conceive this as a trilogy?
I wrote Part 3, Charity, first, and then I thought: There is more to say, not just by me personally but on the part of our company. It was a time—and it continues to this day—where we were hearing lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric. We get so frustrated, because there’s no acknowledgement of the long history of Latinos. We’ve been here for many generations, but we’re always portrayed as people who want to cross the border. So I thought, let’s do our part here and tell this story that hasn’t been told in its entirety. We take this family all the way from fleeing the Mexican Revolution to losing their son in the Iraq War.

So you started with the third play and flashed back?
Actually we began in 2011 with Hope, the second part. When we did readings, the 1960s story really resonated with our audience, so we decided to do that play first because it was in better shape. Then we did Faith, the first one, then Charity, the third. It’s kind of like Star Wars—everything was done out of order.

A scene from “Faith,” Part 1 of “A Mexican Trilogy” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. (Photo by Pablo Santiago)

Are you doing the usual multi-night and marathon options?
Yeah, we’re doing it both ways: You can come on Thursday and see Part A, on Friday see Part B, or you can come on Saturday and Sunday and see the whole thing with a dinner break.

But wait—it’s three plays…
We split the middle play in half; it was the only way we could do it. People can’t come more than two nights. If you only see Part A, you end at the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Did you have models in mind as you worked: Kushner, Robert Schenkkan, even August Wilson?
I can’t really say that I did. I wrote the three plays never thinking that we were going to do them all together. When we decided we were, we started to figure it out. But I’ve seen durational theatre; I sat throughThe Iceman Cometh with Jason Robards when I was 9 months pregnant. I certainly remember that! And we saw GATZ at REDCAT and just loved the whole experience. But our audiences so rarely get to experience something like this—I’m specifically talking about the Latino audience. Some of our board members were actually worried, like, “Do you think anyone will want to do this?” Interestingly, we haven’t sold many one-nighters; more people have bought the whole-day experience. Everyone’s interested in seeing the whole story in one big sweep.

I’m sorry to say I don’t know a lot about your background before the Latino Theater Company.
I’m from East L.A. I got involved with the Chicano movement, and my first professional theatre credit was in Zoot Suit. Luis Valdez basically took me and put me on the stage without any real formal training; I think he was taken by my authenticity. So I found myself as a female lead at the Mark Taper Forum at a young age, and that changed my life. I always thank Luis for giving me that opportunity and pointing me in a whole new direction.

Alma Martinez, Rachael Levario, Anne Betancourt, Becky Gonzalez, Laura Owens, Bel Herandez, Evelina Fernandez, Susie Inyoue, and Dyana Ortelli in “Zoot Suit,” 1979.

I know Chicano and Latino theatre from roughly the late ’80s on, and I know a bit about El Teatro Campesino. What was Chicano theatre in L.A. like before that?
There was a big Chicano movement that grew out of the Civil Rights movement. During the Vietnam War there was a disproportionate number of Chicanos and African Americans being killed in Vietnam. There was a rise in protests against the war and against police brutality, and in favor of bilingual education and our history being taught in the schools. And because of El Teatro Campesino, there was a swell of Chicano theatres in the Southwest and even the Midwest. We used to have theatre festivals every year. There were maestros who came from Mexico and Latin America to train us in different kinds of theatre, and from that came our training, which is based in collective creation.

El Teatro de la Esperanza was a troupe I was a member of with José Luis in Santa Barbara; we also toured with it throughout the country and Cuba. When José Luis left Santa Barbara we came back to L.A., and he got the job at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Latino Theater Company was born there.

That was an extraordinary time; I was lucky to be there for some of it.
It was. There was the Latino lab, the Asian lab, the African-American lab. It was an extraordinary time for diversity. When LATC closed, we originally went to the Taper, but then eventually we came back to LATC, and now we run it. It’s been close to 30 years. It’s unique to have a group of actors who have worked together for so long.

It’s true, there aren’t many examples—Wooster Group orSteppenwolf come to mind, though in the latter case they’ve grown into a big regional theatre.
Right. We still consider ourselves independent; we run our own theatre and we create and produce our own work.

Your training was in collective creation, but obviously you’ve also made plays as a sole author too. Where does this trilogy fit on that continuum?
This trilogy is not as informed by our ensemble as some of our other pieces, like Solitude or Premeditation, which we developed together though workshops. With the trilogy, even though there’s always input from the ensemble, I went off and wrote the pieces then brought them in. But for example, when I wrote Dementia, I knew that Sal Lopez was going to play the lead. I know that Sal can sing and dance, I know he can speak English and Spanish; those are all the elements I have to work with when I’m creating a character for Sal. We have developed a style, a way of working together. It always includes movement, dance, singing. We joke that in all our shows we laugh, we cry, and we have tequila shots.

Sal Lopez, center, in “Dementia.”

And we write for a certain audience. We know the stories that are important to them. We also push the envelope and open their minds to different points of view. When we did Dementia, not too many people were writing about a gay Latino dying of AIDS. And there we had the gay audience sitting with the hardcore Chicano audience; bringing those two audiences together in the theatre was a great accomplishment for us.

I was intrigued that Part 1 and 2 have Arizona settings—Jerome and Phoenix, respectively—as that’s my home state.
My mom was born in Jerome, and Part 1 and 2 are loosely based on the history of my family. I was born in East L.A., then my father took us to Phoenix and I lived there for the first 9 years of my life, then we moved back to Los Angeles. Part 2 is based on a lot of my memories of living in Phoenix in a very dysfunctional Mexican-American family.

Phoenix is where I grew up, and I lived for a long time in L.A. My sense of the Latino cultures in each is that they’re quite different, even though both are predominantly Mexican-American.
Yeah, my relatives in Arizona are very different from my relatives in Los Angeles. Some of them are even Republicans in Arizona! I feel like it’s a slower development of social consciousness there—I’m just talking about my family, and just what I observed, but it develops and moves forward at a slower pace. L.A. is just so diverse in so many ways, not only culturally and ethnically; there are just so many different parts of the city, and the way people relate to each other is different.

Do you ever go back to Phoenix?
My childhood was not very pleasant. I always say of Phoenix, “Oh, it’s so hot—the heat is so heavy.” I just remember us not having much and having electricity turned off, and having to sleep outside under the weeping willow tree because it was too hot to sleep inside. So I have an aversion to Phoenix. But I do love Northern Arizona.

The Taper is bringing back Zoot Suit in its 2017 season. Are you looking forward to that?
Oh man, I’m so excited. It was such a big part of my life, and Luis was such a mentor to me. I heard somebody say, “Wow, I hope it’s successful,” and I said to them, “Are you kidding me?” I think it’s going to be a huge hit. It’s great that Luis is directing it again. When I was inZoot Suit, I was expecting my son, Fidel. Now both my children are actors. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they could audition for that?

This is a variation on a question I once asked August Wilson as he neared the end of his Century Cycle: Having documented such a long time span, how does the overall picture look to you? Have things improved or gotten worse? Are you hopeful for the future?
In Part 3, the granddaughter of Esperanza from Part 1 has just lost her son in Iraq, and they’re dealing with that loss. These are people who’ve gone through the Chicano movement. And then a young man arrives from Mexico with the dream of making it in the U.S., and he comes full of hope and full of questions; he wonders, “Why is there such pessimism? This is the best country in the world!” They have a conversation about the war. Rudy, the father, says, “I don’t want my son to go to war; I don’t believe in war.” And the young immigrant says, “Don’t you love your country? Don’t you believe you have to fight for your country?” I do see hope. As long as we keep coming, there’s always hope in the future.

Sal Lopez and Evelina Fernandez in “Charity,” Part 3 of “A Mexican Trilogy” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. (Photo by Ed Krieger)

The other day, José Luis and I had this event in our home. We have a circle of friends who support our work; most are successful Mexican Americans, some are Guatemalans, Ecuadorians. Everybody has a story. We went around and each one of them told their story. I was so moved: Some said, “I’m first generation American,” or, “I was raised in a foster home,” “I was on welfare”—everybody had different backgrounds. But they were all very successful. I’m a high school dropout, and my children graduated from UCLA and NYU. So many times the focus in the media is on the negative things that happen in our community—the gangs, the poverty—and not on the success we’ve had in this country. I think that definitely outweighs the struggle, and the things we still have to overcome.

Last question. It’s called A Mexican Trilogy, but apart from a prologue in Part 1, it’s all set in the U.S. Can you tell me about the choice of the title?
I’ve gone back and forth on that so many times: Should it be A Mexican Trilogy or A Mexican American Trilogy? The full title is now A Mexican Trilogy: An American Story. It’s about claiming that ethnicity. This is the story of a people: You start with a people, and you end with the same people. They are Americans; they are also Mexicans.

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U.S. was, is and always will be a white-supremacist country

Article courtesy of the Dallas News

Click to view larger version

Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, it can feel imperative to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete actions we can take immediately, ways of expressing love right now to help us cope with the pain.

Those goals are understandable, but it's just as important that we grapple with history, realize the inadequacy of any actions we might take today, and accept the limits of love in the face of political and economic realities. Better that we start with a harsh, but honest, assessment: The United States has always been, and always will be, a white-supremacist country.

Start by remembering that the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world and realizing that this wealth and power has depended on the idea of white supremacy. Recognize that the material comfort of the United States is the product of three racialized holocausts, rationalized by white supremacy.

Acquiring the land base of the United States required the most extensive genocide in recorded human history, the campaign to remove indigenous people and allow Europeans and their descendants to claim ownership of, and exploit, the land and its resources. This process killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 19th century was propelled into the industrial era in large part on the back of cheap cotton, which provided the raw material for the mills of the northeast and crucial hard currency from exports to Europe. This was not the product of free-market economics but the Atlantic slave trade, a process that killed millions and destroyed entire societies.

The United States in the 20th century eventually became the global power, through the use of overt military aggression, covert operations, and violence by proxies to maintain a world order hospitable to U.S. economic interests. From "our backyard" in Central America to southern Africa through the Middle East and Asia, U.S. policy drove toward dominance, a process that was easier to sell to the public because the millions killed and the societies destroyed were almost all non-white.

In all these endeavors, Europeans and their descendants did not dominate and exterminate because they hated non-white peoples but out of desire for wealth and power. The ideology of white supremacy emerged to justify the domination and extermination of other human beings. Europeans have a long history of violence directed toward each other as well, but the conquest of non-white peoples throughout the world produced the distinctive pathology of white supremacy.

Click to view much larger version

Because the wealth and power of the United States are so deeply rooted in white supremacy, the abandonment of that pathology would inevitably lead to difficult questions about the country's moral and material obligations to non-white people, at home and abroad. If poor and working-class white people were to say, "But wait, I haven't been able to cash in on much of this wealth," that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of capitalism. If women were to say, "But wait, no matter what the race and class hierarchies, we still face endemic violence and denigration," that would inevitably lead to questions about the pathology of patriarchy.

All systems of illegitimate authority that give some people unearned wealth and power are based on a similar pathology that tries to naturalize hierarchy and exploitation. Pull on one string, and the fabric of rationalizations for all domination or subordination start to unravel.

The United States will always be a white-supremacist nation because we have neither the intellectual nor moral traditions to deal with these harsh realities. We are intellectually lazy and morally weak. Mainstream politics, conservative and liberal, are terrified of acknowledging these realities.

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced." The United States still has not faced this history and contemporary reality.

That doesn't mean we have made no progress. No one I know wants to go back to 1962. The accomplishments of the freedom struggle, the anti-lynching campaigns, the civil-rights movement are not insignificant. The fact that a black person sits in the White House is not trivial.

But that doesn't change the white-supremacist roots and reality of the United States, and the entrenched resistance to change in the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

In that essay, Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts "to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more."

To date, the United States has turned away from that challenge. I see no evidence in contemporary culture that we are any closer to telling the truth. That means whatever actions we take today, however we make our love real in the world, we must push each other to face our history and ourselves.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His most recent book is Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2015), and he also is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005). Jensen can be reached atrjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online, or join anemail list to receive new articles. Twitter: @jensenrobertw

Sneak Preview: Songs of Hope & Struggle by Agustín Lira and Alma (out 6/24/16)

A powerhouse of the farmworker and Chicano civil rights movements, social activist Agustín Lira spun out songs that fueled the pioneering political theater group Teatro Campesino. From the United Farmworkers grape strike in 1965 through the next half-century of his original music with a message, Lira tenaciously tells the truth as he sees it. On Songs of Struggle and Hope, he and his trio Alma treat us to signature songs of La Causa as well as to new creations that speak of homelessness, child obesity, personal loss, and hope for the future. 61 minutes, 40-pages of bilingual notes and photos.

Un proponente del movimiento de los trabajadores campesinos y por los derechos civiles chicanos, el activista social Agustín Lira produjo canciones que alentaron al Teatro Campesino, grupo pionero del teatro político.  Desde la huelga de las uvas de los trabajadores del campo unidos (United Farmworkers) en 1965 a través de la siguiente mitad de siglo por medio de su música original con mensaje, Lira tenazmente cuenta la verdad como la ve.  En Cantos de Lucha y Esperanza (Songs of Struggle and Hope), él y su Trio Alma nos brindan tanto canciones de La Causa como creaciones nuevas que hablan del desamparo, la obesidad juvenil, la pérdida personal, y la esperanza para el futuro.

Links

http://www.folkways.si.edu/news-and-press/video-quihubo-raza-by-agustin-lira-and-alma-from-songs-of-struggle-hope

Music Sampler

http://www.folkways.si.edu/sneak-preview-songs-of-hope-struggle-by-agustin-lira-and-alma

The 66 Percent: Erasing Mexican Americans in the United States

by Dagoberto Gilb

If you’re from Texas, or the American Southwest for that matter, and a fan of its music, your ears surely perked up when the popular National Public Radio program Fresh Air focused an episode on the accordion.

Many would say that the “squeeze box” is the region’s sound, and thus its most original contribution to America’s musical heritage. Yet that’s not what Fresh Air’s host had heard or knew anything about. Instead, she’d thought the instrument was about as exciting as the 1950s TV show with Lawrence Welk — which was for an already dated, slow waltz crowd in the years it was being produced. She considered accordions, therefore, corny and annoying, valuable only, maybe, for bar mitzvahs. But times changed, her ears were re-tuned, and with her show’s guest, we were to learn that the accordion was a surprisingly not dull instrument, loved in Cajun, avant garde, folk, indie pop, even something called klezmer, and that its sound’s reach was not just Eastern Europe, but Argentina, Madagascar and especially in a new French Musette “explosion.”

Out in the boonies of America’s West, where these national shows are well-heard, there lives a loud, boisterous tradition of music that dates from the turn of the last century that goes by the name “conjunto.” It is true that it belongs to a native people of the West, a peoples whose history can be traced back at least two centuries to what is American soil — born and raised within the geographical and historical boundaries of the United States — and this music, which at its big stage center is the accordion, has been its magnetic draw. Not only in the legendary sound of South Texas’s Narciso Martínez, or San Antonio’s Don Santiago Jiménez, but especially through his two sons, Santiago Jr., and Leonardo, better known as “skinny”: Flaco Jiménez’s fame, in particular, is so grand and wide that in 2015 he received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for his accordion virtuosity and preeminence. And it was the Mexican American music — not South American, African, or European — that didn’t get a mention on Fresh Air’s one-hour episode.

Really there is nothing surprising or new about most of the country being unaware of the culture and community of MexAmerica. On the other hand, it is such a strange form of ignorance — let me hyphenate to adjust the connotation, make it ignore-ance — that one might want to call it utterly fascinating in that unique quality. It requires omitting consciousness that so much of the western landmass of continental United States has rivers, valleys, mountain ranges, states, cities, streets and people with Spanish-language names. Over the years (and by years I mean at least 50) historians and scholars are inclined to attribute that unawareness to an “invisibility” of the community.

But the implication of this becomes that it must be something of a quaint, natural character inside the MexAm people, and not the effect of poverty or consequence of a lack of political power. I’d suggest that it’s more a visual degeneration in the center of the dominant culture’s eyes. No faces, only hands serving enchilada plates and then busing away what’s left of the spicy yum yum. Beds are made after a fun vacation day, floors swept and waxed for the bright, bustling morning in the office, lawns mowed and edged, healthy veggies are in the grocery store: People are not seen, neighborhoods go unknown, songs unheard, deaths not mourned… no cries of birth, sighs of first love, screams of sports joy; no bandages for knees, catechisms for church, homework for teacher, pink socks or baseballs or first cars or skateboards or bad boyfriends or off to war or diplomas or retirement dinners or college or family potlucks or ’buelita turned 99. And though I believe most of the ignorance about MexAms is not conscious or willful, it is equally true that enough is, be it forced by racist politicians in Arizona, or an ongoing blow of American history that began with President James K. Polk’s want of the land by any means necessary.

Even now, too many media stories that do attach are about immigration from the border, inferring that the entire community is recent and, worse, invasive — which, ironically, would be more appropriately descriptive of the Anglo migration from the South in Texas and the Midwest in California. More ironic — bizarre? — is how much it loves, besides the food, everything about the region’s Mexican culture, art and architecture, yet is shocked that these “other” people live here. “Invisible” is not the best word, that is certain. The culture is everywhere, is highly accepted, as mainstream American as the taco has become. But just as the Spanish rejected the corn tortilla of the conquered indios, the essence of the MexAm culture is regarded as too “lesser” to be taken seriously.

Accustomed as its own nation is to treating Mexican Americans as negligible or dismissible, times are changing as demographics do. It is said that this century will be about the power of the Latino. Latino? Take away the 66 percent of this population, the MexAm proportion, that one so hidden away in its western homeland, and what national power then? With the other third divided into several single percentage groups, MexAms ought to receive a landslide of attention. Yet, already and again, the raw facts haven’t created any gain, let alone advantage. Money and political pull are on the East Coast, and the national media’s stories are about those who are there; Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans are more the voice of The Latino, following the last century’s big city paradigm of Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants. MexAms don’t fly from New York to Mexico City, Los Angeles to Chihuahua. Instead, they are home in a poor city like El Paso or Ysleta or Eagle Pass, McAllen, San Antonio, Santa Ana, Riverside, Fresno, Chula Vista, Tucson, Nogales, Albuquerque, Denver, or Boyle Heights, El Monte, La Puente, Lynwood, South Gate. Though everybody’s house has family allá, most have never been farther across — across, meaning the “other side,” Mexico — than Matamoros, Juárez or Tijuana to look for cheaper prescription drugs or dentistry.

And so it goes with literature. The “national” scene knows the very least about Mexican American literature, historically or currently. Though it may not always be as clear as an Arizona school board banning material for ambitious, college-bound young Mexican American students who notice their culture’s absence in their curriculum, the offense, sadly, is the same, only larger in scale, when written voices and stories are passively ignored by all school districts, even when their student body is predominantly of Mexican American descent. Or even more: Why aren’t we going past wanting to educate MexAm children, in their own neighborhoods, to have ordinary pride in who they are and where they’ve come from, and asking how long all of our country can ignore a huge American region and heritage? How can it not want to understand or appreciate its people beyond enchilada or child-care talents, but as craftsmen, business owners, artisans and artists, thinkers, as purposeful voters, as the country’s future leaders? Too much to say as friends? As those who work alongside so many and have children who are in the same classes as their own? Is it possible to ignore and dismiss, to undervalue, an entire people without consequence? How should we educate all our own to each other?

[This essay is adapted from the recently published Mexican American Literature: A Portable Anthology. The featured image is via Flaco Jimenez/Facebook.]

by Dagoberto Gilb