Our New Anahuac

I know I said I wouldn’t watch it, and I know I said no blogs this week, but aqui te va. Unedited so i can see part two. I’ll edit tomorrow. Con permiso…

My expectations for CNN’s Latino In America were quite low. I counted on hearing only from entertainers. I was beating my head against the wall in preparation for the consecutive Horatio Alger stories, the myth that anyone can do anything as long as they work real hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they don’t have any boots. There was a great deal of this propaganda.

Los Scandalous mayor, Antonio Villariagosa, did his whole tired titere-mozo-de-hacienda routine. “Only in America does the success against all odds happen on the scale and scope it happens here,” he said toeing the line of the occupation. No wonder Union Del Barrio calls him the imperialist’s puppet of occupation, or some other apodo like that I think he’s better at playing tune in Tokyo with young reporters while he’s married than selling this propaganda. It just doesn’t work for him. Ashamed to say that he was a member of MEChA, just like me

Despite all of the usual praise-the-system jive, CNN had the courage to point out some alarming statistics. At Freemont High, the focus of one segment, a full seventy percent of the students don’t graduate on time. Almost in the same breath, Soledad O’Brian pointed out the lack of resources in the community. She noted the fact that at nearby Garfield High, the high school made famous by the movie Stand and Deliver, over four thousand students make use of a school which was designed for fifteen hundred students. She stopped short of editorializing about any connection, but the point was sufficiently clear. Of course, the program did not question why the school was overcrowded, which would have taken into account the social disease, instead of the symptoms, but this post is about my expectations, not my ideals. We all know the revolution will not be televised.

I also did not expect to see publicized the fact that we were here before them. In an introductory interview, much ado was made about Eva Longoria’s family being in Texas for nine generations, which ante-dated the arrival of the Mayflower. No hint was there that we have been here for 90,000 years or that the borders were falsely imposed, but again, expectations, not ideals. During the commercial trailers there was even someone who proudly prolaimed that they were Chicana! There was frank discussion by a psychologist, Dr. Zayas, about cultural dissonance and how assimilation (though not explicitly identified as such) causes a great amount of stress, and even the suicide attempt of many young women. They even showed the ugly nativist attitudes which believe that English is purest and the only language of the land.

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the Basta Dobbs campaign, a campaign whos mission it is to remove Lou Dobbs from the ranks of CNN. This campaign has already signed on 65,000 supporters and is, I believe, the first modern campaign with a truly national character.

There was also a whole fettish for the Garcia surname. For some reason, CNN felt obligated to begin every segment with someone whose last name was Garcia…something about the Garcia last name now being one of the ten most popular surnames in the US. So the ____ what? There are many non-Garcias doing important work…maybe I wouldn’t be complaining if they had chosen the surname Chavana…he he. A little undersampling curve never hurt. Oh well, there’s always next year.

During the closing, they did meet my low expectations by wrapping it up with some Hollywood figures. It is possible that the producers cut G Lo’s and Eva’s comments out of context, but I was disappointed to hear America Ferreara’s, a supposed progressive, go Bo Jangles on us: “The greatest triumph of the show (Ugly Betty) for the Latino culture…is the fact that she is Latina and that is the least of the labels put among her (sic).” Really, that’s the greatest thing? That you can “pass?” That nobody notices your ethnicity?

If that’s the society that they’re selling, I’ll continue with my demands that we have Our New Anahuac Now.