was.
I felt embarrassed by this reaction and still do. Although I was not paralyzed by white guilt, I realized I was by no means innocent. I bore the emotional and conceptual baggage of my place and time and no amount of feel-good hipness could cure me completely.
In a way racism is not unlike alcoholism. The tendency cannot be escaped, merely controlled, and the control requires insight, honesty and discipline. Put differently, it requires one to become more fully human. And like an alcoholic, I very much wish I did not have the thoughts and feelings and impulses I still sometimes observe within myself. I wish I was color-blind, race-blind. Instead, I have tried to become insightful and conscientious, I’ve learned to question and control my impulses, I’ve learned to listen and observe.
Much has changed. I now live in a very mixed community in a California neighborhood so diverse I once reflected, during our yearly Nationwide Night Out get-together, that I and my neighbors looked like we’d been transplanted from a Jonathan Demme movie-white, blacks, Latinos, Filipinos, all intermingling effortlessly with genuine warmth and fondness. We look out for one another and involve ourselves in one another’s lives.
It’s the twenty-first century. All is well, no?
When I first came to California in the mid-seventies, I worked briefly at a Los Angeles restaurant with a largely Mexican staff. I was supervised by a waiter named Ramon, who asked me to help him learn French, in return for his help in teaching me Spanish. But Ramon was not merely generous and curious. He was also proud, world-wise and reserved. He knew that I, as an Anglo, might easily replace him as head waiter if the Caucasian owners saw fit or if customers groused. The other Mexican waiters also treated me with a mix of helpfulness and detachment; one actually picked a fight with me in the dressing room. And though none of the other waiters who were there came to my defense, none of them jumped in to help my adversary either. The fight was between me and him; we could fend for ourselves.
What is strange to me upon reflection of these incidents is how different in character my feelings were at the time than the racism I’d known growing up. There were clearly tensions between us-and those tensions were the result of our being of different color and class and culture-but there was also an awareness of one another as human. I’d known no Latinos in central Ohio; the Great Brown Threat had yet to register on our radar. I had not been indoctrinated in community-wide resentment and fear. Latin Americans were not the Other, to be feared and mistrusted, controlled and repelled. Not yet, anyway.
But I remain very much attuned to tone. I have a pretty good radar for bigotry, due to my own struggles with it. It’s for that reason that I’ve grown increasingly disturbed at the poisonous distortions that too often overwhelm the immigration debate. I detect in the shrillness that old familiar fear and guilt and anger, with its gloss of righteous indignation and “common sense” and its rhetoric of protection-defense of our borders, our laws, our culture, our way of life.
One of the most frequent things one hears is the epithet “illegal immigrant,” with the underlying insinuation that the undocumented are intrinsically criminals, since their very existence in this country is testimony to their violating our immigration statutes. And criminals deserve no compassion, no respect, no “amnesty.”
I see the situation somewhat differently. When my wife was dying of cancer, she was once in such extreme pain that, as I drove her to the emergency room, I ran two stop signs and a red light, driving over eighty miles per hour in twenty-five-miles-per-hour zones. She later thanked me, even though what I did was clearly against the law. I would do it again.
The “crime” attributed to undocumented immigrants in crossing the border is analogous-and much less dangerous to everyone but themselves. They do what they must for the sake of the well-being of their loved ones. If this is the moral outrage immigration opponents make it out to be, show me the innocent. Are we to champion as virtuous the heartless, the indifferent, the scared, the ones willing to just sit there and watch their families suffer under the oppressive weight of corruption, poverty and crime that increasingly characterize Mexico and Central America-conditions for which the United States, though not entirely at fault, is nonetheless far from blameless?
Something else was happening while the anti-immigrant backlash was building: Latinos were joining the military in unprecedented numbers. Not just that-their casualties in the Iraq war were disproportionately higher than their representation in the armed services as a whole (11% compared to 9%).
Interestingly, the reasons Latino recruits gave for enlisting was not just the expedited path to full citizenship put into effect by Congress at the request of the Bush administration, though that did frequently remain a motivating factor. A Rand National Defense Research Institute study revealed that in post-enlistment surveys Latino recruits listed “patriotism” and “service to country” as the top two reasons for joining the service, followed by “duty” and “honor.” Many soldiers noted that their families were proud of them, even if they disagreed with the Iraq war.
Despite this, legislation was drafted in the House of Representatives that would make being an undocumented immigrant a felony, forever barring a path to citizenship or even legal status. And attempts to provide a means to citizenship for the children of undocumented workers, many of whom arrived as infants and know no other country than the U.S., were sabotaged by the anti-immigrant bloc in Congress.
To paraphrase the father of a Latino U.S. marine killed in Iraq: On the one hand they’re recruiting the young men to fight and die, while on the other they’re kicking the parents and children out of the country.
Outrage is a luxury. Writers write, and I felt a particular need to contribute something, to bark back at the distorting invective. I felt it particularly important that Anglos chime in on the side of Latinos out of a sense of justice and simple decency. Silence was not an option.
But I’m a novelist, not a pundit. And what right does an American mutt like me, a white boy from the very heart of Middle America, have to depict in fiction the life of a Latino family?
The old arguments against white authors imagining the lives of people of color addressed power, maintaining that the servant always understood the master, if only out of bald necessity and naked survival, but the master was intrinsically self-deluded about the servant. Such reasoning, with its colonial baggage, elevated the term “insensitivity” to a cultural death sentence. The damning reception inflicted on William Styron’s
I studied math and music, both arguably universal languages. And though I came to Latino culture first through fiction-Borges, Amado, Cortazar-I gained my greatest appreciation of it through music, perhaps its most accessible art form. Also, being raised Catholic, I felt a special fascination with the manner in which religion took hold in the southerly Americas, both Gothic and primitive, awake to suffering, fiercely immediate. From where I sat, Latin culture in general and its music in particular possessed a vibrancy, a passion, a sense of both the tragic and the absurd I found mesmerizing and too often lacking in what I saw and heard around me here in the States. Steely Dan was a hip act but Santana could blister your soul. And Santana led me to Tito Puente, who led me to Ray Barretto, who led me to Poncho Sanchez and on and on: Willie Bobo to Eric Bobo to Los Lobos to Celso Pina to Control Machete to Julieta Venegas to Ana Gabriel to Pescozada… The chain hasn’t stopped in thirty years. I pray to God it never does.
Admiring a culture, though, doesn’t grant me a right to depict it in my own work. Artists steal from one another at will, musicians especially; it’s almost lazy not to. But can fiction writers get away with it?
All artists are outsiders to the extent they observe more than they participate, but everyone joins in to some degree, just as we all reflect. Rather, the crucial question seems to be at what point does observation fail us, i.e., when do we begin to imagine, and why?
I began with my third novel,
