Mexican-Americans and the Tensions of a Hyphenated Identity

I’d like to take some time to explore something I’m particularly interested in: the tension inherent in hyphenated identities. Whether an individual recognizes themselves as Hispanic-American, Mexican-American, Latino, etc., there are two distinct sources of acculturation: the mainstream socialization of American society and the cultural appropriation and interaction with the Latin American heritage, history and peoples. This relationship becomes more complicated the greater the immediacy is between the two identities. Those of Mexican descent probably suffer through the greatest tension, due to their relative geographical proximity of Mexico, as well as the numerical presence of individuals of Mexican descent in the United States. I speak on this as someone who has explored this tension quite readily.

There are Tensions. Many.
The tension arises because both sides of the hyphenated place cultural and communal demands upon an individual. I was born in Houston, Texas to parents who had recently immigrated to the United States. The cultural background of my parents and the rest of their family were distinctly Mexican: the music, movies and cultural cues they had were not from the United States. My neighborhood in South Houston, a densely populated Mexican enclave in the greater Houston metro, was similarly filled with the sights and sounds of Mexican cultural practice. Vacations weren’t to Disneyland or New York City: we traveled to cities in Mexico because of proximity and cost. It’s sort of ironic that it was actually moving to South Texas that began my forced assimilation. The district had a tough policy on primarily Spanish speakers, with English immersion and culture classes. It was a rather rough go, but I quickly learned English, key identifiers and important tools of the cultural trade. This was done through some work and by a rather heavy dose of punishment from teachers when I would speak in Spanish.

Kicking in the US, Sitting in Mexico. Gotta make my mind up, which side should I take?

This didn’t change the fact that my immersion on Mexican culture was also easier: living 10 miles away from Mexico does that to you. I remember once being at the center of an international bridge to Mexico, putting a foot on both sides and wondering if I needed to make a choice. More stories are unnecessary, suffice to say: I had a lot of conflicts with family, friends, teachers and officials.

Adding to the cultural and geographical are the socio-economic differences that manifest themselves between ‘Mexican’ and American’. The dramatic tensions between the two nations cannot be underestimated: millions have fled Mexico in hopes of becoming members of a much more prosperous nation. This cannot be removed from the relationship between the two different components of the hyphenated identity, particularly since so much of it is borne out of the necessity of leaving the cultural homeland. This complicates the already fraught relationship even further because a hyphenated individual has to navigate the familial networks in the previous homeland, while still trying to seem as a bone-fide American to a public audience which is already likely to see you as an ‘other’ simply by the color of your skin. If you compound it with public recognition that those that are poor and brown matter as a part of your identity, you can quickly be disempowered. However, your family in Mexico still demands recognition that you are a part of them.

One of my favorite encapsulations of this was in George Michie’s Holler if you Hear Me, an account of a young schoolteacher’s experience as a Chicago public school teacher.

Student:  “It’s sort of like you’re walking down the street and you’re with your friend, the United States. Then Mexico comes walking down the street…you ignore Mexico and pretend you didn’t see him. When you’re alone, you see Mexico walking by and you say, “Hey, Mexico, What’s up?” It’s like you’re embarrassed to say hi to Mexico when you’re around you friend the United States…If you don’t start saying hi to Mexico, he’s going to leave you alone.”

Particularly for children, this is difficult terrain to navigate. Already marginalized from their home culture in terms of language and given a dearth of material about people like them, students of Hispanic background have to modulate their responses to each particular community. Individuals live in a constantly precarious situation, where one false move can lead to backlash from a community or institution. To betray the homeland is to attack the family connection, but to too heavily rely on it paints you with a brush of inferiority from a largely white society that considers you an ‘other’.

Selena and Being Perfect
Selena Quintanilla-Perez is perhaps the most visible Mexican-American in American popular culture, even in death. For most Americans, what made her compelling was her beauty, musical talent, and tragic murder at the hands of her fan club president. For many Mexican-Americans, however, their identification with her stems from the ways in which she publicly navigated the terrain of being both Mexican and American.  Managed by her father, Selena began her music career by singing American Top 40 singles in the English language. Her father, Abraham, would transition Selena away from English and begin to encourage her to sing in Spanish. Selena’s native language was English, a product of her American education. She initially learned many of her songs phonetically, working with her parents to ensure the proper intonation.

Is Selena saluting the tension in this painting?

Her style of music was originally reacted with skepticism, particularly in Mexico, where they had yet to accept a mainstream Mexican-American artist. As she traveled in Mexico, she was forced to give interviews in Spanish, which she initially struggled with.

Through some breakthrough performances and creative marketing, Selena began to conquer the Mexican music scene and began to explode into Latin America, becoming a breakthrough artist throughout all of Latin American. She became a public symbol for Mexican-Americans, who saw her as an individual that was able to transcend her hyphen and become a member of both worlds. This challenge was encapsulated in a monologue by Edward James Olmos, who played Selena’s father, Abraham, in a biographical film about her life:

“Listen, being Mexican American is tough. Anglos jump all over if you don’t speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump all over you if you don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We’ve got to be twice as perfect as anybody else. Our family has been here four centuries, yet they treat us as if we just swam across the Rio Grande. I mean we got to know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante. Anglo food is too bland; yet when we go to Mexico we get the runs. Ours [homeland] is right next door – right over there. And we got to prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are; we got to prove to the Americans how American we are. It is exhausting! Man, nobody knows how tough it is to be Mexican American!”

This challenge is not unique to individuals with hyphenated identities, but as Olmos states, the proximity of Mexico to the United States makes it even more difficult – Mexico is not a theoretical homeland that is far away, but a place that you reach rather quickly. Selena’s ability to transcend was particularly persuasive and inspiring: she transgressed and embodied both. In her death, a model was lost and has unfortunately not been regained. It is a bitter irony for some that she reached #1 on the Billboard 200 listings only after her death, through the use of her English albums. The Mexican-American community was never truly able to see if one of its own could succeed in the United States. To be able to reach iconic popularity in the US and Mexico seemingly required her public passing.

I distinctively recall the day I was told she died. My mother picked me up from school and tears were streaming from her eyes. After she dropped off my friend at her house, she stopped the car and told me in Spanish that Selena had been murdered. Tears streamed down my face and I was despondent for the next week, spending most of my time listening to my cassette tapes. For years before that, I had always heard the music of my mother and father’s generation; the regional Norteño music that dominated in Northern Mexico. Selena was from my generation. I knew she was born in the US, just like me. Only two months before her death, I had seen her perform at a concert at the Astrodome in front of 60,000 people. With her, I had felt connected to a community far greater and more comforting than I had ever imagined. That was all gone.

Personal Negotiations
You never become perfect at this. Because of my immediate family and the communities I would grow up in, I was well versed in many parts of the Mexican experience. I knew all the best Norteño and Tejano artists, and I had been to a lot of their concerts. Even so, at family gatherings when folks start talking about cultural affects from their generation, I sit silently and simply smile: I have no access to that realm of knowledge. A similar process also occurs when they bring up Mexican films. However, I’m luckily considered ‘authentic’ enough that any ignorance on my behalf is forgiven because I’ve shown myself to act and think like someone that is proud of his Mexican heritage.

Concurrently, a similar process occurred to me all the time while I was in college. At any given dorm party, there was a lot of music in the air, particularly rock. With a little alcohol in their stomach, they start singing along with the music. It was not uncommon that I was the only person in the room not singing; I simply did not know the songs. Many times, cultural references pass over my head, particularly at Yale, where I grew up away from the Northeast American culture that many students inhabit. Likewise, I still find myself accepted as an individual within the American context. My lack of knowledge about certain cultural cues notwithstanding, my status as a Yale student empowered me to interact and participate within my ‘American’ identity.

I’m particularly blessed that I have had a decent family network and access to modalities of privilege that let me become rooted in a certain Mexican-American identity without being utterly disempowered. However, my ability to do so does not come without a cost. In Mexico and the United States, I am sometimes simply lost with a group of people, isolated from the larger cultural conversation. You cannot be all things to all people and Mexican-Americans learn that lesson quickly and occasionally painfully. The nature of this disjointed relationship, particularly for those that attempt that try to engage their hyphenated nature completely, is confusing and sometimes lonely, particularly when there are few people that you can discuss the nature of both relationships with. One has to be both Mexican and American; regardless of the ability to do so, one is expected to try.

And you aren’t judged on trying: you’re judged on whether you succeed. We’ve got to be twice as perfect.

Baseball, Basketball and Public Discourse

A big reason why I created this blog is so I can talk about the interaction of sports with the creation of American culture. My friends are, unfortunately, not the biggest sports fans in the world and the complicated relationship between culture, sport and race is something that I largely keep to myself and an occasional facebook status.

Baseball and the Act of Hagiography

This post was born as a critique of a column by Jason Morgan entitled “Baseball and the Soul” on March 31st, 2011, a national holiday for many middle to upper class white guys in the Northeast. In it, Morgan espouses the virtues of baseball in ways that seem a bit too much:

Bring your defeated soul to baseball, and baseball will, by the unchangeable truth of its geometry and the eternal vectors of its freedoms, speak to you, call you by name, and—not teach—but allow you to remember who you have always been.

[…]

Baseball doesn’t care what color you are, or what shape or size, or how old or crippled or infirm. The essence of the game is written in our hearts—there is a deep etiological significance to this, if we would only stop to think about it for a little while.

No explanation required.

I think the rest of the article is certainly worth the read, if only as a classical example of baseball hagiography. To describe the statements as mere hyperbole, however,  undersells their potency. Morgan does not attempt to engage in a thorough construction of the facts of baseball and afterwards create narrative. Rather, the column makes normative claims that are believed to have power outside of the reality of the sport itself. It is what baseball is because that is what it wishes to be.

Baseball fans and media engage in a constant struggle to build certain cultural narratives about the sport itself. An understated version of this is the vast publicity of the Little League World Series (through ESPN) and the ways in which sports media really attempts to connect the perceived purity of youth to professional athletics. Those that have the power to speak about baseball build a framework in which we see the actions of players and the existence of the professional sport itself through the hidden values that are constantly narrated: love of the game, fair competition and equality under the travails of the sport itself.

The lived reality of the sport is irrelevant.

Basketball and Negativity

There is a constant and never-ending parade of sports media characters describing in great and exacting detail the many personal negatives of basketball players. A short list of characteristics include selfishness, a thug attitude, flashy, lazy, rude, etc.  The sport’s biggest stars are some of the most lampooned: Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, etc. There is something amusing about the fact that a very common attribute to great players, Greatest of All Time, spells out as G.O.A.T.

Furthermore, if youth playing the sport of baseball is seen as a magical, near mythical experience through events such as the Little League World Series, nothing of the sort exists for basketball. Worse, the entity most often blamed for the negative qualities of basketball players is actually AAU basketball, the amateur circuits that allow young players to participate in the sport outside the context of a school team.  This is without considering the way in which ‘streetball’ as a category is perceived or described. The game of basketball, more than any of the major sports, is played most differently outside of the context of the rules and regulations that govern the sport. If a player is described as either having ‘streetball’ origins or playing as such, it is likely that the negative personal characteristics are only magnified.

There has never been a question over which athlete garnered the big endorsements: the loveable Shaq, always in style and one of the most exuberant adopters of the dress code.

The NBA is also the only professional league which mandates how players should dress: in 2004, after the Melee at Auburn Hills, the NBA came down hard for a mandatory dress code, which stroked controversy over the ways in which the sport was trying to deal with the very negative image the public had of its players.

Explanations and Conclusions

Why is the contrast so stunning? Given the way in which the sports and players are described, the NBA seems far more likely to have just gone through a giant, player-led conspiracy to hide systematic performance substance abuse from testers, regulators and fans. Baseball seems to have largely escaped the Steroid Era without much damage to the way the game is described, even amidst the severe way in which the sport was compromised by hundreds of players.  In contrast, the damage done by the player’s strike of 1994 was rather severe. I’m convinced this is due to the perception of the players as fundamentally selfish for their actions, an attribute which strikes at the very core of the sport.

The race and ethnicity of the players seems to be the most obvious difference between the sports. Baseball is defined by the scrappiness of its white players, with mute Hispanics on the side, while basketball is featured as the sport of super-human black athletes. A couple of weeks ago, I was a bit more confident that this largely explained the difference. However, a conversation with Dara Lind, where she focused on the viewing audience, rather than the players, is shifting my thinking about this. Baseball is the sport of middle and upper-class white men, who are also the most powerful cultural architects in the United States.

Another theory focuses on the power of the individual player in basketball: a great player in the NBA is able to dramatically transform any game and is able to define the parameters of how both themes must play. Given this power, the personal attributes of the players are magnified as a way to cope with their outsized power on the court. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this, particularly because it ties in with the concept of the “white quarterback” in the NFL, where there is a systematic attempt to ensure that the player with the most agency on the field, the quarterback, is white as a way to ensure visibility for a team.

In the end, I’m not too sure what the causal relationship is. The gap, however, has deep significance and importance. Basketball is intimately tied to the broader black experience in urban United States. The NBA is a league where the most prominent players, commentators, and fans are all African American. J.A. Adande coined the idea of the NBA All Star Game as the “Black Super Bowl”. When the sports and its fans are constantly denigrated and demeaned, portrayed solely through negative personal characteristics, it is a broadside against the value of the sport itself, dismissing the ways in which youth throughout the United States struggle to find meaning through the sport.

Baseball is a great sport and beloved by many. However, the language that is used to described it is simply hyperbole. This isn’t to say that baseball fans should not enjoy the game or the language; however, too many of those fans spend much of their time decrying the experience of other sports, particularly basketball. They need to stop and examine.

Disney Channel Movies and How I learned Not to Sell Out

DCOM Logo

Edit: Apparently, a paragraph was eaten in the posting process. Quick summary: Disney Channel’s early history is under investigated.

It’s important to note that Disney’s influence has skyrocketed in the last decade. After its glory days from the 1930s to the 1960s, Disney entered a state of malaise. Walt’s death deeply wounded the company and it seemed to be bouncing from project to project, increasingly looking rather irrelevant. It would be in the early 1990s that it would begin to climb out of the whole. The “Disney Renaissance” marked Disney’s re-emergence as a cultural force, largely through a series of very successful animated films, perhaps most dramatically illustrated by Beauty and the Beast, a Best Picture nominee in 1991.

Its most powerful current tool, the Disney Channel, was still a fledgling network at the time. Better known as a launching pad for careers outside the Disney Channel (the Mickey Mouse Club famously had Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Britney Spears on as members), the channel was a premium-channel that was available in about 15 million homes by 1997. I remember being angry at my parents for not getting me the channel in 1995 and having to only get small weekend previews once or twice a year.

However, 1997 would be a big year for the channel. Under new leadership, the channel made an aggressive two-part move. First, it created a brand for its original movies, DCOM, and aggressively began to market and created them. Secondly, it made its move to basic cable. By 2002, the channel was available in 80 million homes in the United States, an over 500% increase in availability and cultural reach.

We’ll be coming back to the Disney Channel in many other posts, mostly because the cultural influence of its DCOMs beginning in 1997 is understated. After 2006, the channel began to use DCOMs as a cross-promotional tool for its biggest stars. In the time period between 1997 and 2005, however, Disney was producing anywhere between 6-12 movies per year, with very clear themes in many of them. The movies largely focused on teaching several types of cultural lessons: being true to one’s self, working hard, teamwork and fighting against discrimination. As a tween and teenager, I would anxiously await new Disney Channel movies. I remember a particularly funny moment in 2002, watching the premier of “Gotta Kick it Up!”, a movie about a low-income, Mexican-American dancing team, which devolved into me and my close friend trying to do some of the dance moves.

All of this prologue is to make a broader point: these movies had the power to define norms and made those arguments explicitly, particularly through the commercial segments, where they would heavily cross-promote a movie’s actors making cultural and normative statements. One particular movie + lesson combination still resonates today: Brink! and not selling out.

Brink! and the Dangers of  Selling Your Soul

Brink! begins by introducing us to Andy and his teenage friends. They are ‘Soul Skaters’, a group of friends that love to skate for skating’s sake. They are juxtaposed by Team X-Bladz, a group of sponsored skaters. Like all great plot devices, both teams go to the same high school. Ten minutes into the movie, it’s clear what the dichotomy is: if you are a good person who helps others, you are a Soul Skater. If you like being selfish, fame and try to hurt others, you seriously belong to team X-Bladz.

Val, captain of Team X-Bladz, taunts Andy, captain of the Soul Skaters

This dichotomy gets a bit complicated when Andy, our intrepid hero, realizes that there are serious financial problems going on at his house. His dad, a construction worker that was injured, is unsure if he will be getting his job back. Real estate agent mom is not having the best time at work. Andy overhears this and starts to worry. Val, our evil villain from Team X-Bladz, taunts the good guys by mentioning there is an open spot on the team, knowing that in particular, Andy is liable to join, simply to help out the family. His line works and before you know it, Team X-Bladz has a new member: our hero, Andy.

Andy has to hide his defection from his former teammates and from his father, who forbid him from joining the sponsored skating team after an incident at school. He has a second job at a dog grooming shop, courtesy of his dad, as a way to get him some pocket cash without resorting to skating, which creates further problems for Andy. The hero starts having to lie and weasel himself out of situations. Our happy, principled hero has been reduced from his perched, hurting those around him.

The situation comes to a head when Andy’s friends discover him at the seasonal invitational meet, competing with Team X-Bladz, after he had feigned sickness so that the “Soul Skaters” wouldn’t go compete. . An injury to Gaby, a female member of the Soul Skaters (caused by Val), causes some soul searching from Andy and advice comes from two corners. These serve as the cornerstones of the broader lesson being taught:

Gaby: We all need the money, Brink, what does that have to do with it? That’s how it starts, you know. First, you do something that you really love. Then you start doing it for the money. Before you know it, you’re just another sell-out.

Andy then tells his father that he joined the sponsored team and a conversation ensues between the two:

Andy: I tried out for the sponsored team.

Dad: When I told you no.

Andy: We needed the money.

Dad: Not so bad buddy that we needed you to disobey us.

Andy: I guess it wasn’t just for the money, either. I wanted to be a part of Team X.Bladz. I wanted to have my picture in every magazine, I wanted to be someone.

Dad: You know, you and me, are a lot alike. I used to love being construction foremen. I’m Ralph Brinker, I’m a construction foremen. People looked up to me. Suddenly, no more construction foremen. What to know the worst part about being disability? I didn’t know who I was anymore. I used to define myself by my job title. You want to know something? After being laid off for six months, I finally figured out that construction foremen is what I do, not who I am. Andy, you are defined by the company you keep and by how well you keep it. You are Andy Brinker. You are a good son and you are good friend, who just happens to skate.

Both interactions point to the heart of the movie: success is being true to one’s self, being a dependable human being and being kind to everyone. The concept of selling out is judged harshly, which is imbued with the idea of giving up all that is good for the opportunity to engage in selfish desires. As a kid, I remember this lesson being rather important to me. There were many moments in my life where this movie has been in the back of my head as I’m about to make a decision. The movie contains no moral ambiguity: there is a strict dichotomy between good and evil and falling upon the evil side is a choice that quickly leads to moral depravity and the inability to show kindness to any human being.

The way in which money is treated is a bit more nuanced. Andy takes out a loan from work to pay for new skates and gear for his team before the championship. Andy’s dad gets his job back which will allow the family to comfortably make their payments. It’s only when Andy combines his need for money with his dream of being a public star that the money, which would help his family, become corrupted. Though it’s unclear if simply wanting the money would remove the taint of association. The movie presents us a world in which engaging in a task that you love and monetizing it simply corrupts it and would be ill-advised. The moral lessons get complicated, but this concept of selling-out seems to be at the core of our ability to dichotomize the moral agents in the movie. Oddly, it never seemed to be well-defined, left to the viewer as another application of the famous doctrine, “you know when you see it.” If anything, it seems to be connected to purity of heart. At the end of the movie, the ESPN announcer explains during the final stretch of the downhill race that it all comes down to heart. Andy wins and Val is ostracized when he is discovered to have tried to hurt Andy.Yet, this doesn’t remove our confusion: did Val sell out because he is evil or was he corrupted when he sold out? It’s unclear.

I’d like to go in more detail about this another time, but I think this is the sort of example of what I mean by social production. Simply due to the mass availability to the productions of the Disney Channel, certain kinds of behavior were normalized in the public sphere. I’m not sure how one could test this effect – clearly, there are thousands of cultural influences and it would be hard to isolate for individual influence. However, it is consequential that Disney’s rise also corresponded to its most moralistic phase in its DCOMs.

As an undergraduate, I was always rather disdainful of people who were going to do something they were sure wasn’t going to be that much fun for large sums of money. As much as I intellectually argue it, at some level, I have to admit it is an aesthetic choice largely defined by my cultural context. Movies like Brink! were a part of that.

Introductions and Such

I'm Being Influenced! AAAH!

Hello,

My name is Ferny. It’s quite simple. I would tell more about myself, but that would sort of miss the point.  As a sort of introduction, I’ll merely relate what this blog is going to be about: sort of me, but only in the most mundane way possible – as a data point.

The most fascinating part of human beings is their fundamental social nature. The construction of tastes, culture, memory and representation is a process that never ceases. We are our experiences, at our most base. Thus, there’s a big hole out there – why am I me?

The blog name, Socially Produced, tackles this issue head on. The blog, its author and the concoction of mildly grammaticality incorrect content is all a much wider product that has seemingly little design, except that it’s widely influenced by the most mundane of realities. The tag line is this acknowledgement taken to a somewhat humerous level – the ability to blame everything about yourself on something not quite controlled by you.

I don’t plan on bemoaning the lack of agency or theorizing about it. We’re created, but we help create others, and this doesn’t mean that we can’t consciously affect the attempts at creation themselves.

So this project will largely be about that.

Though there will be other pet issues, because, well, I like to talk about other stuff, though I will attempt to put it through that prism.

Here are four other issues that will largely come up:

1. Harry Potter fanfiction
2. Political Debauchery
3. Sports, Sports and More.
4. Education Policy and Politics

I hope to not bore anyone. I won’t be posting every day, though I have a vague goal of at least every other day.

Welcome aboard!