Commentary & Cuentos

A Few Thoughts on the History Environmentalism and Chicanxs

Aaron E. Sanchez — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 17:34:33 +0000

As we celebrate Earth Day, it’s necessary to reflect on the history of environmentalism in the US. People of color and especially Chicanxs are largely invisible in its past and present form.

The studied canon of nature writers, whose romantic verses and sentences, connected humanity and ecology has been white. People like John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, and even Emily Dickinson racialized nature and its benefits. In their late 19^th and early 20^th century writing, they saw nature as an escape, a form of leisure, or a way to resist the dehumanization of capital and capitalism by reasserting the importance of the individual. Industrial capitalism in the late 19^th century was turning people and parts into interchangeable pieces in production that were standardized. Individuals were unnecessary and people were completely replaceable to the point of redundancy. In order to counter these ideas and economic changes, Whitman chose to loaf, to walk, to sing songs of himself, to contribute a verse in a powerful play that would go on. In nature, you did not have to be a cog in an industrial machine; you could just be you. Of course, not all people had the privilege of leisure, not all could loaf.

The other late 19^th and early 20^th century forces of environmentalism came from the hope of managing nature for capitalist production. Many saw natural resources—land, water, trees—on the verge of depletion. Without management, this would be a catastrophe. Technically trained mangers and bureaucrats would oversee those resources, allocating them rationally and responsibly. Their scientific management would ensure that the landscape would remain for future generations. But for these early preservationists, the land was valuable, but the people were not. For people like Teddy Roosevelt and Madison Grant (who infamously wrote the eugenicist book The Passing of the Great Race), the indigenous and Mexican peoples who occupied the land were obstacles to overcome and displace. Inferior and uncivilized, they misused the land. The government and its agencies would impose order and peace to disorder and chaos. Theirs was an environmental benevolence tied to the previous century’s manifest destiny.

Modern environmentalism in the late twentieth century was informed by a neo-Malthusian notion of “carrying capacity” that focused on overpopulation. Edward Abbey wrote:

According to the morning newspaper, the population of America will reach 267 million by 2000 AD. An increase of forty million, or about one-sixth, in only seventeen years! And the racial composition of the population will also change considerably: the white birth rate is about sixty per thousand females, the Negro rate eighty-three per thousand, and the Hispanic rate ninety-six per thousand.
Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.

Environmentalists read books like The Population Bomb and Famine 1975! that argued that the population of the world had reached its limits and environmental disaster and global famine were imminent. Largely responsible for the reckless growth were humans in the global south. People who subscribed to this concept almost always focused on countries and people in the global south, ignoring the disproportionate over consumption of resource and goods of the global north. So ubiquitous was the racialized idea of carrying capacity that the eugenicist John Tanton, a wealthy white supremacist who created a network of anti-migrant organizations, used the concept of overpopulation to support racist immigration laws in the US. Tanton was a member of the Sierra Club and also played a large role in Zero Population Growth. The proliferation of “overpopulation” as a trope was so widespread that Tanton did not feel out of place within some environmental circles and the idea also gave him a springboard to create more openly anti-migrant organizations like FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA.

As the historian Karl Jacoby has written, environmentalism is more than just preserving trees or maintaining the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon. It is is a “redefining” of the “rules governing the use of the environment” that addresses “how the interlocking human and natural communities of a given society [should] be organized.” The fact that Chicanxs/Latinxs have not only been overlooked as “nature writers” but actively targeted as a cause of environmental degradation in the history of environmentalism points to why environmentalism draws a whiter audience and membership. Change is slow in coming, but a new generation of Latinx environmental activists are starting to organize their communities and force a reckoning with environmentalism’s racist past

My Forthcoming Book: Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging Since 1900

Aaron E. Sanchez — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 15:31:27 +0000

Some of you may know that my academic monograph is forthcoming in January 2021. You can preorder now from the OU Press website and it will be shipped in early January.

At only $24.95, it’s an incredibly affordable monograph.

Here’s the link: https://www.oupress.com/books/16122730/homeland

George Lopez, the Trauma of Generations, and Generational Trauma

Aaron E. Sanchez — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 18:19:58 +0000

You might have missed it, given the state of the nation and world, but George Lopez released a stand-up special at the end of June on Netflix. “We’ll Do it for Half,” the title of the special is an allusion to a controversy that Lopez was involved in, a joking tweet about a rumored bounty on Trump issued by Iran.

Lopez continues to be one of the most famous Latino actors and comedians, who has used his celebrity to weigh in on politics. The titles of his stand-up specials alone indicate this, “America’s Mexican,” “Tall, Dark, and Chicano,” and “The Wall.” “Tall, Dark, and Chicano” in 2009 was released during Obama’s presidency, but revealed the cracks in the purported era of post-racial America. Lopez was coming off his sitcom and was angry about the comedic, directorial, and content concessions he had to make appeal to white audiences in order to be “mainstream.” No longer under the constraints of media whitewashing, he was a dark Chicano and he had something to say.

Since then, though his support of liberal and Latino politics has been steadfast, his cultural politics have been uneven. He starred in El Chicano, which was billed as the first Chicano super hero movie. Unfortunately it was an unbalanced attempt to put Mexican-Americans on the right side of the thin blue line. His anti-black jokes have been criticized and, yet, he’s defended them.

In his later specials, and especially in his most recent, Lopez’s jokes about young people turn him into a crank, a near-boomer complaining about how all young Latinxs are pampered, privileged, whiners who are petulant and perpetual babies because they didn’t grow up with the same traumas as the prior generations.

This is an unfortunate turn in his comedy and outlook.

His early comedic success was based on making fun of the traumas that so many Latinxs, and especially Chicanas and Chicanos, endured growing up in poverty. His comedy didn’t minimize traumas. He exposed them. Growing up in poverty meant broken homes, alcoholism, verbal, emotional and physical abuse, food scarcity, housing insecurity, sexism, even environmental racism. The early jokes were meant to show that Latinxs were not the sum of their traumas. That, yes, they experienced those traumas and they shaped who we were, but laughing about them was a way of putting them to rest. It was not necessary for Latinx parents to impose those traumas on their children. They could move past them. The stories and the jokes he told about trauma were funny, because they were past. We could all laugh because they were sepia-toned memories of childhoods that would be remembered but not passed onto the next generation of children.

His 2005 special, “Why you Crying?,” was based on the premise that Latinx parents in the past hit their kids, often crossing the line of discipline into abuse. He enumerated the various ways he was abused and the reasons why. To uproarious laughter, he admitted that parents of his generation “raised us to be insecure,” with constant verbal abuse. They hit children out of anger, frustration, and because of emotional detachment. Jokes about chanclas always get laughs. But then he revealed, “my daughter is 8, never been hit.” Lopez could laugh at his past because it was not part of his present and would not be part of the future. At the end of the special he urged, “remember all that stuff” but “allow them to dream, that’s the most important thing.” He concluded: “Look, no one ever told me I could do shit with my life…Whatever child you have whatever age they are, encourage them to do better than you and to go to school and to dream and become whatever they want.”

A similar theme appeared in his 2007 special “America’s Mexican.” He makes light of his grandparents’ parenting style. He was not read to, perhaps because of his grandparents’ limited literacy. He was thrown into a pool to literally sink or swim. He jokes that as a poor Mexican-American kid, he didn’t have access to a pool so he swam in the uneven part of the cement where water collected. Children of his generation didn’t get whole popsicles. (They were too poor.) They were not given allowances. (His grandma would say: you do “I allow you to live.”) All of this leads him to declare that “kids today wouldn’t last one day of our childhoods.”

But that was a tacit acknowledgement that the childhood of his children was nearly unrecognizable to him as well. In a mocking tone, he chides gogurts, lunchables, and juice boxes. “We didn’t have the shit they have,” he quips. Instead, they had weenies and Tapatio. Instead of expensive juice boxes that his children have, he grew up with water from the hose. All those experiences shaped him and his generation. However, they stopped with him.

In that special he remarks, “my daughter’s 10, she gets read bed time stories every night.” His daughter is no longer drinking from hoses laden with carcinogens and lead. She has access to juice boxes. Lopez and his audience were laughing at the chasm between their experiences and their children. And while they noted that those things shaped the people they grew up to become, those experiences also damaged them, inflicted trauma upon them that they did not want their children to experience. That was the collective release of the comedy; that the traumas of the past would not be passed on, only the joys that come with learning to overcome adversity.

But then, his cultural politics shifted.

Perhaps it had to do with the hardening of politics and the rise of anti-Latino sentiment in the 2010s. In the anti-Latino climate of the Minutemen, Tea Party, and the forces that gave rise to Trump, Lopez reacted by retreating into a cultural bunker. His jokes, which had previously revealed the shortcomings of Latinx culture, made a turn toward reverence of tradition. Somehow the positive changes in Latinx parenting were now sad affects of a white American culture that had changed the community, and not for the better.

By his 2009 special, the kids were no longer alright. They were pampered and babied. They were scared of the dark. They were scared of Halloween costumes. They were afraid of drowning. All of this, according to Lopez, was the fault of their parents. Parents had become too friendly with their children, crossing a line into being friends with their children and not parents. “I hated my grandfather. I hated my grandmother. I think I turned out ok” he exclaims.

He elaborated on this point in his 2017 special, “The Wall.” He begins his set-up with the observation of a young child throwing a tantrum because his food was touching on the plate. He asks the audience, “Ask yourself if you could have gotten away with that shit?” The set-up leads him to his statement on Latinx parenting: “You don’t baby. Our parents and our culture shows us that it’s not all compliments. It’s not everything you do is amazing.” In short, the strength of Latinxs was based on the traumatic parenting style of their predecessors. While it may hurt, while it may be abusive, while it may traumatize, at least “you don’t have a distorted view of life. Not everything is wonderful.”

In his latest special, Lopez belabors the point that Latinx culture is markedly different from American culture. While this is a tried and true trope of ethnic humor, Lopez uses this differentiation not for cultural resistance, but reverence. “That’s who we are” he says of his upbringing. “We were raised by the original body shamers,” he extols. “All the parents are nice now,” he bemoans. Latinos are different. “We don’t disrespect out parents. We don’t talk back.” If that happens, parents dole out retribution. Physical and verbal abuse: “That’s how you get respect!” he exclaims. In his new special he celebrates sexism, homophobia, obesity, and trauma as quintessential to being Latinx. In his latest special, it is not the surviving of trauma that makes Latinxs, but its maintenance.

Lopez is not officially a baby-boomer. Born in 1961, he’s one year too late for that designation. While it could seem that this is just another inevitable conflict of generations, generational conflict is rarely if ever only a contest between age groups. More often the conflicts are political and ideological. What then are the ideas and politics of Lopez’s generation that was formed between the Chicano Movement and the Decade of the Hispanic? Why is it so important for Lopez that the traumas of his childhood are passed on to the next generation?

Maybe, this isn’t just generational crankiness. Perhaps Lopez’s retreat into a cultural bunker is a political expression. In an anti-Latinx climate like our own, any calling out of our own cultural shortcomings could be used as an inroad into cultural denigration. Cultural deficiency theories have a long history in the US and still have incredible power today.

Maybe his parental crankiness is the expression of parental guilt. The nation that his children and young Latinxs are facing is different. The most common age for a US-born Latinx is 11 years old and they are growing up in a climate of hate that has not been rivaled in recent history. Perhaps Lopez believes that without the trauma of being insulted, yelled at, and beaten, they have left their children without the tools to confront a nation that is ready to do all those things and more. As coach Doc Rivers, who is the same age as Lopez, said “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country and this country does not love us back.”

Lopez’s cranky parental politics seem to be rooted in guilt that he and his generation bear the weight for having failed to prepare their children for the trauma they will endure in a nation that has turned abusive. But what he fails to see is that people and generations plagued by trauma often lack the emotional capacity or empathy to confront their own trauma or correct the trauma of others.

Latest for Sojourners: This is the Face of the Reconquista

Aaron E. Sanchez — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 17:50:21 +0000

I’ve had the opportunity to write for Sojourners lately. I’ll be posting the articles I’ve written for them over the next weeks.

Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.
– Samuel P. Huntington

The first cast in the ochre light of the dawning sun is a morning prayer, filled with hope and faith that ceremonies sought in earnest will feed the soul. I reel dutifully, waiting for a faint tap on the end of my line. My father stands at the front of the boat, scanning for ripples on the water in the low light. “Wachale!” he exclaims in joking Spanglish as he reels in the first largemouth of the day. Two Mexican-Americans bass fishing in Texas. This is the face of the Reconquista.

Read the full article here.

Latest for Latino Rebels: Birthright Citizenship and the Trump Administration’s Manufacturing of a White Majority

Aaron E. Sanchez — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:09:12 +0000

Donald Trump has announced that he plans to rescind birthright citizenship through an executive order.

While possibly a ploy to encourage support among his white nationalist base in the upcoming midterm elections, this new proposal fits into the Trump administrations larger policy project: making America white again. While they cannot change the demographic reality of the nation, they will make the nation whiter by fiat.

Read the rest at LatinoRebels.com.

Latest for Sojourners: Seeking Communion: Religious Rites and Civil Rights

Aaron E. Sanchez — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 18:09:03 +0000

Seeking Communion: Religious Rites and Civil Rights

My son and daughter’s favorite part of church is communion.

They can finally leave their seats at the back pew where my wife and I have been feeding them snacks, trying to bribe from them their patience. They stand. They walk down the center aisle. They smile at nearly every face they see and wave at many they know. As we approach the front, the pastor takes bread and places the pieces in their small hands.

“Do you know that Jesus loves you?” she asks.

And nearly every Sunday, as broken bread stands for broken bodies, I am struck with the words of James Baldwin, when he wrote that to be born black or a person of color in America means that you must “give up all hope of communion.”

Read the entire article here.

Guest Blog for BigBrownDad.com: THREE #CHICANODADPROBLEMS DURING BACK-2-SCHOOL

Aaron E. Sanchez — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 15:12:29 +0000

Guest Contributor: Aaron E. Sanchez

#ChicanoDadProblems are real. For some reason my kids run away when I try to read them Pablo Neruda poems. They’d rather listen to the Frozen soundtrack than Chicano-inspired Son Jarocho.

They showed no interest when I tried to read them Fidel Castro’s obituary at the breakfast table years ago. When my son was little, the violin in Mariachi music made him cry but the fiddle in bluegrass cheered him up.

Now that they’re back in school, there are only more #ChicanoDadProblems to deal with.

Here are a few.

1. Trying too hard to make people know your mixed-race kids are Chicano.

Read the rest at: http://www.bigbrowndad.com/guest-blog-three-chicanodadproblems-during-back-2-school/

Latino Voters Favor a Progressive Democratic Party, New Poll Shows

Aaron E. Sanchez — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 15:39:47 +0000

Despite popular handwringing about the Democratic Party’s left-wing moves, recent tracking from Latino Decisions and the NALEO Education fund indicates that registered Latino voters and likely Latino voters support the progressive plank of the party. Young women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley are proof of the eagerness among the communities of color, who form an important part of the Democratic coalition, for important social reforms.

Latinos Care About a Fairer Economy and Society, not Just Immigration

The Latino Decisions/NALEO poll shows that Latino voters would be more likely to support candidates who have policies that align with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Respondents overwhelmingly favored candidates who wanted a clean DREAM act, universal background checks for gun purchases, expanded access to health care, protection of social programs like Medicare and Social Security, and reproductive rights.

DREAMers are an important issue for Latinos, but immigration is not the only issue Latinos care about. While 80 percent of polled voters were more likely to support a candidate who favored passing a DREAM Act, 86 percent were more likely to support a candidate who called for universal background checks before any gun purchase.

Healthcare is an important issue for registered Latino voters. Over three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents were more likely to support a candidate who wanted to expand access to health care and improve and protect Obamacare. Nearly 70 percent of respondents were less likely to support a candidate who wanted to cut spending on Medicare and Medicaid. While Latinos also comprise 41 percent of Catholics in the US, Latino voters still favor reproductive rights. Sixty-two percent of respondents were less likely to support a candidate who prioritized placing an anti-Roe v. Wade judge on the Supreme Court. Even more telling, only 17 percent of respondents were more likely to support a candidate with that stated goal, while 35 percent were much less likely to support the candidate, showing that this is a battle in an overwhelmingly white culture war.

For Latinos, Trump is the Republican Party

Seventy-nine percent of Latinos have a negative perception of the Republican Party currently, believing that they “don’t care too much” or are “being hostile” toward Latinos. Sixty-nine percent of registered Latino voters surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump. The highest ranking issue for Latino voters was “stopping Trump and the Republican Agenda,” compared to only 7 percent believed the most pressing issue was “Stopping Pelosi and the Democratic Agenda.”

This information correlates with earlier Latino Decisions polls that shows the Republican Party’s turn to Trumpism is shedding Latino Voters. Trump and the nativist turn of the GOP has brought an end to over four decades of Latino outreach. Trump’s demonization of Latinos has turned nearly every significant Latino group away from the Republican Party. Only about 15 percent of respondents identified as Republican voters.

Outside of Trump’s tweets, the overall message of the Republican Party is not appealing to Latinos either. The Republican bogeyman of “big government” is not frightening for Latinos. The scarier specter is governmental breakdown. While Republicans in the past have doubled-down on Latinos’ skepticism of the larger role of government, they have misconstrued it for anti-statism. Latinos want good government. They are aware that government is not always the solution, but neither is government always the problem, as Republicans since Reagan have repeated often. For many naturalized citizens and first-generation U.S.-Latinos there is a belief that things can and should work better in the U.S. Latinos are afraid that American politics descending into disorder and there is no better example than Trump, who acts, lies, and governs as an authoritarian dictator. For many Latino voters, Trump and the GOP are the type of leaders than their parents and grandparents warned them about.

Photo credit via Wiki Commons

My Latest For Latino Rebels: The Real Health Cost of Living in a Deportation State

Aaron E. Sanchez — Thu, 03 May 2018 15:57:36 +0000

Public health researchers and sociologists are showing that living in a deportation state has a real health cost that is being disproportionately paid by citizen children. According to these experts, immigration is no longer just a policy issue; it is a national public health concern. Deportation-centered policies affect American families. Of those deported in the United States, nearly one in four deportees are parents of U.S. citizens. The impact on U.S.-born children becomes clear when considering that within the Latino community—one in four children are born into families where at least one parent is undocumented, or a mixed status family. The issue becomes even larger when considering that across the nation, where one in eight children born in the U.S. are born into mixed status families.

Read the rest of the story at LatinoRebels.com.

The Point of the New Citizenship Question on the Census is to Make the Nation Whiter by Fiat

Aaron E. Sanchez — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:42:08 +0000

Last month, the Trump administration made it clear that the 2020 census would include a question regarding citizenship. The administration claimed that the new citizenship question was added to make sure that key sections of the Voting Rights Act were being upheld. The block-by-block census data could identify communities under threat and the Justice Department, headed by Jeff Sessions, could keep an eye on those vulnerable communities. The administration argued that it was nothing for community or civil rights organizations to worry about.

The census is constitutionally mandated in order to ascertain the number of people living in the country. Using that information, representation can be apportioned, congressional districts can be drawn, federal funding can be issued, states can make long-term plans. But the census is important because it one of the ways that the state “sees.” That is, government officials at local, state, and national levels do not personally know every single constituent or person living in their district, city, state, or country. It is impossible for them to know something or anything about everybody, yet these officials must. In order for highly organized states to function, they must know key aspects about the populations they encompass. The census, a series of questions asking individuals to describe themselves and their families, is one of the many ways governments know their populations (others include social security numbers, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, death certificates, tax returns, etc.).

The data is supposed to be scientific, objective, calculated, and rational. It is supposed to be free from predominate prejudices and political calculations. However, this is not the case.

The 2010 census was the most accurate census in history. Yet, it still over-counted the white population in the United States and undercounted communities of color. Latinos were undercounted by 1.5 percent, while white Americans were over-counted by almost 1 percent. Effectively, an increasingly browner nation was made whiter.

This is the point of the Trump administration’s citizenship question: to make the nation whiter by fiat. The 2020 census will do the work that their policies cannot, return the nation to an imagined past in which there were fewer non-white people in the country—the time when America was “great,” as his slogan proclaimed. They want the census to be less accurate, that’s why they’re cutting the funding of the census and adding untested questions. They hope, through adding questions about citizenship—in combination with anti-immigrant rhetoric and public deportation efforts—that Latinos with unauthorized family members will not answer or return their forms.

Given the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant and particularly anti-Mexican and Latino rhetoric since 2015, many Latinos are likely to under-report. Nearly 1 in 4 Latino children born in the U.S. are born into mixed-status families and only about 1/3 of Latino families in the US are families in which all members are US citizens. As their fear of deportation increases, few mixed-status families will want to divulge information regarding their loved ones. Latinos’ lack of response will lead to a dramatic undercount of Latinos in the nation, which will statistically indicate a smaller Latino population.

Trump will point to this in 2020 as proof that his policies—calls for a wall, unleashed ICE agents, and anti-immigrant rhetoric—worked. The statistical erasure of brown bodies and Spanish surnames from the census is not insignificant. It is not a mere oversight. It is the intended consequence with the purpose of rendering Latinos socially invisible for at least 10 years.

Photo via Wiki Commons