Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  The successful writer Julia Alvarez. CREDIT: JULIA ALVAREZ

  One of Julia Alvarez’s best-known works, How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel that follows the daughters of a Dominican physician making new lives for themselves in New York. CREDIT: ALGONQUIN BOOKS

  Even today, not far from the Canadian border, and a long way from her Caribbean roots in the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez, author of the celebrated novels In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, carries home in her head. “As the leaves fell and the air turned gray and the cold set in, I would remember the big house in Boca Chica, the waves telling me their secrets, the cousins sleeping side by side in their cots, and I would wonder if the words by which I’d entered this country had set me free from everything I loved.”

  For Juan González, that memory, like a pearl sewn into the lining of a coat, is part of what keeps Latinos who they are in the twenty-first century. “That sense of giving up all that you love, your island—your home—which was always remembered better than maybe it really was. It fed a nostalgia that insisted on the preservation of culture and language—those were portable items that one could carry anywhere and pull out when times got tough.”

  The coming years of tumult for the United States would bring change, struggle, and progress for Latino communities across the country. A people was coming into its own. Down on the border with Mexico, out on the Pacific, back in New York, Latinos would come into the inheritance that was theirs . . . as Americans.

  A migrant worker family in the fields. CREDIT: WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

  WHO’S “IN”? WHO’S “OUT”?

  WHOSE AMERICA?

  MOST AMERICANS only occasionally travel outside the region where they live and work. When they do, it is rarely with the express purpose of digging down deep into the way life is lived day to day by unfamiliar people. Instead, we form impressions. Each person carries a map around in his or her head—a map of places unfamiliar and well-known, desirable and best avoided. We also have a kind of people map, a grab bag of impressions and ideas and conclusions that help us to “know” a place we’ve never been, and people we’ve never met. One of the most potent tools for sketching in the details of that mental map is television.

  Freddie Prinze. Born Frederick Karl Pruetzel, the Nuyorican comedian became a situation comedy star as Chico in Chico and the Man. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS

  So it was important that on the evening of September 13, 1974, a network audience watched actor Freddie Prinze start drumming a Latin rhythm on a gas pump in an East L.A. garage. The shop’s owner, Jack Albertson, not only tells him to cut out the drumming, but adds for good measure, “Go back to your own neighborhood.”

  No drumroll. No fireworks. No sudden swell of violins to signal to the audience that something important is about to happen. Prinze’s character, Chico, replies, “This is my neighborhood. I grew up watching your garage run down. You need me.”

  Albertson is puzzled. “For what?”

  Prinze answers simply, “I’m Super-Mex.”

  All right, it’s not the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It’s not the Bill of Rights. But American television audiences had not seen anything like it before. Here was a Latino character telling a mainstream American one:

  That the Anglo is in Latino space, a place that is populated, defined, possessed by Latinos rather than a place where they are strangers, foreigners, intruders, or visitors.

  That the Anglo needs a Latino for something more than bracero labor. Not just a strong back and two arms, Chico is a skilled mechanic, offering to help save a failing business.

  That the relationship can be multidimensional. Over the course of the series comic situations are drawn from more than ethnicity.

  There is a wide difference in age between Albertson and Prinze at a time in America when the generation gap yawned like a canyon, after the struggles for civil rights, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and Watergate. Albertson’s character is older, traditional, and occasionally cranky. His hardness is confronted by Prinze’s exuberance, humor, and decidedly different worldview.

  Some might say, “Big deal.” By the Nixon years, Chico was hardly the first Latino leading character on network television. In 1974, however, Chico and the Man took a mainstream audience places it had never been taken by a Latino character before.

  I Love Lucy’s Ricky Ricardo, played by Desi Arnaz, is not a migrant farmer or a manual worker. He’s a talented musician and entrepreneur, a nightclub owner. Earlier TV characters, like the sombrero-topped Cisco Kid (1950–56) (played by Duncan Renaldo, ethnic background ambiguous) and his brave and comic sidekick Pancho (played by pioneering Mexican-American actor Leo Carrillo, whose great-great-grandfather sheltered Apolinaria Lorenzana) are as much Mexican as American, expertly riding horses back and forth over the borders of nationality, culture, and sovereignty in the mid-1800s American Southwest. At home, and skilled in navigating both cultures, Cisco Kid can speak with credibility to both Anglo and Latino, and became a go-between in a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape in newly American territory that was once Mexico. Not a sworn peace officer or member of the new American governing apparatus, Cisco is a kind of Mexican border knight-errant, finding bad guys, righting wrongs, and defending the weak.

  Also signaled by the pounding of horses’ hooves and a flash of glinting sword was Zorro (a character who first appeared in a serialized magazine in 1919 and who was played from 1957 to 1959 on television by the Italian-American Guy Williams). Zorro was Robin Hood with a Spanish accent and a high-class pedigree. The masked enforcer lived in colonial California, battling corrupt, lying, abusive (and occasionally feminized) Mexican bad guys. It was a weird show, featuring as it did a skillful, brave, and strong Mexican hero, the aristocrat Don Diego de la Vega, while at the very next moment indulging in the worst set of Mexican stereotypes to define his adversaries. The soldiers, aristocrats, and landowners of the Zorro stories are cruel, venal, and stupid.

  Guy Williams as “Zorro.” CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS

  Springing from the same stereotypes while in a different category from all these Latino characters populating the black-and-white television screens of my youth was Baba Looey, the sombrero-wearing burro who was the cartoon sidekick of the self-deluding, clumsy, but well-meaning horse/lawman Quick Draw McGraw (1959–62). While identified as “Mexican” in the near-empty deserts of the American West through his hat and his accent, Baba marries the best traits of the Cisco Kid’s Pancho and Cervantes’s Sancho. Like Sancho Panza who keeps his wary eye on his “master,” Don Quixote, only the little burro appears to know what is really up. Baba breaks down the “fourth wall” of the TV screen and occasionally speaks directly to us, his audience, with a running commentary on his efforts to save his boss and friend from his own worst impulses. When Quick Draw dons a mask and channels his own Zorro fantasies by becoming a cartoon Zorro, “El Kabong,” Baba follows, in sombrero and mask and cringe-worthy “Mexican” accent, to narrate the goings-on.

  Freddie Prinze’s Chico is different. He is confident, secure, and doesn’t get his status or his sense of himself from Jack Albertson’s “Man,” an ethnically undefined character known as Ed Brown. Prinze challenges his would-be boss, “Ask anybody in the barrio about Chico Rodriguez. You know what they’ll tell you? ‘Oh, yeah! Chico can take apart an engine and put it back together blindfolded.’”

  Again, this is not some great cultural milestone. But it’s something. Albertson becomes a kind of West Coast Archie Bunker, occasionally mining the same kind of stereotypes as Carroll O’Connor’s sitcom New Yorker, to both serious and comic effect. Remember, Prinze is asking Albertson for a job, but Chico believes his skill allows him to be an easygoing wise guy rather than a subservient petitioner. The garage owner hands his visitor a wrench:

  Prinze: “You want me to fix
something?”

  Albertson: “Yeah, tighten up your tongue before it flaps out of your mouth.”

  Prinze: “Amigo!”

  Albertson: “Don’t call me amigo!”

  Prinze: “It means ‘friend.’”

  Albertson: “I don’t care what it means. Talk English.”

  Prinze [adopts his version of an upper-class English accent]: “Very well, friend. I would like to be the first Chicano associated with this floundering enterprise.”

  Like Chico Rodriguez, Freddie Prinze was an invention. He was born in New York in 1954 as Frederick Pruetzel, to a Hungarian father and a Puerto Rican mother. After his start in stand-up, Prinze moved first to late-night television appearances, then to his groundbreaking sitcom. In 1977, he was at just twenty-two in the third season of his NBC show. He had performed at preinaugural festivities in Washington for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at the request of the incoming president, and vice president. Prinze’s press agent, Paul Wasserman, told the New York Times, “It was a great thrill for Freddie. It symbolized that he had made it. Professionally, he was at his peak.”

  The tremendous success of Chico and the Man and Prinze himself was short-lived. Just weeks after the performance at the inauguration, after a history of depression, he shot himself in the head.

  • • •

  THE UNITED STATES in the 1970s was faced with major challenges. People who were held back by prevailing prejudices in the years after the Second World War were, one by one and often together, demanding a new kind of society in their country. They learned from one another, made strategic alliances, and banged on the door of the “people in charge”—politicians, business owners, the courts, the schools—for thirty years.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you might have plopped down your schoolbooks, as I did, and around dinnertime watched as all the world’s sorrows were delivered fresh and piping hot to your TV screen: the Vietnam War and the struggle at home to end it; school strikes over control of administrations, who taught, and what was taught; sit-ins; street riots; assassinations; and the persistent demands for rights from blacks, women, Latinos, gays, people with disabilities, and others.

  These extraordinary times also forced people who thought of themselves as ordinary into action. Confronted with the injustice, suffering, and struggle of the workers who picked the crops that ended up on America’s dining tables, Dolores Huerta could not sit still.

  She was an interesting mix. Her mother was descended from Mexican-Americans in the United States for many generations; her father was the son of Mexican immigrants. As a young schoolteacher in central California, Dolores saw the living conditions and ill health of the youngsters whose parents worked the fields. Maybe half were American citizens; the other half were not. Huerta remembers that they shared the dangerous poverty that handicapped their todays and burdened their tomorrows. “They were so poor, and almost always sick. They came to school in rags, often without breakfast. Most had never seen a doctor or dentist.”

  Huerta’s mother, Alicia, and her father, Juan, had split when Dolores and her siblings were young. Her mother took the kids from New Mexico to Stockton, California, and burned with the desire to get ahead. “She would work two jobs—in the cannery at night and waitressing during the day—to save enough money to open a restaurant, and later a hotel.”

  Her father stayed back in New Mexico, and became a union organizer and state legislator. You might say Dolores incorporated both examples in her own life—of labor leadership and politics—and she was the model of an ambitious, hardworking, and independent woman.

  Standing before her class at Brown Elementary School in Stockton, Dolores realized she could do little to change the circumstances of her hungry kids. Change had to come in the fields, where their parents worked to give Americans cheap and plentiful food, while getting paid a pittance and going hungry.

  Dolores Huerta as a young organizer. CREDIT: © 1976 GEORGE BALLIS/ TAKE STOCK/ THE IMAGE WORKS

  “The work was hard and dangerous. Crop dusters sprayed pesticides on the fields while people were working. People got really sick, and some died. So many babies were born with brain damage. I remember seeing children with the most horrible birth defects. The growers, the business owners, the government: nobody did a damn thing.”

  Dolores Huerta left the classroom and headed to the fields after concluding, “I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.” She became the cofounder of the Community Service Organization’s Stockton chapter. In a way she never stopped being a teacher. To the most neglected and mistreated workers in America, she helped teach the techniques of organization and resistance that would help migrant workers stand up to growers with greater resources and contacts.

  In the early 1960s, today’s common ideas about the rights and abilities of working women were not as widely accepted. As Huerta’s devotion to advocacy and the labor movement grew, she was also a young wife who went on to have eleven children. “I was always pregnant. But I cared more about helping other people than cleaning house and doing my hair, and this didn’t go over well at home.

  “It ended up in my second divorce. Every day in 1961, I drove to Sacramento to lobby the legislature to pass laws for poor people. Meanwhile, my husband was trying to take my kids away from me in court. Hard times.”

  Where does the mother end and the citizen begin? If you knew Dolores Huerta and her work during these years, would you have thought of her as a hero, or a neglectful mother? She ended up raising her kids alone. “I don’t remember anything about my daughter Alicia’s childhood except nursing her in the ladies’ room during breaks in city council meetings.”

  In between nursing breaks, Huerta was making her mark. In one year she helped get fifteen bills passed in the California legislature. Poor children would now get free breakfast and lunch in school.

  In 1962, Huerta met a young organizer who was already developing a growing reputation in California’s agricultural heartland. His name was Cesar Chavez. “I had heard a lot about him. Cesar this and Cesar that. But he didn’t make much of an impression on me. I forgot his face. He was very unassuming. He had a reputation as a great organizer, but I found it hard to believe.”

  History is full of teams that go on to build enduring reputations and accomplish great things: Lewis and Clark, Watson and Crick, Lennon and McCartney. Their first meetings have often been uneventful, even hard to remember for the partners themselves. In Huerta and Chavez, the farmworkers had organizers, leaders, and allies who would eventually pull them from the shadows and ask Americans to think about how food gets from the soil to their table.

  Chavez’s grandparents came to Arizona from Mexico in the 1880s. His family started a freight business, bought land, and began farming. Chavez’s family did not stand still. His father added a grocery store, a pool hall, and a garage to the family holdings.

  When the Great Depression hit, it wiped out all the businesses, and the state of Arizona repossessed the family home. Like millions of other Americans, Chavez’s family hit the road. They worked the fields and lived in camps. By his reckoning, Cesar and his brothers and sisters attended some thirty different schools in those years. Later, he recalled how Spanish was forbidden. “The teacher swooped down on us. I remember the ruler whistling through the air as its edge came down sharply across my knuckles. The principal had a special paddle that looked like a two-by-four with a handle. It was smooth from a lot of use.”

  As an adult he could speak to illiterate farmworkers as a peer and friend, and to the powerful and influential as an equal. He was soft-spoken, erudite, sophisticated. Chavez left school after the eighth grade and headed into the fields.

  “It was a hell of a life. Working in the fields in the scorching hot summers. Living in a broken-down car, or else in the dark, overcrowded
shacks without toilets, electricity, or running water.

  “Farmworkers were in a uniquely bad position. After decades of struggle and bloodshed, unions were established in other industries. But there were no farm unions.”

  The men, women, and children who made Americans’ food were very different from other workers. Many had no permanent home, simply following the seasons, arriving in a state or county around the time the lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, tomatoes, apples, or grapes were ready to be picked. When a crop was in, it was time to move on. A worker could labor for the same grower for years, only to be a stranger to him if the two passed on the street. It was hard to make a life in one place, because before long, it would be time to leave again.

  To the end of his life, Cesar Chavez insisted that his union members be regarded as human beings, invested with the dignity that is the right of workers anywhere, in any industry. “I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: to overthrow a farm labor system in this nation which treats farmworkers as if they were not important human beings, to see my people treated as human beings, and not as chattel.”

  Chattel is property. A system had grown up over the years that allowed growers to regard workers as just another machine. They had become something like temporary serfs. While serfdom around the world had taken on an implied, if small sense of obligation from master to worker, America’s serfs seemed to deserve nothing. Even if their well-being was ignored, they would be back in another year, when the fruit began to ripen.

  At twenty-five, Chavez began doing social work with Mexican-American migrant farmworkers. Nine years of that work had brought little tangible success. When Chavez met Huerta, a partnership began that would remake the struggle in the fields, shake up the labor movement in America, and bring a new kind of attention to Latinos in America. Another part of the story, less noble perhaps, can’t be denied: Dolores Huerta moved into Cesar Chavez’s shadow, and would never emerge from it.