chips & salsa
I've started and stopped three times. So let me skip the topic of Venezuela for now.
Instead, let me write from my direct experience. That's almost certainly why you're reading this.
I've spent almost half of my adult life working for a Hispanic media company. Only, that's not right. It's an American media company that sells products to Hispanics.
But aren't Hispanics Americans, you say?
LOL.
And here's how I would summarize my experience: no one gives a shit about Hispanics except for other Hispanics. And even they have a lot of self-hate to overcome.
Of course, lots of people love tacos and many peope love hispanics as friends and family. Some of you love me and my family and I love you back.
But love, it turns out, is not enough.
When I was in high school, one of my teachers joked that I would eventually change my name to Joe Marks and sell out. It was a funny joke to us all because even then it was clear that I'd be on my shit for the rest of my life. To use the AAVE idiom. Which is to say, high English.
If not for the African Americans, I would not be an American today. None of us would. If not for African Americans, this country would have sold out its founding principles long ago. There's people lining up to do it right now. And there'll be more tomorrow.
Which brings us back to Simón Bolívar. And José Martí. And Toussaint Louverture. To the Americas.
Whoever has not dreamed of the Americas has never dreamed deeply enough. Or, more likely, they've never awoken from the nightmare of the present.
What does it mean to be a Hispanic if not to dream of the Americas?
Americas.
These Are the Americans.
The indigenous and the creole and the immigrant and the native-born.
Pride is a curious flower. It's forbidden in most traditions. It's a salve for the wounds. When you're still being called vermin in mixed company, it's understandable that you'd resort to pride for some sense of restitution.
Certainly, there are appeals to nationalist pride all over media – Guatemalans dance like this, Dominicans eat beans like that.
I don't take much solace from that material any more. No matter how popular it may get. Oh, your mother threw a chancla? Oh, OK.
Those are appetizers. What about the main course?
I recently read a Young Adult novel that's been optioned for a possible series. It's set in NYC and – I'll leave it at that because I rent and our car still has a year of payments left.
What this book does best is to extol the beauty of being a New Yorker. What it does worst is to extol the beauty of being Latinx. The author simply doesn't know what that means. And I don't blame them.
(You say Latinx, I say Hispanic. They're both names for tomatl. Because there were no tomatoes in Europe. Zero. They come from the Americas and their name is nahuatl.)
There are so many such missing links in the chain migration. Because we don't teach our culture in our schools. We hardly teach our literature. And most certainly we do not teach our history.
For the history is still being written. Or not.
Literally, we lack a consensus on many of the most important events of the Americas. That's how much bloodshed and violence we've suffered. That's how recent it's been.
By way of analogy, Canadian-American Ted Cruz ran a presidential campaign headed by Steve King, the Congressman from Iowa who proudly displays a Confederate Flag in his office. Iowa, a state that was not in the Confederacy. The American Civil War ended 154 years ago.
The US government was helping Guatemalan soldiers rape, torture and kill less than forty years ago. It's a fact, seldom discussed, in any discussion of the refugee caravans.
I could go on but I'd rather not. I have too much pride.
Enough to know that the status quo is unbearable. That assimilation is suicide. That my ability to write you in crisp Yankee prosody is additive. It's a bonus.
What I really am, what makes me truly American, is that I still dream in Spanish, that I dream of the Americas, that I honor our living history, alongside that of every other people who have ever fought for freedom and survived.
Joe Cuba, El Pito.
Listen to it now. Let it play in a background tab.
Mr. Cuba is in fact Puerto Rican. Only that's wrong too, he's a New Yorker, from Oosten Haarlem – or East Harlem, as it's pronounced these days.
And this song, which still bangs, which has MULTIPLE RHYTHMS, as our music does, borrows its catchphrase from Dizzy Gillespie and his song Manteca. (Read about it here.)
There was a time when the diaspora was one. When the Americas were one.
That time won't come back by itself.
There is no karma. There is no reason in history. Words are lost forever. Entire religions.
I see your Antikythera computer, which was built a hundred years before Jesus, and which used technology that would be lost for much more than a thousand years, and I raise you the Quipu knots.
Or, even, simply, a tomatl.
Did you know some 8.2 million pounds of fried mahiz will be consumed this Sunday?
We are not being erased. We are erasing ourselves.
Whoever tells the past, controls the future.
If we don't tell ours, again and again,
we're doomed.