I am

I shall no longer be subjected or fall into that treacherous pit, I am mexican Xicano and I speak english as a primary source of communication. I shall no longer care or worry that my brethen down south or within our culture think I may have gone lost with no return. I was born in no man land’s, it is my natural state. I shall no longer partake in the mourning or loss of this or that culture because I no longer speak spanish. I have matured, I am mexican, I am gringo, I am those two, I am Xicano.

Though I speak english I talk mexican Xican@. If the spanish speaking majority find this as regrettable I find it sad that they would come to that conclusion for I am mexican Xicano though I speaketh the anglosaxonist tongue. Spanish does not have a sole right to the mexican culture, nor do their other dialects. I am an expression of that mexicanness regardless of that ostricism that some practice to obligate, force their view of their ways to people like me. I am Mexican Xicano and I speak english. So weep not that I may have lost this or that caracteristic of my race, celebrate fool! Celebrate for this is the dawn of a new culture, a culture that is yours, mine theirs, american!

To the very contrary as supposed and mourned I preserve, I retain those values, I used to be though of another opinion. I used to feel obligated to preserve, no longer is such thinking the mana of my soul, I now know that I am because I have that which you have said I no longer have, though I ceasesly tried to convince you otherwise, I now know that that thinking is akin to racism, you want to me to be different from you. Though I am not, for I am an extension of that expressión and as such a part of you.

When you say I am lost and that I have lost my culture not only do you denigrate my culture but you also denigrate my familia which has learned to love me for who I am.

On blogs and other secessionist thinking

Am rather glad to have found Mariel Garza, a newsy hound from LA. On the Tijuana blogsphere there are loads of newsies with blogs but I am not that acquainted with the one’s in the english blogsphere. So am particurly evenmoreso glad that this newsy happens to be erhm, of mexican, extraction. Yes, I know, I take the easy road out, the fact of the matter is that I do this because I can get the pulse of the Xican@ mind state and not because I prefer the letters of Xican@s more than anglos.

I’m the one living in Sweden ese!

So I procure this type of blogs because I hear their voices and they warm my cold solitude.

On other pertinent stuff it seems that secession is the buzzword on the net, just be informed to know that we here at Yonder Lies It help the avalanche not so long ago, Oso, Ethnoqueer, Xolo, and Culturezap where way ahead of all! Ha! Take that! wait Julio, you’re making a spectacle out of you, that’s news.

Over at Sensoryoverload the talk was pretty heated on that respect and now via her I got this link Fuck the South. All I can say, reclines in his chair while he strains his fingers to type this, is that it is nice and healthy therapy. However, one ought to really wonder to whom said inflammatory rethoric is intended to. While this kind of letter writing sounds like jingle bells to liberals and creates headassenting and yeah, that’s right, acclammatory hummings, this double edged rethoric has the intention to inflamme those on the other side too, yet, like my roman ancestors would say cui bono?

In more language of the Bard, who benefits? The url address has an expiration tag on it which means to say that after a while that url will cease to function because it is only bought for a certain period of time. The registrant is most likely to be a ghost, that is, the person who registered for the url doesn’t exist nor his address makes any sense (computers talking to computers it smells like). Now, there is no real name attached to the page, it isn’t signed and it bespeaks and reeks of fear of speaking out in a nation that prouds itself of its right to speech, so this someone obviously isn’t/can’t be that enraged about the south’s choice for in essence far from decrying a democratic process he is a person afraid to really speak out and use his or hers full right to speak out.

Though be it known, I think that one realizes that the current administration resembles that of a sitting duck. I think that people will just wait out the four years. You see, George’s problem since coming into power has always been one and only one, credibility. He lacks it. No one really cares about his ideas, well maybe christian lovers, but all other ones seem rather opposed to him in more than one way. And lastly, though be it red states there where some people in those ‘red’ states that voted for Kerry. I am rather surprised though that people bit and bought the map showing all those red states, in other words, you people have been FRAMED!

Those ignorant fools!

–yes, ask me motherfucker, and I’ll tell you stupid anglo motherfucking WASP loving güero.
–ok, no need to use that sort of language ese, what is it that you most hate about the güero politburo in Washington?

You know what I hate the most? Do you really want to know what I wholeheartedly detest above all in these so-called United States? I hate the fact that we are still treated, despite the bloodshed, despite the years gone by, as nothing more than aliens in these sacred land we called Aztlán, that is what I hate the most. That and the fact that we still blindedly prove again and again the contrary, the new Gods, the Güero Gods are bloodthirsty insaciable, they are not quenched by our sacrifice; with lies they demand more from us.

So speaking in more earthly matters, I hate it, really do, that fucking güeros think that we do not love this land, this land was ours first before they set up their gun-ho supremacy over us. If there is a thing that güeros will never take away from us is the fact, compa, that we partook of the making of the land, so the foundations, based on indio californio and mexicano blood, cements the foundations of this state ese. So this land is ours even moreso than the gringo empire loyalist attest it is, and nothing, not two millenia, not the jesting and joking of a thousand Lettermans or Lenos can change that.

Last Autumn Day

The long many metal blades caress
the soggy brittle leaves that layeth
strewn about
that a
sudden October gust
of a now long past nordic wind rearranged;
in their grey and misty morrow litteredness
which greets mine eyes
they become entangled in their thin tin nails

It is still warm,
descended dew
covers the brown dotted yard

the fallen ones are gathered
all those damp leaves
in a sweeping motion

the fresh green grass
uncovers a field of joy
vibrant wet savannah for my receiving eyes

to a cyberpal, Sixlegged

This guy cracks me up. You gotta love the knocking on the screen and having those words echo the demand. Well, in fact I have been thinking at those hints you’ve dropped here and there but alas! I offer but half cooked notions.

I am trhrown back at those days when a slogan of sorts offered confort to a young twenty-something whilst earlier memories flooded him with a sense of belonging.

Assimilation is assasination! was the cry I wrapped myself in to protect me from the chilly and cold anglo winds coming from the Sacramento hub of ideology making. I suppose that when you have the ghost of the INS (which now is an obsolote acronym) hovering at every thought in your daily life survival comes first. So, did I embrace chicanismo for convinience sake’s or because I, regardless of my political and legal status in the USA, though unbeknownst to me, I had been one all along?

Does the fact that I was raised in an American city in the Bay Area during my infancy, and some in my twenty-somethings and the why I can write in this language nearly fault free, mean anything towards my Xicano identity? What makes me a Xicano? No doubt I have the cultural baggage. I, regardless of the legislation that anglos so obsess with do have a history and a past in the Californias beyond any legal reasoning, so I am Californian and Mexican at the same time. Yet you may wonder, is Julio digressing again? Far from it. I am cementing the prime reason as to why I ‘failed’ to assimilate to the greater anglo and hence economically more handsome society that locks my ilk to it.

I in fact used the tools of assimilation to pass of as one of the locals though I now know I had been one all along. There is much in that last sentence that might need some untangling but suffice to say I ‘pretended to be one’ to the point that I perfected this facade to dare and cross the border in spanish which I am very proud to have done so.

So assimilation for me, in California, was not something I underwent in great duress. I used assimilation to my own benefit. I needed to survive in an alien environment. I say alien because this assimilation process did not become apparent until I had the need to pass of or pretend I was a local and countless of confrontations with law enforments agencies in the states thought of me as of their own attested to that fact and which they should still think that because I am one of their own regardless of my legal or citizen status, aquella tierra es mi tierra.

So I used assimilation tecniques to blend in, all from the clothing to the manner of speaking, Clark Kent; at night I was Superman, in my own neighbourhood, where I could be illegal/wetback as I wanted to, and we spoke english and we laughed in spanish and we loved in spanglish.

In Sweden, did I have to assimilate?

I haven’t had the need to assimilate, in fact, they have had to assimilate to me. I carry the vector that they so yearn after, America, despite all of its wrongdoings is still vey much admired and feared.

Surely you must of had to give in to something to adapt to the environment, you are, dispite all of the above mencioned criteria, an alien and in order to remain a unique individual something had to give in…

Yes, I had to give up my country and my friends, english has been a link to the exterior world where Sweden has failed me or the other way around, though I have not, I do not think so anyways, failed this culture.

Perhaps the concept of familia here comes in handy. I had the drive to assimilate willingly to my environment. My blood is después de todo, half swedish, so I figured that I needed to learn their ways so that they could some day learn my ways. A trade of sorts if you will. So I applied myself to their culture not in the hopes of assimilating. I am unable to do that due to my xicano experience but because I see it as a tool to advance, I cannot be that which I am not, so I have adapted those values that rule over the majority to my advantage to know them and to know me.

And I remain, not a mexican, swedish or american but a Xicano.

Ground Zero Borracho^TM

Confession time, am not the only Xicano in Sweden, my eldest daughter was born in San Diego Califas and my youngest one was born as a swedish Xicana. So yeah, I’ve been hogging the castlight, so sue me and maybe El Pocho Abogado or Oso’s cycling buddy can lend a hand and give you a discount for a Milky Way.

Either way am not here to discuss that, really, am serious though be it a Tuesday and thank Quetzocoatl am not wholly protestant and can merrily drink on a day like this which is curiosuly enough a warrish day.

What am to tell here is the state of Xicanismo in Sweden.

Surprisingly enough there is work being done on Xicano issues here in Sweden. I first met Carla Jonsson about three years ago when her doctoral thesis was just starting to get of the ground and she was kind enough to let me in on her work. The young and quite the beaux lass has been spreading the word about Chicanismo. Her doctoral stuff bears the title of Linguistic Power and Pride: Chicano English in Chicano Theater. Now, I haven’t spoken to her since Gad knows when but I recall asking her why the interest in the Chicano thang, you know? Long story short she had spent some time in LA, that Holy capital of Aztlán. Pity moved her but alas! who hasn’t been moved to tears upon seeing the saddest facet of the Chican@ gestalt?

She has also singled handedly furnished (I believe, I might just be adding too much sugar to the post here you know?) the University of Umeå with loads of Chicano works and Mex-Am Lit across the spectrum. Now, Umeå is about as far as you can get before you cross over to the North Pole, so imagine folk, were Destiny to send you far away into those nordic wilderness just know a good chicano voice in the manner of a book will just be at hand ready to comfort you thanks all to the good Doc.

No she ain’t Mexican, she is Peruvian.

More on this stuff later….

This is interesting

...because it pulls my strings, I mean, what do I deem more important? Raza or fundamental human rights? Oh, sorry, lost you didn’t I? Hell, sometimes I forget that I just might have an audience. Well, I’ve long suspected that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez was Mexican, who sayeth thee?

He just looked too much the part for him not to be it. The three-Star General oversaw U.S. Troops in Iraq until he found himself embroiled in the Abu Ghraib human rights affair.

In some respects Sanchez is doing for Hispanics in the military what Collin Powell did for Blacks when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like Powell, he is proving that through perseverance and hard work they can ascend to positions of leadership in the armed forces. According to the magazine, Sanchez is the highest-ranking Hispanic in the U.S. Army and the ninth Hispanic general in the army’s history.

Read more of this article here ...

Yeah, well, Sanchez is in jail and Powell ain’t buddy! So, I digress, the point being is that old Rummy, as in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, wants to pin him a fourth star, this via the Agonist, as if that would launch him into the White House… Gee Wally, I wonder if that has anything to do with this study.

So am riled, and pissed because I know that Sanchez is covering for his boss, his values tell me that.

He credits his 77-year-old mother with instilling these values in him. As told to Hispanic, the mild-mannered general believes these are also the values that the Hispanic community embraces—patriotism, service to country, and being very loyal to your family. “When I became a soldier the ethics and the value system of the military profession fit almost perfectly with my own heritage. It made it very easy for me to adapt to the military value system,”

Read more of this article here ...

And further more am glad I just found out he is of Mexican extraction, had I known whilst he reigned in Iraq I would have rooted more for him than what the qualms claim of me now….

Other stuff related to the Generalissimo …

Mexican Americans Are Building No Walls

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez Named ‘Hispanic Of The Year

A Mexican American General in the Service of Empire

My madre tongue ese

Ok, I know I was trying to be arty when I published this latest post; Gad, I wish I could write more often, (no Julio, ofteneran doesn’t work in this language [in swedish there are ofta, oftare and oftast degrees of this adverb]). Besides, poems are a very difficult thing to come up with. I have been trying to come up with good poetry, and do notice the minor degree adjective there, it’s not like am using great or superb, right? So I read some poems and they look very simple to do …So yeah, I took some part of that poem away. It looked and begged to be worked on some more and so I left just the part of what I thought was shouting to stand alone if not at least readable.

....

When I hear mi lengua

My soul
becomes warm…

as if a million rejoiced Xican@ voices

embraced me altogether.

I - P and the band plays on ...

Jewish students protest Duke conference with bus display

RALEIGH, North Carolina – A Jerusalem city bus left gutted and burned by a deadly suicide bombing is being displayed this week at Duke University in protest of a pro-Palestinian group’s annual conference on the campus.

When they do that, in reality, is that they don’t want you to see the atrocities they commit [ they want to keep up with the ante that it is they, the people in Israel, the ones that are being wronged ] in fact, Isreal holds accountable every palestinian for the troublemaking of the few. Not only are most of Israel’s treatment of the average palestinian wrong, it is racist and hate-filled as well. Quite arrogant.

So, while I agree that it is atrotious to do the things the militant palestinian does, suicide bombers, and the like, I also consider wrong that jewish people around the world do not allow the palestinians to speak up or tell their side of the story, not only does it undermine western thinking, it is baffling they refuse palestinians to be heard. But of course censureship is also a western tradition but one that we actively try and contain; contain the container.

What of course jewish people outside Israel adamantly defend is the right to land; which is not necessarily wrong and they have had a lot of help in doing just that. They have Israel but what happened with the creation of Israel is that it didn’t happen on a clean slate, in what is now Israel there were millions of Palestinians living there before and ever since Israel became Israel there has been a systematic ethnic cleansing going on, till this very day, with the blessing of governments world wide over, they are pushing palestinians out of Israel, Let the Palestinians go to Jordan or some other Arab country is a familiar phrase amongst the elected ones over there in Israel.

and frankly I don’t see a solution to this problem because the state of Israel was created under and because of historical reasons of a people who was/is in a diaspora. They came back to what they believe was theirs in the first place and theirs is a driving force that undermines institutions and papers and the like: their God, aka, Jahve, Jesuschrist and the Holy Trinity and whatever other secret name they put to their so-called humane spirituality.

Adios S

Just because its fashionable to do so…

“Superman stands alone. Superman did not become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red S is the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses the business suit, that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.” – Bill

Columbus day

Well, well, well, it seems this year’s Día de la Raza is well underway and the protests too. For this early batch of news we thank the state of Colorado were 200 [were] Arrested in Denver Columbus Day Parade Protest. This is the largest mass scale arrest of people I have seen in the US and all because of that old Veneciano; am just glad it happened in Aztlán and not in some ol’ pilgrim state.

Likudists be off and away!

After a long hiatus, Isreali-Palestinian commentary is back in full force …

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/483982.html

http://www.nologo.org/newsite/detail.php?ID=410

Kill first, ask questions later mentality has flawed thinking because it is assumed and pretended that one has the ability to read people’s mind and set thinking which is totally wrong. The creators of this ideology have egos that disallow them for clear and objective thinking so the time for the Neocons Likudists has come; their arrogant ways do not help no one (in fact it hurts and perpetuates the problem at hand) and they must cease their hold on power for the good of the nation.

Besides, please note the daily news flow coming out of that conflict and how biased our english written and controlled media display such human catastrophe: Isrealis are depicted as more humane than Palestinians; in that conflict it is babies that are killed on the side of Isreal but is it is collateral damage when babies from the Palestinian side are murdered.

IDF prevents terrorist attack, kills 4 armed Palestinians

By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service

The Israel Defense Forces prevented a terrorist attack in the Negev on Saturday morning when they killed four Palestinians carrying Kalashnikov rifles who had crossed the Israeli border with Gaza near the Nahal Oz area in the western Negev.

...and all for a piece of dirt land stupid christian evangelical organizations such as those Pat Robertson own gladly give money to so that Goddamn idiotic ideas such as believing Isreal is the Holy Place, my asss it is, can be preserved.

The road to peace is clearly filled with good intentions.

Peregrinos de Aztlán

Well I’ve been slacking.

I was forced upon a swath the size of the Congress Library of work to do, and what did I do today? Slack, that’s right ese! so yeah, and my own personal protestant guilt tormentor from Queen Elizabeth’s time is beating the living crap of any shred of self-steem that still manages to eek a wriggle out of me (Cromwell, is that thou?) for being a slacker. It’s a mammoth sentence I know, so don’t get me started buckwheat!

So i’ve been reading loads of chicano literature in spanish. In spanish you might say raising an eyebrow or two, three would make you a freak. So yeah, Peregrinos de Aztlán by Miguel Méndez which is rapidly becoming a must read and taunted along the lines of Juan Rulfo which is to say a lot.

So my line of studies consists on focusing on the institutions and the making of the destitute in the novel.

In both cultures, because the characters revolve around Aztlán, which gives a huge boost to my theory that Aztlán lies south of the border as well, the institutions partake in the making of the destitute, that have no rights. It spells out in the desert, Califas and Tijuana.

The characters, the downtrodden mock the institutions that are supposed to protect them. The characters speak of the hypocrisy that the servants of the law engage in, specially those servants of the law in the United States which see the Chicano as nothing but a nuisance in all their protestant pulchritude. In fact, the Chicano character in the novel who is sentenced to jail by the judge whose story is detailed in french fetichism can not speak to the judge in the same language because he speaks chicano, not english.

There is also a mockery of the law institutions in México whose servants of the Law only serve the money God. They are depicted with even more desdain since at one point there is girl being used and raped and as she asks for help the police only tell her she is going end up in the can if she doesn’t stop the yelling.

The church institution is also made a mock of here because the outstanding citizens that abide by the laws of the christian Lord do not pay attention to the destitute.

The medical establishment is also made fun of here since no poor person can ever receive the same treatment as those destitute souls ans o eah, you get my drift.

...More later esas and eses.

Ditch the Logan Act!

I have always wondered why the mexican government hasn’t really taken advantage of the bilingual population that it has alongt its 3000 kilometer long border con los gabachos. I mean it’s an increible asset right? people who actually understand bilateral communication, but no, few, like counted in the fingers of a hand, can say they actually work as they wish or could to their utmost potential for the mexican government. The fact is that ideology still permeates to the hilt the relation between the native of the Baja or for that matter entire 3000 border population and the centrist macho I am mexican at all costs burocratic employee in Los Pinos.

Such is the case as well in the US of A.

It seems as though that the English love affair with China and India has more than seeped into the anglo gene, I mean, you’d think that América Latina would stand in priority A one list over at the Washington offices, but no, last if not the very end of a reminder thought like a comets tail it is seen that América Latina is here, on our backyard or should I say home?

As far as Xican@s are concerned the matter is far more important than matters should suggest.

Ten years have now gone since The Tomás Rivera Foundation sponsored by the Stanley Foundation in collaboration with The Tomás Rivera Center gave out a little pamphlet called Latinos, Global Change, and American Foreign Policy Report of a New American Global Dialogue Conference October 7 – 9, 1994.

I have always reckoned that the ‘new’ in that sentence has always meant the introduction of Mexicans into the close-knit circles of the anglo Washingtonean spheres.

Here are some ideas that the little pamphlet highlighted for the reader:

”...to promote an exchange of ideas … about the current and future role of Latinos in US foreign relations”

”...because of this new environment, Latinos may increase their influence over the direction of American global activities.”

”...regional and group agendas have come to the forefront to displace the national perspective of the past.”

”...many Latinos are already substantially involved in the foreign relations process”

“One of the more daunting challenges for Latinos is making explicit the common interests that may unify them.”

“The chances for unification are better as Latinos understand that their domestic converns are directly linked to global issues.”

“Latinos are uniquely suited and situated to link the United States to emerging Latin American markets.

That was then, the matter is that things remain more or less the same. Latinos are still seen as nothing but canon fodder either for the war machine that Washington greases its power like a liftweighter might with steroids or as a little gimmick to the rest of the world that the US of A takes into account all of its race sectors in its now in serious doubt democratic society; in which case we are but the less for it and far away from the 15 minutes Warhol stated everyone has a right to.

Prologue

- Run!
– What’s that noise?
– It’s the chopper, órale! Run!
– Hide by those bushes.
– I can’t, their too low, and there isn’t much to hide in.
– Chale homes! You got the castlight on you…
– What? I can’t hear you? What did you say? It’s to bright!
– Damn, here comes the migra now… fuck! just lie low…

The barren soil didn’t have much of anything on it, it’s famous for its arid terrain and the refusal of the US government to allow any building to be built there. For years the only thing in sight from this side of the border was what seemed to be a car lot. As the years went by my imagination concocted more serious and credible theories, drugsmugglers came in handy to depict that parking space, maybe even crooked INS agents dealing in smuggled and stolen cars, who knows.

Between the thin wire netting, no-man’s land, were littered sniff-glue bags. Broken bottles and rags strewn about covered with hundreds of cigarrette butts. The soil is dry, and the wire that separates the countries was full of holes; the marines set up other measures now. Tortilla curtain was the response from indignant neighbours. I was born less than a kilometer from this other country, Tijuana.

– State your citizenship. – American

Our eyes met, usually they looked at you from the very depths of their eyes to see whether you lied. Sniff, sniff seemed more like it. Bean sweat, not hamburger or saurkraut, anything smelling near like maize was suspicious. “American Citizen” The hand waved me away not seeing another citizen such as he, but rather more like a nuisance, laws must be abided, an undesired though with ‘rights’. I slid across, like always, my xicano look helped me over. ‘Go ahead’, the migra said, ‘pásale,’ I heard. The badge on his shirt said his name. I laid my eyes on it, to see if he was raza, my lips uttered some words: ‘American Citizen’. I took a leak, like everytime, my confident act; the luggage detector passed countless of bagage. I veered off and left my mark in those prison like toilets, metal urinators and metal toilet seats. They seemed like nice bathrooms, clean. I took a drink of water, something you can’t do in México’s government buildings. The hospitality greets you even when they’re assholes. I never looked back. I smiled, the red San Diego Trolley pulled in. It’s a wonderful view, like coming home. I walked forward but voices could still be heard from where I was: state your citizenship; what was the purpose of your visit to Mexico?; Are these papers for real? I went in to Mickey D’s as the voices drowned in the background

I always wondered why was it that the INS allowed, for what my suspicious eyes detected as criminals, to thrive so near the border, la línea, right next to them. I spotted them right away, you knew those people weren’t people to mess with, there they were, pulling in people right smack in the middle of their faces to board buses towards Los Angeles or selling fake papers with the right connection. I mean I even sold papers there my self! I’m sure that doesn’t happen anymore, but that’s how it was, right next to them, those light green colored vehicles couldn’t figure out what those thicked mustached people were talking about or doing standing there all day and yet dress so nicely, so mexican. Stereotypes and what people want see, that’s what made it possible, preconcieved notions of what other races are like. Off course the INS was a federal institution but come on! Couldn’t they at least observe a little what was going on right there? So I grew suspicious with time, you know, the lonely citizen that watches its surroundings but is powerless to do anything about it? That’s me, not that I would rat on my own brethen mind you.

I never payed to travel on the Trolley. It used to be that one would declare itself illegal rather than pay those hefty fines and best yet, back then the gringos bought one’s name no questions asked, so many files on illegal immigrants in the archives of the old INS bear names like Pedro Infante, Vicente Fernandez, José Alfredo Jímenez, Chapulin Colorado, Lola Beltrán, Juana Inez de la Cruz or Paquita del Barrio, you never knew what the raza might come up with to avoid giving in one’s real name. So I travelled for free, whilst I wondered whether I should stop and visit my Aunt who lived on 8th and National or whether one should by a refeer in Chula Vista, mostly though one would rather go to San Diego’s porn shops. Though Tijuana is a sin city it has very little or not at all porn shops, off course why visit those shops when you can be part of a real live sex scene? It made sense for some, though for the likes of me, sex went beyond the flesh and fornication of the open prostitution markets of Tijuana’s Coahuila sector. I wanted to see naked güeras and best of all, those fancy underwears that look so delicious and tempting, lingerie.

Future issues facing the Xican@ culture

I see three pressing issues that the Xican@ must face soon, or in the near future.

1.- Not all Xican@s have spanish or derive pride in the ideology which infuses nationalistic hues in the mexican soul; some are very resistant to the whole concept of mexican as we know it to be, some are still fighting the spanish. For a glimpse of this check out Mixtec, a nicely articulated post done by our own Elenamary. We must simply go beyond the Aztec and Maya dichotomy

2.- Not all Xikan@s are the color of the earth. There is a substancial amount of black Xican@s outthere, for a closer detail and look plus background check out Bobby Vaughn’s The Black Mexico Homepage. I have been reading this guy’s page for over two years and there hasn’t been any substancial change to his page but the contents are bona fide research.

3.- The sexuality thang. There has just got to be a stop to this homophobia in Xican@ writing though I suspect that this issue has long range solutions. For more on this subject I redirect you to Seyd who wrote something about it not long ago Aztecs and Homosexuality

We are

I Xican@
Shall nothing to do
About losers and winners
-with
that 1848 date
long ago come to pass it has
That bloody threshold birthing
— Crieth the child hast —
that now Breathes new life
And suckles the milk and honey
Of the magic corn
From whence nurture and nourishment cometh

Strong and vital
Celebrate I do
The foremother/father
Earth Madre cactus desert thy warmth thou giveth me
From running lives like dried river beds that suddenly life gain
Across the orality of their sayings
Fillith my head
Imagination
Pass on their language/words/umbilical linguistic essence
Impregnated in their love for the land
New Mexico, Arizona, California, Tejas, The Southwest, La Frontera;
the landscape our crib is.

Ok...

Let’s get one thing straight right away, there is no such thing as a smart bomb.

...

Modern English

Incredibly enough, my mouse had a host of dust bunnies inside its plastic shell.

the United States in 2092

A couple of eons ago, internet timewise, the guy at Culture Zap started a volley of predictions on the US that got me athinking about the long dream of some of my fellow californians and intent to either secede or split the state from the rest of the nation. (yeah, I know it’s a long ass sentence so sue me for writing in Xicano English.)

They predicted or joked or envisioned the state of the future landscape which we now call the USA.

Here are their takes:

xoloitzquintle unfortunately Xolo doesn’t have any permalinks to his posts so you’ll just have to scroll down until you get to the post titled: The Future of America – a Prediction

ethno-queer title: The Republic of Montexas

and the guy that started it all: Sixlegged

This spinned my memories to recollect a quaint little article I read on the New yourk Times in 1992, yeah, am that old ese!

Though back then the internet was, erhm, something so new I didn’t know about it until 1998, at any rate, I saved said article which contained a little map of what might the US look in 2092.

So I scanned it today and here it is: Canada and the United States in 2092 Just click on the little pic.

You’ll just have to go to another page because I haven’t figured out how to incorporate javascript that this program can digest without complaining that there are syntax inconsistencies everywhere.

Have fun!

By the way, hope you guys have big monitors, otherwise just save the pic onto your drive and view the map there …

And oh yeah, the pic first appeared on the NYT OP-ED Oct 21 1992.

the blacklisting of the academic left ...

The time to be outspoken has never been more pressing than now.

David Horowitz and his Study of Bias in the Selection of Commencement Speakers at 32 Elite Colleges and Universities

Apparently the neocons, just as the conservative agenda that has been forming for years are now planning to free academic students from the left …erhm, really? are we speaking of the same bastion of centuries of revolt to worldwide institutions?

Want more?

Here is how far they have set their agenda on the nation of the US:

Full Committee Hearing – Is Intellectual Diversity an Endangered Species on America’s College Campuses

And here is, as they call it, their ‘headquarters’ (which brings to mind bunker for some reason …)

Que vivan los Novios!

It seems as though our good friend at Culture Zap is about to make a move that just might mean an end to Culture Zap as we know it to be. Amazingly enough he hasn’t thrown into the dust bin his Ground Zero Post of last Friday which just managed to throw a monkey wrench into my developing theory.

I was to argue that it was due to his protestant background that he hid his previous Friday Ground Zero Posts from our prying eyes which usually brings more than a few chuckles into my life.

(I guess here he revolves in an entirely protestant milieu, he can be Hare Krishna for all I know…)

Oh well.

And oh yeah, it seems they/he is getting married, dang. On the countryside too, double dang, no, I mean: Órale ese! Felicidades.

Te veo azul cielo mi adorada

Here in Sweden it has always struck me odd that people once thought my eyes “exotic”.

I live in an ocean of blue eyes you see. Growing up in the Bay Area as a child I grew suspicious of blue eyes: they radiated a higher well being, the looks told of another world lived.

Here in Sweden those very blue eyes have become so common, so everyday that I no longer think about the importance they once had on my conscience.

In my young adult days, living illegally in the US, blue eyes meant status, position, preferance and best of all “Americanness”.

So I used to hang out with some white, blue eyed dudes, to be more “American”; then I found out about a more fundamental difference in American immigration. There were some güeros from Ireland who had overstayed their visas. Yet they had better jobs than I did, earned more respect from society than my all my history and relatives and family could ever muster in hundreds of years of California trekking.

...

Sobre Japoneses en Tijuana

Which brings to mind an interesting aspect of my life and my city, perhaps the very essence that sparked my curiosity towards it.

It turns out that my grandma’s IIWW stories included one out in the labor fields of some country which I have no recollection of, suffice to say I suspect it was the US because she ended up in Stockton California ‘round the 30’s.

She reminisced about how japanese field workers you say to her: “Soon México very high, US very low”. This prior the Pearl Harbour incident. This very phrase must of have stuck to her head. Did she invent those words for my childhood and inquisitive mind? She did like to read Western novels a lot, you know, the ones without the pictures in them?

At any rate, it sparked an interest in me, a passing curiosity that confirms the everyday when you see it. It just marks a special moment in ones life because it explains the oral with the reality out there. So I used to see them and as I looked back it confirmed me those stories, otherwise what the hell where they doing there?

Am speaking of japanese people in my city.

There are several stores in my city’s downtown that have japanese names, like Casa Tanaka. I know of other places of which I have no names but they exist and now that am doing the blogsphere I pay special attention to my city and lo and behold their heirs are blogging, Tijuana japanese kids. Probably third to fourth generation at this stage perhaps fifth.

But the big question is what have they been doing there all along?

You are familiar witht he japanese internment camps, off course you are, every time the US goes to war with a foreign country the nationals of said country end up in dire straits in the US, just look at Arabs in the US; yeap, divide and conquer, the Arabs never made any alliances in the US with no other minority, hence the muck they are in now, but I digress.

In México they were not rounded up, instead they were directed to go to Guadalajara.

So there they are, and everytime I see them I see that past, crazy ain’t it?

I have some sources on this topic for the interested:

The Japan Society of San Diego and Tijuana (english)

A Japanese photographer and pioneer in my city:

Nonaka Pionero de la Fotografía de Tijuana

Mexican Repatriation: Depression Era

It’s one of those things that make you shake your head in disbelief and welling anger. It is just this kind of treatment that our Xicano history records to reminds us that anglo American society will forever cast us as unwanted and mistreated. Racism is always just a look away. I know the times have changed and the latter is just pure ill-channelized anger, but today I couldn’t help feeling again those very sentiments. However, it pleases me to no end, as our good Aztec poet once said to me in am email, that those deported during the Depression era, American all, are seeking redress. Finally!

I remember hearing stories about this from the ‘hood viejitos and my abuelitos, not that we were personallly affected by it but it came up when they discussed the maltreatment the gringos gave them, usually expressed in the form of indignation. Curiosly enough though my family stayed in Tijuana as early as 1938 they did do stints and vida in the US prior to 1938 as well. However am doing my classical digressing, be that as it may, it runs in my people’s oral history. All the more because I come from a border town, Tijuana. I think Miguel Mendez describes this phenomenon in his spanish written novel Peregrinos de Aztlán although am not certain of it.

Via San Diego Union-Tribune

LOS ANGELES – Ignacio Pina was 6 when immigration officers came to his Montana home, held his family behind bars for a week, then herded them onto a train bound for Mexico – a country he and his five siblings had never seen.

“They just kicked us out with what we were wearing,” the U.S.-born Pina recalls more than 70 years later.
It was 1931, the first year of a decade-long effort to remove Mexicans to free up jobs in a U.S. economy mired in the Great Depression. Estimates of the number of people caught in the raids range from 500,000 to 2 million, with researchers agreeing that they included tens of thousands of legal immigrants, as well as children like Pina who were born in the United States.

Read all about it here and while you are it check this photo gallery on those mexicans.

dualities in bilingual speakers

So there are dualities in Xicano bilingualism. However, I believe that what am about to divulge here covers pretty much trilinguals and quatrilinguals as well because in essence that which I have in mind is language shifting that is, adjusting one’s way of speech according to one’s environment.

So it does not matter if Xicanos, who by the way not all speak spanish as their first language nor english, know two or three languages. In fact it could very well be that said Xicanos have an indigenous language already so that by default they are trilingual inasmuch as they not only shift between the anglo world they must also shift languages style when they confront the mexican spanish world.

Ok, what I have in mind is the following and all because I was standing in one of the cafeterias at Stockholm’s University minding my own xicano business when my eyes suddenly came to a table where three young people sat and talked. Two were girls of obvious middle eastern background and a swede. What caught my xicano attention and started my cogs on the go was that they spoke what seemed to me a very Stockholm swedish, that is, to put in equivalent xicano terms, the girls were speaking as if a xicano spoke like a white dude or dudess for that matter.

It made me reminisce about my old California days. I used to live in Redwood City, (Bay Area) were talking the old RWC with its little Michoacan town and all. However since I was so-called “illegally” in the US I had to adjust a lot so as to “pass off” as a native. Never mind that I spent quite a few years of my infancy there as well, hence the english, but that is another story for another post. At any rate this situation meant that I had to spend, according to my very young logic then, time away from the “mexicans” and so I lived and worked basically in Menlo Park, güero town as güero gets. My english changed dramatically from one that was purely Chicano to and all out assimilated english, in fact, I know this because I used to get recriminations about it every time I called my relatives and they remarked and answered as if I was a gringo.

So there is a duality in our manner of speaking which raises several interesting ideas regards the sole identity of the Xicano in Califas, Aztlán.

Am nearly certain that we are still doing this in Califas, the question is, when are we going to stop doing this and what will it mean?

...

dualities of a bilingual speaker

Today I discovered why I suffer from a lapsus in my communication to the monolingual world.

It turns out that one of the things that happens to a bilingual is the “stuck” state that happens in any given conversation at one time or another in one’s life as a bilingual.

So you know what you want to say but the words fail you creating a very unconfortable time space for you and your listener. Makes you look like Forrest Gump.

I used to be embarrassed by this because I felt it gave away my duality: an illegal alien in the US and worse yet, I felt as if I wasn’t a native enough to the ground.

So there I was growing up in gringo Califas pretending I was from there whilst I lived a life that told me just as in so many convincing words I was from there.

But not any more, I don’t care anymore, I demand from my listener that he or she understand me.

So yeah, that….

In Europe already ese?

Oh my, well yank my quetzocoatl eyes out of their sockets.

I was wondering why was I gettting a lot of hits from our good travelling English friend, David at TEFL Smiler and lo and behold I nearly left my eyeballs stuck to the monitor at what I saw. It turns out that our good Mexican represantive in the White House has made the headlines in Europe.

The good thing is that the Guardian and obviously Republican Floridan are unawares that calling a Mexican American an Hispanic is an insult, yu-who! Kudos for them the other is that it’s amazing how the European crowd is getting already “familiar” with this lad.

Get a load of this blurb:

“George P Bush is a tremendous asset to the family,” said Dario Moreno, director of Florida International University’s Metropolitan Centre. “He’s obviously Hispanic, he’s an attractive young man, he’s articulate and he’s a Bush. That’s a powerful combination. It raises the dynastic possibility, and it could be a hoot if the first Hispanic president of the US is a Bush.”

and if you want to laugh your sockets dry read even more.

Am gushing with a mix of pride and disconcertedness here….

And oh yeah, thanks for the link David and don’t forget to check David’s take on George P Bush.

Some thoughts on a long incubated idea

I just finished going through Injust-Spring’s blog latest entry and she seems to be in a nonplussed state. I read the same article she mentions before and I was struck with sadness. She dislikes the very idea that Wal-Mart is behind the building of a mall in Teotihuacán whereas I find myself incapable of believing that the people did a thourough job in making sure no aztec ruins were found were they are building such said complex. My belief in mexican authorities is virtually next to null; I have no faith whatsoever in them. This is due to years of seeing how government always goes where the buck swirls the most and perhaps they did do the best they could, who knows, mexican society has changed.

All this brought to mind a few long incubated thoughts on Chicano/Xicano aztec imagery.

I believe in Aztlán but I long ago stopped caring for aztec symbology. To me it doesn’t make the slightest sense to associate aztec imagery with, say, California. At one time it used to irk the living daylights out me because I had no notion nor relation whatsoever to aztec culture. I come from the north of México, Tijuana, Baja California to be more exact.

Our local indigenous population is on the verge of extinction and at least one tribe will become extincted during my lifetime. If you want to become familiar with this dilema read here)

It seems to me that our minds are colonized by botht he US and México and the local suppressed to the hilt on purpose.

So I tend to question its value in my society; I question the statue of the last Aztec emperor in Tijuana boulevards, what is it doing there? I question it in the same manner that I question Lincoln and Jefferson’s role in California, in fact I wonder outloud what do they have to do in California schoolbooks at all. So you know where this is going, yeah, regional pride. But I believe it’s more than that.

Just inasmuch as the US readily suppressed mexican California history from society to keep Chicanos et al in the dark about its true origins and forgot all about the responsabilities it had when the US signed the peace treaty of Guadalupe so have they deliberately pursued a policy of making sure we have no California history at all. I realize this may sound drastic but I firmly believe it is the truth.

Sadly enough most people don’t give this kind of thought much thinking nor do they wonder why certain coins or American symbols bear only thirteen stars when in reality there are 50 states in the US, so again, the interest of the nation proyect get a first go and then the regional a second and then the history of it thereby, such as in the case of Califas, a distant third or fourth depending on the zealots in charge of said knowledge dispersement.

So yeah, that.

Some if-thoughts on implementation

Yet we must agree at the very least that Aztlán represents an ideological challenge to several forces within the USA.

As far as am concerned there are two versions of Aztlán being tossed around and Chicano caucases of the US must adopt a stand on it sooner or later.

There is the radical position that states the US should return those states or territories that changed hands in the 1848 Mexican-American peace treaty; then there is the one that considers Aztlán a spiritual homeland.

I prefer the latter for reasons already stated numerous times before but I will state it once again for the sake of argument: Aztlán in the latter is my homeland because Xicanos and Xicanas were born out of that war; to change geographical and political boundaries would simply render me without a culture at all besides being pointless and something that will not happen in my lifetime nor I hope that it will ever happen.

However, I do advocate a land where we are treated as equal and the population see me as native as native to the land gets. The history of my people runs in California longer than any Stockton fan.

But let us entertain the thought that “our” way/culture gets all it wants, that is that Aztlán stand vis-à-vis the majority monolingual society of America and which now rules over Xicanos; though they speak good (equality et al) on paper that is not the case such as we know it and live it.

The answer to such a scenario brings readily one country to mind: Canada.

And furthermore that is why México does not allow autonomous regions such as those the EZLN propose to end centuries of oppression in Chiapas.

I suspect as much. Were México to allow the recognition of “distinct” groups such as those in Canada then the US would be clammed inbetween two very progressive nations.

So its promising, because we are fighting to be on an equal footing with anglo America right? So what happens if that happens? Anglos and others would feel foreigners, that’s what would happen, so I think that Aztlán is to remain a long time nothing more than a spiritual home to us, the very idea of Aztlán is just too threatning to some.

Spanish and Xicanismo

Spanish has always been a problem in Aztlán.

Though am second guessing this problem is slowly turning a leaf in the collective concious in as much as Native Americans are more and more preferring to be addressed as that or have that as part of their lives.

Geeeeez, even my second generation mexican american cousins are teaching their children spanish.

Back in my days having someone hear you speak spanish was tantamount to labeling yourself a foreigner; one only scurried fast enough to blurb half chicano english phrases to assure the observer one was as American as burritos on a taco stand in LA. It was tough beating the “bad looks” that disfranchised one from one’s society. I still shiver in embarrassment at the thought of it.

I even remember not speaking spanish, my heady days as pocho as pocho can get.

Though it is no surprise that such societal effects have taken place in the history of the Southwest; we are one of many groups who has been questioned about our “english” purity by the white majority due to the color of our skin or our racial looks.

And little wonder is it then that second generation Xicanos/Chicanos (girls and boys) have such a schizophrenic attitude towards mexican spanish because mexicans are ill-spoken of all the time. In fact, am willing to bet a whole wad of pesos that the number one source of embarrasment for many second generation mexican americans is just that, that they are referred to as mexican, beaners, wetbacks, and all that.

This off course has a well intented purpose, one to debase the human being being labeled as that and the other to assert majority opresion and to let you know who the boss is.

So spanish betrays.

Curiosuly enough on both sides. The “english” purist camp arguing that this and that on assimilation and the spanish “purists” arguing that we don’t speak enough of a good spanish at all.

But let’s keep the spanish “purists” out because those mostly stem from one’s house criticism rather than the world out there, that is english America.

So if you are not well informed about your own self then and have half cooked notions about your surroundings, like the most of us do, then your self steem falters like a San Andrea’s fault on any day. You are vulnerable because the majority has dictated what an “American” is, no matter the past, history or your background, if you fail to pass the “American” test, that is, speak fault free General American english, your out like a bat. That is why we Xicanos speak english/spanglish one way with our close ones and another more common, out there, english which makes us sound like gringos. But mostly when we are caught speaking Chciano english we become unwanted, that is American society for you. Because we are not interested in ideals that the government sells: we are all equal under the law blah, blah, we do not take that up. Here we are just concerned about what the average Xicano experiences when he or she confronts the rest of America and what the rest of America has said about him or her and his or her background beforehand. A pre-established frame society carries around to see the rest of society with.

So spanish is seen as a foreign language, it doesn’t belong in California, never mind that half of its history is written in just spanish. Society renounces this altogether and chastises the vowels whenever it hears them out. I am sure I don’t need to remind no one about the hundreds of cases pending in courts about discrimination for speaking spanish in the job.

So, for the most part, knowing spanish in Aztlán is a detriment rather than a plus.

So yeah, that, today.

Nada

Passively scouring the media
Sifting through human remains
Am bombarded my eyes shot red

Left riddled with half-cooked notions
I trod on in ether all teared
Through the bardwired wide world web

Seeking not knowing what
Respite from the pain perhaps
Of seeing all those deadly aims

I stand idle in oceans of hate
Watching the waves of utter despair
I am but the sum of the day

Western Zilch

t-90:sd at 2am

crunching
metal twisting
engine sounds
that promise
clear blue skies
on a loft out there.

Luther in Me

My awareness
One moment to another
Measured by the morning sun
Finished by the nightly stars
Skirrs like the wind that fills my lungs

I sense no motion
Only conmotion
I dread the passing of the hours
Making me feel pointless
as I awake and it’s 7 o’clock already.

Ay Dios mio

... for the shame of it all.

Those of you who have come here via my front shop page that is, http://www.yonderliesit.org might have come across that the titles rotate for that page and that one the titles reads like this: Detests the idea that W Bush might be related to mexicans.

Well it turns out that our good mexican representative in the Bush House, George P Bush, notice he bears the same name as ol’granpa, has been trimmed to go for the big lime light. By the way, who could ever forget that little phrase Granpa Bush said, these are the little brown ones of the family, in fact I suggest you do a little googling on that phrase to read many, many stories about that. So yeah, he’s down in México gathering Republican expatriate votes for the Familia in the US. And not only that he’s defending his uncle’s foreign policies, shhhhijole mano, the shame!

The worrying aspect of all this is that he is not only gathering votes he is also stroking egos, after all he is mexican and he is one of us. Let us not be deceived here by our principles, as soon as one of our kind comes along it is bound to have effect.Even moreso since we have for such along time sought this very political goal, to have one of our own on the top. They didn’t come up with the old adage “birds of a feather flock together” for nothing.

So yeah, go read some and then shake your head in disbelief because I know you are not gonna let it influence you one bit, so let’s get the flock outta here ….jejeje, couldn’t resist it.

Swing'in it by

The clouds were in a hurry today. They moved like on a call. Giving out a radiant white look, they were cumulus on a majestic trek.

I saw the wind too shake the electric wires hanging midair between the sky and the ground.

A green covered landscape peppered my sight with pines trees and a few buildings dotted it with their recently rain soaked streets as well.

Then it suddenly came into view. A single black bird in the middle of all that, being columpiado by the swift and sudden mild-to-fresh nordic winds. He went along and permaneció, swinging.

A few sunrays later, which somehow managed to escape the hold the cumulus had on the horizon above brightned my day as I went about.

I thought about the grass how green it is now and how soon yelllow, browm, beige it will get until all whited out ….

Religious thinking of the day

far more dangerous than issues of gender and masculinity is the “obsession” men have about their call in life, destroying everything in their path to fulfill their mission.

From my last semester class notes …

I wonder how much of that is true, am thinking here before the great divide of religions, ok, am seeing this without making much sense now.

What I mean is that am looking at it from the perspective of the two religions that permeate the Xicano soul, that is, the Catholic and Lutheran (protestant) values. Historically wise, Cortes and Columbus come to mind, the West then was ruled, basically with Catholic thinking yet the Manifest Destiny attitudes that changed the American continent arose out of the Luther camp; yet before that Tenochtitlán suffered some sort of zealot call of that nature. Allow us to remember that those catholics back then decimated populations in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and all attitude towards the local population was one of denigration if not right out hatred. Europeans felt superior and thereby commmitted atrocities hereto unnamed because few remained to tell of it.

Another strain of thought arising from that quote is when did the Catholic people become so backforward compared to the more forward ahead thinking of the lutheran lot?

I think that it was Weber and his famous work Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic that mencioned that it was due to the fact that protestants always held close a bible (everyone had and was obligated to have one, read and abide by it inasmuch as it is still inforced nowadays) whereas the catholics never allowed their feligreses that privilige and in fact this wasn’t even thought up until recently and all because the big Catholic honchos over at the Vatican are now worried that the Luther camp is making headways in their traditional territories. Amazing.

...end of daily digression.

On Poetry

Every time I open Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems 1957 – 1982 am surprised at how simple and ordinary his poems are.

I got of hold of his book because it was requiered literature for one of my courses here at Stockholm’s University, darn teacher made us pick only one poem of his but anyways, that is how I know about his works.

So it sits on a bookshelf gathering dust, like all my books have a duty to do for me, and every now and then I pick it up wondering how such an anglo name could ever take a place on my personal little library. I’m convinced it’s the misterious aura the lemon lime color on the jacket alongside some funny weird font in black that somehow pulls me towards it.

His poems baffle me because they don’t seem like poems at all. I mean, they have no rhythim, no technic other to narrate a personal observation, words are often repetitive and all in all its simplicity baffles the acamadecian in me.

They are very nice thoughts but it revolucionizes my whole perspective on what I have until now considered what a poem is:

– A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall

Somehow it has all
added up to the song-
earth, air, rain and light
the labor and the heat,
the mortality of the young.
I will go free of other
singing, I will go
into the silence
of my songs, to hear
this song clearly.

That one dawn

That night spelled out so many things, like a blanket strewn on the floor. My brain lay idle for answers. I couldn’t figure A from Z to be frank, and I was. Frank’s the name. I was born in Aztlan.

And the rays of the dawn broke not only my concentration, it shattered my soul.

What was I doing there?

I listened to the morning’s dew make drops one by one and the spiders and other critters scurried for them, I thirsted for more.

I hungered too.

I sensed the beginning coming, the end far from now.

Unwillingly I stared out to the open space, my self in a cosmos star spangled and all.

I dragged the moment even more.

A scent came to me, her hair suddenly covered my chest.

It was wrong in many ways, but it felt good.

My eyes wondered about.

We met, eye to eye.

The music of yore embraced me, I got lost.

Until this morning everything else made sense.

When the chateu clerk came by I was dreaming; skiing on some mystic alp on the Inca empire land.

She reminded me that.

I heard her voice echo, close your eyes again.

Where was I?

Spam that baby!

I got this picture via El Oso and El Moreno, I cracked up the minute I saw it, geeez! The things that they come up with to assimilate us or is it the other way around, maybe Culture Zap can offer a culinary explanation of this phenomena? Either way I had already tried it, so there! yum….

Jajaja, are they really serious?

Last 20 Searchengine Queries Unique Visitors

19 Aug, Thu, 07:24:34 Google: spanglish poem
19 Aug, Thu, 12:33:33 Google: Barrio Warriors
19 Aug, Thu, 14:22:46 Yahoo: orale ese
19 Aug, Thu, 15:21:57 MSN Search: Ronald Reagen
19 Aug, Thu, 15:23:00 MSN Search: ronald reagen
19 Aug, Thu, 15:37:57 Google: blog + “surfing the waves”
20 Aug, Fri, 04:41:53 Google: chicano blog
20 Aug, Fri, 06:43:55 MSN Search: “barrio warriors”
20 Aug, Fri, 09:05:30 Google: Barrio Warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 10:02:21 Google: barrio warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 10:44:44 Google: barrio warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 10:52:28 Google: bill richardson lies
20 Aug, Fri, 14:08:26 Google: american me orale what does it mean
20 Aug, Fri, 14:16:01 Google: Why is Swedish society so dull
20 Aug, Fri, 14:27:29 Google: Barrio Warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 15:34:50 Yahoo: palabras con spanglish words
20 Aug, Fri, 15:41:07 Google: barrio warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 16:12:03 MSN Search: oprah winphrey
20 Aug, Fri, 22:08:34 Google: Barrio Warriors
20 Aug, Fri, 22:31:25 Yahoo: orale homes

Some people really think the internet can answer everything, get a load of the one that says “Why is Swedish society so dull” I guess some people are just too lazy to do research on things that apperantly matters to them …duh, I don’t know ese!

How about this “palabras con spanglish words” aside the fact tha it has a nice round sound to it I wonder what that person was looking for …

But this is one is even more baffling: “american me orale what does it mean” I have seen people looking for answers on qvo and dios mio but orale? sorry bub, my brain doesn’t have the time to explain in few words what one grows up up with but sufice to say, it has more than one meaning depending on the context ….

Oh yeah, I put barrio warriors on one of my posts on purpose because I knew people would look for it sooner or later. This is called in my book fighting back …. :-D or leveling the field.

of Xicanos, Aztlan & the CIA

Boy, just last year i only had like three Xicano blog links in the roster there on the side, and even before i go on allow me poetic license to say Xicano blog even if your blog isn’t necessarily a Xicano blog, so yeah, loads of them.

Today via Oso I got a hold of two more, Sensory Overload and Daily Texican, in fact Daily Texican I heard mentioned in Elenamary’s (who I just found out is quitting the blogsphere) blog but since I have an extreme allergy to anything that has a Tex on it due to my Califas roots i kinda judged the blog by its name and bypassed it the times I saw it mention here in there. So sue me. Yet today i dared opened the blog in question because Oso had it there so I decided to see what the fuss was all about and lo and behold the blog ranks pretty darn high on the Aztlan radar system, orale ese!

Culture Zap got me thinking about the intentions of Barrio Warriors. I thought Barrio Warriors all lay in the figment of some Republican’s imagination yet they actually exist. So damn. They even have a website one can refer to, check it out.

This puts me in a very precarious situation.

I have for the most part relegated, thus far, Aztlan as an area of the imaginaton; a geographical location in the colective concious of our people, that is, people of mexican extraction (gee, this almost sounds like syrup is involved somehow here), whether newly arrived to the USA or have been in Aztlan for generations since the inception of Aztlan as an ideology as we know it today.

I have also argued, for the most part, that Aztlan would not exist had it not been for the war of 1848. In fact Xicanos would have never come to be had it not been for that war, so in essence Aztlan, as the birthplace of Xicano culture as we know it, owes its existence to that war and the nations and states that thereby became Aztlan.

It puts me in a precaurious situation because Aztlan though in the imagination of the colective it has geographical borders and states which it refers to and while it felt right long ago to “return” the states, (damn propaganda!) it actually doesn’t make any sense at all now to do so because in the Xicano culture it would be akin to shooting ourselves in the foot and not because of the political ramifications or the massive carnage Washington would unleash on our people for what would undoubtedly be considered as having UnAmerican ideas but because quite simply without the gringo the Xicano would loose a half that makes him or her a Xicano, face it, Luther is embedded in you ese!

However, I am pro for the land rights such as Reis Lopez Tijerina fought for in those days when white America ruled the nation with an iron fist those of us who happened to be of color and or mexican. That is, I believe that the USA hasn’t fulfilled its obligations stated in The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and I am all for the inmediate implementation of those rights and the return of lands ill-gained in courts who coalesced with other white folk to attain those lands due to color preferance.

So yeah, that.

By the way, have you checked out the latest update at the CIA World Fact book? See what they have to say about languages in the USA :-)

Sorry, did I cry wolf?

Barrio Warriors

I haven’t the slightest idea who came up with such a catchy name but let me tell you, it ain’t good. It is supposed to resonate in the mind of the gringo and it probably will.

I can imagine some republican speechwriter coming up with it in some smokey republican board room saying it in a very zealous and outloud voice ” I know! Let’s call them Barrio Warriors!

The fact is it also smacks of some FBI or Home Guard sting to root out potential Aztlan fervents outthere who might be ready to pull a Reies Lopez Tijerina on the Southwest.

Hopefully it will just stay as a dirty campaign trick from the part of Republicans, wait Julio, you’re not making any sense now, Oh yeah, I do have some readers don’t I? Sorry about that.

It turns out that while minding my own Xicano business and pleasently enjoying a nice sunday morning here in Sweden, all while enjoying as well that fine fine internet Aztlan newspaper of Califas, La Prensa-San Diego, with a cup of coffee, like any good hearted citizen of Aztlan would, I read the Xicano spiritual voice of Tezozomoc.

It nearly yanked my quetzal colored eyes out of my sockets.

It turns out that the dirty campaigners of the Republican party are getting help from the Schwarzenegger campaign staff. Remember how they used the Raza word to decry our culture habits as racist? Well the Republicans are sending little chain letters to each other stating the following:

Democratic Presidential Candidate Senator Edward Kerry and his wife, Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry are supporting the “Barrio Warriors” a supposable radical Hispanic group whose primary goal is to return all of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico!

So I did a little googling and put the words Barrio Warriors in the search field; heck, the pachyderms are at it again. It looks like a little anthill of comments all whispering and telling each other about how Teresa funds Barrio Warriors. Just the thought that anyone in the R camp is buying this makes my faith in Republican intellegence somewhere there I last had my faith on the christian God, next to zilch. If that’s what they do to their own ….

Want to read more about it? You do the googling, it’ll come up, I promise you.

Talk about la raza ese...

En la head today: Culture Zap, Elenamary, Seyd.

Txale Culture Zap (look at the bottom of the post) I think I’m’onna hafta decline the vodka ese; the thang is that I just don’t do screwdrivers anymore, long are gone the days when I could mix a little orange juice with vodka, yeap, so yeah, beer will just have to do homes. And you’ll have to know that mr Culture Zap is having a wad of un with negatives in his blog, so go check out his myriad of colors loveship …

Seyd, am saddened to read your post regards liberty of expression even in a bipartisan ruled country such as the Aztlan proper bit where you are at. You have no idea how much it breaks my heart to read that the ideals that are so promising always boil down to old Anglo Saxon values. Hang in there buddy!

My good compa Elena over there the Midwest made me laugh with the anecdotes she recounts regards the word gringo.

Now if I could just add my two devaluated centavos, öre and cents to the debacle that attracted such a world wide crowd I’d be much obligued.

Gringo, according to some very reliable sources in the intellegence community of my family it has to do with a tragic day in Aztlan history. The story is so sentive that my family won’t go on record with this. It wasn’t until I managed to convince my uncle Tiburcio, no small effort at that mind you, it costed me a Sauza tequila bottle, to meet me in a dark alley in the in very heart of Aztlan, New Mexico.

According to him, and the black alley we were at, gringos was a phonetic misinterpretation on the part of some mexicans.

By the this time the whispiring had gone to lows I had never come across to in my family, I mean, I even heard some migra two blocks away say “papers”. It was only the cracking of the Sauza bottle that brought me back to where I was. It was then that I heard, after a lick of the tongue on the lips, that my uncle managed to say that the word gringo, and by this time he took a another zip of the tequila bottle, came from the very troops of Pancho Villa.

What? echoed across the alley scaring some pigeons feeding on some strewn curled frito chips on the road.

Shhhhhh, he said while eyeing the bottle of Sauza and asking me if it was añejo. Your grandma would kill me if I told this in english but it has to be told he said. It turns out Pancho Villa wanted to get across the border to Columbus so bad, he said, that he dressed his men all in western suits. Unfortunately he dressed them all in green, so by the the time he reached the migra point the migra suspected as much and all he could say was green go!

I just raised my eyebrows and wondered if the tequla bottle was all that worth it compa and as I turned to ask another question my uncle was way gone with some pochitas to Aztlan proper laughing his head out.

And while you are this far on the reading stuff go check out my good compa Injust-Spring dare teenagers drink her breast milk for two bucks and why Derrida is so caliente.

so yeah, that.

My local library

I went to the library today. Usually the english section of the city’s library has no more than 200 volumes in english for the swedish constituency it purportedly represents; so there I am scouring the volumes that run from Stephen King to Agatha Christie and Danielle Steel. So you can imagine my choices though there are some books that are worth reading but all in all I get the impression that the guy or gal making the purchases of english books doesn’t necessarily read the Times Book Review. And let’s not talk about the spanish section because there I get a depression spasm the moment I lay my eyes on them.

Yet sometimes they manage to surprise me, such was the case two years ago. They purchased Salman Rushdie’s “the ground beneath her feet” with a nice intro to the novel regards México; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans” which managed to keep my faith in the guy who wrote The Remains of the Day, a very superb novel which I rank in my top 20 books of comtemporary writers alongside Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Umberto Eco’s the Name of the Rose. (I know the two latter are translations but who cares).

I borrowed them because in both cases I had left the books unfinished. I figured that since I have a few days rest and obligation-free I might as well finish some unfinished business.

Xicanos as latinos

Thanks to Culturezap for the mention in this post, the guy grooves, that’s all I have to say. I mean, he passed the Puto test without feeling insulted and that spells nothing but good in my book.
Let us now go on …

Whether Xicanismo likes it or not there is a latino force outhere to be reckoned with and it must embrace it. I say this because I have just been listening to Pepito for the past two days, an SF based band with ties to my birth city of Tijuana and a lad from Cuba. And I mention Xicanismo because Xicanismo/Chicanismo is impregnated with nationalistic hues albeit our nation in the green fields of our collective imagination.

However, the very same force that drives regular citizens away from patriotic jingoisms is making Xicanos of all walks of life turn their sights away from the entrappings of the cultural narcisstic mirror that Aztlán represents; there is a sense that latinos, as a major umbrella which encompasses all spanish related roots in the american culture, are becoming more the norm than the exception. This force must coalesce in order for it to become the norm, so that we Xicanos stop being an unknown force America.

Curiosly enough just as poverty is the hallmark that makes one nostalgic for Mexico, La Causa, immigration and the illegal alien is hindering xicanismo from becoming more mainstream if you will. We cannot see beyond those two issues hence the different types of Xicano that makes up the lot we are. Pochos, Chicanos, Mexican-American, Wetbacks and all that are but an expression to break lose from the chains that bind us to our past; there is no expression of xicanismo without the latter mentioned. Is there Xicanismo without immigration? Is there Xicanismo without la Causa? Does one exist as a Xicano in the everyday life? What does it mean to live a Xicano life? I dare not say lifestyle. Yet one must take into account that if culture is a mass product then we consume culture habits. Does listening to xicano music, Xicano rap and salsa makes one a Xicano? Do I choose to live a Xicano life and if I do is it a preference one can choose away? Apparently so because in our culture lingo there is the dreaded pocho, the dreaded soldout label.

Therefore the gains in latino preference, even our good friend in Chicago, Sandra Cisneros calls herself latina, and even I, have expressed this sentiment as well. In the bigger picture we must become a force within the emerging force of latinos. However, to answer myself the questions posed earlier as to whether I choose to be Xicano or not I believe that for me it represents more of an affirmation. I do not live in Aztlán proper. Like mexicans who live Aztlán and who long after México I yearn after Aztlán due to my exile. It affirms to me that I am a Xicano because I have so much of it and it delights me to read, see and hear Xicano matter. I do not represent your average Xicano. I am far from the marketing kingpins who appeal to the fibers of the Aztlán nation with their gimmicks. So there is no such thing as a Xicano lifestyle, however, I suppose there are xicano-philes.

And we must embrace the latino force in the US. However let us not be deceived as to what latino implies. There are those who will argue that latinos are the white upper class of hispania. When I say latinos I mean latinos in the senseit is used in the US. Latinamerican.

the explication

It tends to suck wads of time, I mean wads. The problem is that it tends to drain me thus leaving me with no ganas to deal with my love affair with the written word. This summer has been spent mostly doing a reluctant report on my visit to México city, filling six stupid questions that took me a month to do and playing around with the blog software I use, and the latter is to blame for the results from the first two sentences I began this post with.

That and drinking. It has taken me away from writing and being creative at any level, perhaps it’s just that stupid protestant feeling Xicanos are infected with, at any rate I realize everyday that I don’t write, off course I mean that I don’t write in english because in spanish I write nearly everyday, Swedish? well that is far worse than english, I hardly post there though I do write there too.

So that garbage is out of the way, so I have been battling as well this stupid spam yet the good side to it is that as I go through the posts I been giving some old posts the rounds and I just might pick up on an old short story here and there that I left unfinished.

Hopefully I will begin my daily task of writing 5 to 6 hundred words a day, its absolutely necesessary for me and my ideas, I shall be posting rather soon some post about some ideas regards Xicanos soon ….

Blogs as fast food?

The entry for this post in this blog caught my eye when I read it häromdagen as the swedes say and immediately set the few cogwheels in my head into motion which a little beer helped speed up. I like the idea of blogs being bite-sized morsels as stefangeens says, because I for one am not ashamed to confesse that I read in a fashion that could be described as superficial but which in reality is a much more complex form of reading. I deduce the following because when I scan the blogs my eyes stop there my interest is aroused. At any rate, I am more than ready to affirm to our good friend David indeed Blogs Are the Fast Food of Academia inasmuch as they offer entertainment from the regular read.

Go read' him now!

Boy, our friend Seyd over dar in Texas has been selected as a y’all week’s blog, cool, heck, I say go gi’em a read y’all! Hej! am not trying to be funny ese!

Irksome spam

There has been a weird and sofisticated sort of new spam that hits weblogs just like mine. I have seen others been affected by it here in Sweden, our friend Chadie.nu would like to know how to solve this irksome dilema I on the other hand couldn’t come up with a better solution than to delete all the comments from my MySql database.

This meant of course that all previous and current comments made to posts are in the garbage can of some distant server out there. I deeply apologize to those who took the time to place those comments but it’s a drag having to erase 37 to 50 spam comments by one by one …

Update, I know I should read thouroughly the blogs I read but heck, I just got one pair of eyes right, anyways, after reading the above mentioned blog and following some links I came up with spam poison, a webpage in swedish, but there is also one in english, despair not folk, that helps out root out this pesky problem for us bloggers, here, take a peek your selves here, Fight Back Against Spammers.

10 sentences about my eyes and 1 Parentheses about my hair

The crumbs littered the keyboard drawer
(an ocassional black eyebrow hair or a head black hair mingled with a white sugar grain)
The mousepad was flat, red and worn by the corner.
It was a computer equipment that still smelled like a bran new computer.
It was an unhealthy equipment that made my palm hurt.
The sound of the fan in the computer is loud, filled with two years of beigeish dust.
My eyes see only the screen of the computer nowadays.
Yesterday I managed to take a peek towards the window.
The sun shone and I think I saw the end-tail of a beautiful bright greyish to white fluffy cloud.
I could see the nordic winds pushing them southwards.
It seemed like a real paramount task because the exertion was rather visible.

Need a laugh?

Go read this post by El Pocho Abogado

Heck, I laughed my head off.

Dang ese!

Oh my freaking jesus Quetzocoatl God, this is like so vey deep serious people.

Not only did scoopagonist ran a post on the Linda Ronstadt affair I mentioned before but even the Drudge report took some space on its blog to make a passing mention to it. This goes very well beyond my imagination, even anglos are standing behind Xicanos these times, what is the world coming to? when wrong is wrong it’s damn wrong ese!

More about the whole Unamerican activity here

People of the world unite for the raza ese!

Linda Ronstadt

Dios mio! It’s a scandal!

Linda Ronstadt was kicked out of Las Vegas, is there no respect any longer for Xicana Diva’s? Hope raza stand behind her. I certainly am and if I ever go to Las Vegas, which I now doubt I ever will after this, I shan’t leave a cent of my money there until an apology is issued, dumb people.

Boicott Aladdin casino in Las Vegas! Yeah!

wondering 'bout my better half

Am drinking a little tequilita from Penjamo, Guanajuato that I received in kind from my uncle who lives in Chula Juana (Chula Vista but local mexicanos and Xicanos refer to it as that) during a sojourn I paid to my old backyard backs in May. Then, I remember being stopped at the Chicago O’hare airport ‘cause the migra couldn’t accept seeing a raza boy bearing a Swedish passport.

Detained for two hours without a reason, and pressured by a raza migra whose hunch made her stubborn with belief that I somehow had traveled all the way across continents to purchase a passport for the sole purpose to enter the USA illegally (!) I was queried as to why I spoke perfect inglés and what was the purpose of my visit all whilst the insistent migra kept looking for records of my supposedly previous incursions into Califas.

I said, I grew up as a child there due to my parentela incursions for a better life. I was asked many times as to the why’s of my visit. Never mind I was headed towards Tijuana. I responded that I was on my way to a Quinceañera, at last and begrudgingly I was left free to go.

I still wonder why was I kept so long in detention, perhaps it irked the migra that I said I had no reason to ever come illegally into the states (for historical reasons (Aztlan) that escapes Chicago migra but I didn’t even mention it for fear of irking even more the lady raza in green.)

Now it is September and I’m taking these Tequila shots reflecting upon those moments, all the while I’m listening to a cd I found in the library here in Stockholm called Orquestras de Cuerdas Mexican-American Border Music -vol. 5 and feeling darn sorry for our gringo carnales because they aren’t aware of a history of America where no apple pie has ever been baked.

It ain’t fair thinketh I, for I knoweth theirs far too well yet they, gringos, think of this chunk of the world called the Southwest as foreign as Penjamo.

Pobrecitos, really, although sometimes I wonder if they don’t miss more those 13 colonies where they came from since they keep insisting on learning more about Jefferson and Washington than our own local history such as Pío Pico and all the life before that which many of our elder raza have memories of and which helped form a unique and wholly Californian identity. But such is the rule of the victor, his heroes stand on a higher pedestal all the whilst those of the defeated are reduced to a less than brilliant place, with luck, as such is the case in California, a passing mention is granted in the new revised history.

Jijole! This tequilita really makes me feel sorry for them. I wonder if they would one day be as willing to integrate to us, the whole enchilada, as some of us through the years have been willing, at times forced, to integrate their Anglo-Saxon history and values.

What kind of California would that then be?

• I wrote this in September of 2002 before I blogged, and yes, it did really happened to me and ever since I have refused to fly directly to the US though once in Tijuana I apply for a waiver visa which costs 6 dollars a pop.

When strange looks meet

This post has also appeared on Living on the Planet

Despite my seven long years in Sweden am still surprised to find myself smiling and waving at people I don’t know. This oft more than not causes me to loose my morning cheeriness and wipes my Xicano smile of my face and a small Homer Simpson rebuke, dope! can be heard in the back of my head.

I live in the Swedish Higlands, in the boonies to be more exact and the small towns are, well, really small, mine has a population of 800 or so and everyone knows everyone here.

I have also recently gained the insight that I carry some city behaviour to small town Sweden with the consequences above mentioned, people don’t say hi to each other in small town Sweden if they don’t know them. Let alone mingle with them but that’s another story. Anyways, I figured that, what I deem an odd behaviour, god knows they deem mine so as well, has to do more with city habits than small town ones.

In big cities there is a necessity to say hi to each other because in essence no one knows no one there but in small towns they don’t have this habit at all, since as soon as one steps in their territory they know a stranger when they see one.

However, this might seem an obvious feature just about everywhere there is small towns, but you have to remember that Sweden has a huge territorial extension of small towns everywhere making American habits like mine odd at best.

So yeah, that, in Sweden.

Officially over the hill

Boy, did I ever pass the generation gap this evening. I just saw Spiderman II, unwillingly. I was dragged from my computer desk with a ten ton forklifter and still managed to leave a trace of my buried nails nailed to the keyboard, but anyways, as fate would have it I sat down in a movietheater somewhere in Sweden and watched the movie with my ten year old daughter who was the one that wanted to see it. As a blogger am exposed to all kinds of blogs out there because that’s what I mostly do on the net: I seek and see other blogs when am not reading newspapers, searching information to plagiarize or just email a friend or two, wait, I only have to friends so yeah, that. Point being is that inevitably one finds all kinds of reviews of this and that not to mention being exposed to the giggling sounds of geeks all over the blogsphere waiting to see this trailer or that so that by the time I see the movie out I already have more background info on the movie than I ever wanted to, so yeah, Spiderman II, they have ruined it!

First of all this movie is littered with Sept 11 propaganda to the hilt, flags, flags, and more flags everywhere, Dios mio!, they made poor Peter Parker’s aunt something she is totally not in the comics or cartoons. Peter Parker is a bona fide geek, and Spiderman not once did he joke about anything, I mean, gosh, the only one making a joke there was Dr Octavius and only one!

Peter Parker is just way too depressed and frankly said, they made him too human, I suppose this is the way the USA transmits its values, their goodie two shoes ideology about honesty and da-ta-da-ta-da-ta.

They have ruined it for me anyways, my little girl seemed as impressed as I saw Spiderman for the first time on television, oh well, I am officially over the hill now people!

Guilt writing

Ok, am like writing this live, out of sheer guilt I haven’t written on this blog for like eons, or so it seems like that, anyhow. So writing out of guilt isn’t perhaps the best topic one can come up with to dot the blank pages with a message of sorts ‘cause certainly i ain’t about to map out the outlines for the Xicano epic I want to write and I might as just as well leave that chore to some young and enterprizing turk with more discipline than me. So yeah, the ergonomics issue seems rather palpable as I am now writing this piece with an upsidedown piece of cheap porcelin that resemles a corn, you know one of those things gringos come up with to eat corn on the cobb with its little nice forky things so as not ti smudge your fingers with? Well the thing is that I have been playing with the mouse so much that a pain has begun to call my attention for a remedy, yeap, the bottom part of the palm of my hand aches cause am so poor tha I can only afford flat mouse pads. Nope, none of those fancy mouse pads that have a bunpy part where your wrist is on the Club Med of mouse pads, nope, I suffer and improvise.

So it ocurred to me that you just might wonder what the hell such a gringo gadget is doing in my house, well, am happily living with what the Bush Right might taunt as a Living Companion, from sweden ese!

So yeah, that, hope the guilt goes a way a tad now….

It rains in the plains of Sweden

Well I can officially kiss the suntan I adquiered during my sojourn in México adios. Its been raining cats and dogs in Sweden for 6 weeks in a row now and that means I will probably miss not only the summer the rest of the planet is probably indulging itself in right about now (- sticks tongue out to the rest of the whole wide world -) but also because of the cloudy skies that have been carrying all this water, something that ironically enough moved me from the metaphorical to the literal since I am now officially a wetback all day long, hey! try moving the lawn on a rainy day will ya?, (damn, that’s a long ass sentence, but hey! it’s my blog right?) I will also miss the blue moon on the 31 of July, rats!

Speaking of wetbacks, Kevin Sites has a story that one only hears about it in rumours in the press, this (get a load of the phrase) Mexican-Born Marine has something to say.

“When he was nine years old Carlos Gomez crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico to the U.S. with his father, mother and two sisters. They had heard stories about the opportunities in America, dreamed about them, wanted them so badly they ran through oncoming traffic on the 805 freeway to get to them. They didn’t stop until they reached San Diego. Fear, fatigue and La Migra slowly fading into the souther