I was on the radio

Ring of Red: A Barrio Story is a play I wrote, based on the hundreds of hours of oral history interviews I’ve conducted with Vietnam veterans and their families. It’s on the stage now at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles, with three more shows to go this weekend: Friday, September 28 at 7:00PM; Saturday, September 29 at 7:00PM; and Sunday, September 30 at 2:00PM, followed by an audience “talkback.”

Our efforts were spotlighted in a story on The Frame, and arts and entertainment program that airs on the NPR station in Los Angeles, KPCC radio.  It’s a really well put together story, one that hits all the right points when it comes to me project and the play I’ve helped produce, with the help of theater folks who know what they’re doing.

Check it out online.

WELCOME HOME: March 5 in downtown Pomona

On the radio

I recently did a radio interview with KPFA, the Berkeley-based flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network. We talked about my book, Latinos at the Golden Gate.

My interview will be edited and aired at an upcoming date on the morning show UpFront. I’m not sure I’ll know in advance of it actual airing, so I’ll be sure and post a link when the segment is posted on their site.

The timing is fortuitous since Latinos at the Golden Gate is scheduled to be released in paperback in early 2016.

More on that when I know more…

Immigrants are #MoreThanALabel

About a week ago, I was asked to participate in the #MoreThanALabel campaign, an effort by the MSW Program at Simmons College to promote positive immigrant-related discourse in the United States.

It’s not mystery that this is something dear to my heart, both intellectually and personally. It’s what I care about as a professor, through work that focuses on the history of Latin American-descent migrants and their descendants. It’s what I care about as a Chicano, as the member of a family and larger community that is both immigrant and native-born. And it’s what I care about as a person, as a human being who sees the unnecessary suffering of people as they make terribly difficult decisions to migrate and, ultimately, take up the struggle of creating lives in new often hostile places.

For those in the United States who care about immigrants––especially those who are part of the majority (white, native-born) society––there is work to be done.  If we really care about doing something to combat the labels and stigmas that affect the lives of immigrants in our country, we have to start by looking in the mirror.

We need to check our fears and assumptions. We need to open ourselves to learning about the diversity of immigrant experiences.  We need to promote the creation of new immigration systems that are designed to meet 21st century challenges.  And we need to forcefully and affirmatively commit ourselves to the social value of humanism.

Being a humanist in the 21st century means learning about the world. It means grappling with the complexity of things like capitalism and neoliberalism, systems that link much of us together in ways that are powerful and, often, invisible to our understanding. It means being empathic, extending ourselves to understand the lives, the desires, the struggles of others, even when those are nearly impossible to fully understand.

It also means changing how we think about the nation that is the United States.

There is no a person in the United States today who is not benefiting from the work of immigrants.  Not one of us will go the day without eating something that is planted, picked, packed, or processed by a Spanish-speaking migrant.  And that’s just one, life-giving form of work.  The work immigrants is so diverse that it relates to each of our lives in countless different ways, each day.  The common link of all this labor is simple: The United States does not survive without immigrant labor.

That is a good starting point, but its not a very humanistic one.  We’re not going to combat the racism and xenophobia making immigrant lives so difficult by shouting “We need them for cheap labor so we can benefit from them!”

What we need to do is to learn about these relationships between our own lives and the lives of immigrants.  We need to think about the ethics and morality that come with them. Is it right to benefit from the suffering of others?  Is it right to support a system that labels some “acceptable” and others “illegal”?  And finally we need to find a way to humanistically “flip” the power imbalance that makes migration such an oppressive system in our present.

We do that by accepting that global migrants deserve the same inalienable rights as do all other human beings in the world.  We do that by making sure our political systems nurture and protect those rights.

And we do it by living our own, individual and personal lives in ways that show it.

 

 

The Limits of Numbers

It’s official now: Latinos outnumber whites in the state of California, making us the largest ethnic group in the Golden State.

The switch happebed sometime last year but the numbers only became official last week. With 14.99 million Latinos in California, there are more of us than there are so-called “non-Hispanic whites,” who number about 14.92 million.

It’s a gradual change but one that will continue throughout the foreseeable future. Aside from immigration, whites in California are old and dying and not reproducing much while Latinos are younger and reproducing at higher rates. We are the future source of the natural birth rate, too. There are twice as many Latinos under 18 (4.8 million) than whites (2.4 million) ensuring that we will make up the majority of the next generation of native-born Californians.

More than 80% of the Latino population in the state is ethnically Mexican, meaning our collective story is rooted to this just one country, whether we are a US-born “Mexican American” or a foreign-born mexicano. That means that sometime in the next few decades it is likely that the ethnic Mexican population alone will outnumber whites in California.

Our youth–coupled with a long legacy of segregation and political disenfranchisement–means that our demographic ascendency doesn’t necessarily translate into political power. That, too, will likely come, but it will take more time, political organizing, and, perhaps, a willingness for the emerging “white minority” to relinquish some of its hold over the reigns of power. If not, every year that passes will make the Californian political system look more and more like some kind of 21st century apartheid state, albeit one that projects a kind of benevolence.

All these changes are important and, in my eyes, good. But there are limits to our demographic ascendancy.

How many Californians will go through their day never once speaking to a Latino? How many live in communities where Latinos are nearly invisible? How many work in places that make this demographic reality look false? How many are educated in classrooms that do not reflect this emerging majority? How many will be surrounded by Latinos–will have their lawns cut, food cooked, and houses cleaned by Latinos–but never have a conversation with even one?

I am Chicano (Mexican American). I live in a Mexican-majority city, in a Mexican-majority neighborhood, next to my Mexican American neighbors. My kids attend a Mexican-majority school. When we go to any store, we see and engage with other Mexicans/Chicanos.

When I go to work, I am one of two US-born, Mexican Americans on the faculty of my college.  The Latino share of our student population is a national-leader for liberal arts colleges but is still only about 1 in 6. Unless they speak with the gardening or housekeeping staff, most of my colleagues can go their entire day on campus never speaking to a member of the emerging majority of this state.

What’s worse, this is hardly a unique condition.

We are the the largest ethnic group in California but we remain segregated, marginalized, and disproportionately confined to the invisible corners of mainstream society. The reality of the demographics should be–it must be–a wake up call for us all that the meaningful reality of a multiethnic, multiracial society is still before us.

And there is work to be done.

Chicanos and Vietnam

My current research relates to the history of Chicano/Latino military participation in the Vietnam War. It’s primarily based on oral histories with Chicano veterans, interviews that (with the help of my students) I’ve been recording for about four years.

A big part of that research is also analyzing large data sets (like the census and other federal surveys) to help tell the story of veterans and their families in the four decades since the end of the war.

Broadly speaking, then, I’m hoping to shed light on some of the ways the war impacted Latino communities. As the son of a Vietnam veteran, and the nephew of another vet, this is a very personal project for me.

It was a real honor to be able to talk a little bit about my research with a local reporter, as part of Time Warner Cable’s “Local Edition.” The segment will begin airing this Sunday throughout the LA region. But it’s also available online:

This will be my first time on TV. More importantly, I’m glad the project is already gaining some attention in the local media. It’s a reflection (I think) of the gaps in our collective understanding of the war in US society, gaps these stories help to fill.

Chicano Vietnam Veterans

My work on Chicano/Latino communities and the Vietnam War was featured in a front page story in last Sunday’s Inland Valley Bulletin. The story also ran in other small papers throughout the LA area, since the IVB paper is part of a group of local papers covering most of the Southland. You can read the full story here.

There are a few errors and inaccuracies in it. For example, I never refer to the process of oral histories as “giving a voice” to anybody. In most situations, we are all people who have a voice and who have the ability to “speak it” in a literal and symbolic way. The work of the oral historian is to seek it out, to record it, and to preserve it in an intentional act that is done in relationship to the narrator. But when we see ourselves as “giving voice” to subjects who didn’t have one to begin with, we start to recreate a lot of the problematic power imbalances that created that misperception in the first place.

In any case, these are small discrepancies for me considering the context. I mean, it’s a newspaper, not an academic journal article. I will say that going from a seemingly casual conversation about my work with a reporter to a feature story on it is a good lesson in how to be better prepared to speak to reporters in the future.

Overall, I was honored that my work gave the newspaper an reason to highlight the experiences of tens of thousands of veterans and their families. I’m also glad that more people who are the subject of my work now know about it.

One of the nice results was that the various papers also spotlighted some of the veterans I’ve interviewed. In some, the stories of my dad and uncle were spotlighted. You can read that article here. And in other papers the story of Louis Ramirez was featured in a thoughtful write-up. You can read that one here.

This history means a lot to me. A big part of that is the fact that it means a lot to thousands more.

First Reviews

Though my book was released in summer of 2013, it’s only now starting to be reviewed in various scholarly journals. I’m happy to report that the reviews have been generally positive, too.

Here’s a list with links, although some can’t be accessed freely:

• The Journal of American History, vol. 101, no. 3 (Dec. 2014): 892-893.
• Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 481-81.
• Regeneración Tlacuilolli: UCLA Raza Studies Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (Dec. 2014): 167-69.
• Utah Historical Review, vol. 4 (2014): 257-59.

This last review seems to have a formatting error. It’s not listed in the Table of Contents and doesn’t have an author listed. It shares specific analysis with the one published in the online journal from UCLA. My guess is it was reworked by the same author for republication.

As you might imagine, it’s pretty great feeling. You spend years of your life working on something, making it better and better until you finally just let it go. Then you start second guessing yourself. Is it any good? Is it useful? Will people like it?

These first reviews are helping to put all those feelings of inadequacy into perspective. I think the most rewarding part is that I can be sure there are at least a few people out there who have read my book. As more reviews come in, hopefully that group will continue to grow–and that’s a great feeling.

So thanks for the support!

History is not the past…

A friend of mine made this a short video from a talk I gave in San Francisco last fall. The talk was about my book on the history of Latinos in the city–Latinos at the Golden Gate–but, as you can see, it was also about some of the present struggle Latino communities are facing.

“Is Hollywood Mexican enough?”

Chris Rock is making the news these past few days because of his comments on race in Hollywood. Those comments were a lot broader than just about his experience as a Black man in the industry.

But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You’re in L.A, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans. It’s the most liberal town in the world, and there’s a part of it that’s kind of racist — not racist like “F— you, nigger” racist, but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o’clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it’s General Motors. It’s this weird town.

You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that’s true?

You can check out his full essay at The Hollywood Reporter.