Tamales on Christmas Eve

Tamales on Christmas Eve Stephen D. Gutierrez Those tamales come around again. Always those tamales come around again. They show up on people's laps at my grandparents' Christmas Eve parties every year. Inevitably, red, soggy husks are peeled by fingers dexterous and knowing, unashamed and deft with the most ancient of Indian foods—tamales, a food that connects us to our most sacred past, our Aztec beginnings. And people just eat the damn things regardless of origins. We are a tamale-eating Mexican American famüy attended by strong, sturdy mexicanos de aquí, Mexicans from here, who are my grandparents hosting the affair. And the tamales make the rounds of the house. They come out ofa big olla in the kitchen, steam-wrapped in white towels to preserve moisture and tenderness. They are lifted out carefuUy by tongs or quick fingers, dropped onto porcelain plates chipped and beautiful, then eaten in the Uving room in fuU view of others with bent spoons and forks. I make us sound Uke a bunch ofTJs1—a bunch offresh-over-the-border Mexicans. We are not a bunch ofTJs. In arguments loud and clear, that is reiterated. Mexicans, of course, are the grand topic of conversation, broken down into the different kinds of Mexicans there are. We are not TJs, recent arrivals, lower-class country bumpkins. Even as we side with them in cases of gross injustices done to them, honking the horn for Cesar Chavez-backed farmworkers who picketed the markets of L.A. in the '70s, registering dismay at the brutalities inflicted TJ derives from tijuanero, "person from Tijuana;" used in a derogatory manner to describe any recently-arrived Mexican immigrant who is poor and uneducated. 41 42Fourth Genre upon the lowest of the low, trapped in boxcars or robbed of their meager wages by unscrupulous employers, we distance ourselves from them. Our sympathies go only so far. We side with them when it costs us nothing. As long as we are not mistaken for them, we champion them, though the feelings we have for them are genuine and real, strong and deep. We hire them to do our cheap labor and treat them with respect. We place ourselves between them and the gringo as a kind of buffer of decency who wfll never forget their humanity. But to ourselves, we also vüify them, make fun of them, as if to ensure the distance between us stays intact. We want this inherited disassociation to become complete, too. We want the next generation to know where we come from. "We are not TJs," we say, and laugh it off. We are not ofTJ stock. We don't come from Mexico freshly, and when we do come from Mexico freshly—we simply don't have that TJ look. We are not TJs. The brighter cousins roU their eyes around and know differently. They have seen the pictures of ancient relatives and know that they were poor, abused, ignorant, abusive, proud, headstrong, strong and hardy gente. They had the third-world look despite efforts to cleanse them. They were hungry for affection in America, and they pushed their wives around instead. They survived and were hardworking and indomitable. When they got sick, they died with grace and fire. When they cursed, they brought maledictions from the heavens upon everybody and everything. On Mexican Independence Day—and this is my grandest proof that we are descended from TJs, that somewhere in our background we trace a Uneage not unlike those hordes ofimmigrant Mexicans now so much the topic of our conversation—they went wild with Mexican patriotism. Our recent ancestors, great-grandparents of mine who traveled the dusty roads of Mexico during the revolution to work in the brick factories ofLos Angeles, slaughtered goats and hung Mexican flags. From their sorry porches on Mexican Independence Day in the '30s and '40s hung the glorious colors of the nation of Mexico. On their cars they tied smaU flags and tooted around the town getting drunk. They set offfirecrackers and hooted into the night. They burped earnest "Viva Mexicos" and slept under a cactus in the back yard. Stephen D. Gutierrez43 And of course I did...