Crowding Out Latinos

1.Introduction

Introduction espite efforts throughout the twentieth century, especially during the last thirty years, to improve how Mexican Americans and other Spanish-speaking people are perceived in the United States, Chicanosl and other Latinos are not yet seen as typical American citizens. Latinos continue to receive poor educations. The media continue to represent us in ways that have not been changed substantially by the emergence of Chicano literature or by anything else attempted by American Latinos during the last three decades. There has been no acceleration ofefforts to educate and develop this potentially great national human resource, and success continues to be available only to a tiny fraction ofHispanics. Although some small improvements have occurred, the great majority of Latinos in the United States still live in separate worlds connected only tangentially to the rest ofAmerican culture. Despite the efforts of many Spanish-speaking citizens to interact more meaningfully with the rest ofAmerican society, too often the Chicano barrios and other Latino communities that exist throughout the United States remain social spaces to be avoided instead ofplaces that can be developed and enhanced to promote a town, city, state, or region.2 Since Chicano literature provides an ongoing record about the presence of a resident and growing Spanish-speaking population in the United States, examining the writings of Chicano writers in light of certain widely assumed views about Hispanics is a social imperative. Essentially, the issue is one of Mexican American and Latino visibility-or, visible Copyrighted Material 2 Chapter 1 invisibility, as it were-within the larger American environment. Studying how Chicano authors have labored to improve education and analyzing how Latinos continue to be represented in newspapers, magazines , television programs, films, and advertisements should allow readers to determine where our narratives have succeeded and where they have fallen short of the needs of Latinos and American society.3 By examining four Chicano books in this study, I hope to focus attention on the larger but seldom-noticed social text that adumbrates the relationships between the wider American public and the permanent Latino communities ofthe United States. Such relationships offer a cultural text that Chicano writers and critics have been constructing onesidedly since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created Mexican Americans in 1848. Since such a text can be accessed from a number of sociopolitical, economic, and historical perspectives, I do not presume to speak for all American Hispanics in the following pages. Nonetheless , I believe that education and media portrayals of Spanish-speaking Americans are the two most important socializing vehicles that, generation after generation, have continued to shape and influence that very real Hispanic world that exists, however nebulously, in the American consciousness. While Chicano literature dramatizes the impact of education and the American media on Latinos, and even though many Mexican Americans and Latinos invest considerable time and effort on our relationships to American society today, the larger American public seems to remain unengaged. United States Latinos often feel less like Americans and more like recent immigrants or life-long foreigners in our own country. Dramatized in avariety offorms, which include anger, indifference, adjustment, and accommodation, Chicano authors have long rendered frustrating sociopolitical realities and psychological responses that have remained unheeded and unaddressed. If America's Latinos are to help advance American civilization in the twenty-first century, our Spanish-speaking citizens require better educations and the American media will have to learn how to represent Hispanics more attractively.4 The schools and the media are singled out because these two socializing vehicles continue to be the chiefmeans that daily shape and influence Latinos. Ifno extra efforts are soon made to improve how Hispanics are educated and perceived and responded to throughout American society, the future promises to be bleaker than the shameful past that made it acceptable to discriminate against Latinos. Copyrighted Material Introduction 3 Although a number of studies have addressed relationships between mainstream Americans and Chicanos, such efforts have not especially sought to bring the people of these two American cultures to a better understanding of each other.5 Some Latinos want and may even state a wish to remain separate and apart, but the majority ofus have shown by our lifestyes that we would rather be regarded as regular American citizens . Despite the different desires expressed by Latinos throughout the twentieth century, from those who would create a separate society to those who would deny that they have special problems within...