Organic Hispanics

(Art by Stacey Torres, Etsy.com) Well, here we are, and it's Hipanic Heritage Month again. Time for ethnic dance troupes to put on their garish costumes and go hopping around in public, while spectators snicker under their breath. Time for Professional Hispanics, non-profit types who profit from government funding as self- proclaimed community leaders, to come out and promote themselves on local news shows. Time to be reminded of Hispanic role models who raise the bar so impossibly high for the rest of us, they might as well not exist. (Sonia Sotomayor? Really?). To me, Hispanic Heritage Month is about underscoring US Latinos' status as Other. People who whites are comfortable with as long as they can laugh at us, our accent or our appearance. As long as they can remind us that we are different. And they will, often. You can be light-skinned, educated and accentless, and some white

person will always greet you with a hearty "HO-LA, A-MI-GA"! Being categorized as "other" means you're not really equal, that you're not allowed to compete on an even footing with people whose gifts you may exceed. It reduces the arena to work related to your ethnicity, so you end up trying to out-Hispanic each other for crumbs off the mainstream table. And then there's capitalism, the drive to turn Latinos into commodities that form a huge consumer market within the US. So there are powerful forces at work keeping US Latinos as "other". Worse,too many Latinos buy into the stereotype. I've found that in New York, if you're not short, dark and manifestly ignorant, other Hispanics look at you askance -- never mind that you can curse in Spanish and shake your ass with the best/worst of them (while also knowing about your literature and history and speaking and writing the language correctly because you didn't learn it second-hand in some ghetto). It's a reverse discrimination of sorts. But we're not all bookies and churro ladies, so deal with it. Somewhere between Carmen Miranda and Cameron Diaz,there are millions of people like me: educated, integrated Hispanics who grew up in the US., who retain their ethnic identity but feel no neeed to flaunt it. They are a "market", too, why won't anyone here see it? While there are plenty of black and brown pundits on English language news TV, I notice a dearth of Latino spokesmen. That's because Latino viewers are supposed to be watching Univision and Telemundo, right? WRONG! Many of us find it boring, embarrassing and, yes, primitive--largely produced in countries that are foreign to us.

That's why I was overjoyed to see Jose Diaz-Balart get his own show on MSNBC this month. Jose, a second generation Cuban exile, is exactly what I'm talking about. He speaks with a trace of an accent. He wears his ethnicity lightly, like a second skin. He comes off as refined, professional. Unlike Black pundits, who take every chance to trumpet their Blackness to guests and viewers, as if it were not obvious, Jose is never heavy-handed in his projection. He treats his Latino guests with understated familiarity,like they're all members of the same, exquisite, secret society. Every now and then, he'll drop in a quick Spanish phrase to underscore this. His presence gives me hope that finally,someone is bothering to go beyond stereotypes in order to appeal to a segment of the public that's been ignored for way too long. Felicidades, Jose.

No symbols, no problem?

When we first moved to Miami from Havana, I was enrolled in Catholic school and my two brothers went to public. For us kids, integration to the zeitgeist came easily; there were few Cubans in Miami back then--not enough to be targeted for prejudice. Granted, it wasn't all smooth sailing. I spoke near perfect English, but was still viewed as different--weird--by my classmates and even teachers. (Mrs. Mongelia disliked me for no discernible reason).And a few days ago, my brother Jorge told me a childhood story I'd never heard before. As adults, we three siblings have scattered along the Eastern Seaboard, and,as too often happens in the US, we're reunited only by family tragedies. It is on these occasions that reminiscences emerge from the vault of time, and sometimes, you're surprised by what people closest to you hide deep in the recesses of memory. Miami in the 60's was still very much segregated. Signs designating drinking fountains as "white" and "colored" could be found in schools. My brother remembers an open discussion between two of his teachers about which drinking fountain he should use. Is a Cuban white or colored? "Look at him... Just ... LOOK at him!", one teacher kept yelling, without specifying what should be looked at. My brother felt confused; he'd never had to consider his racial identity before. The truth is that Cubans come in all colors, from pink, to yellow, to black, but mostly in varying shades of tan. Moreover, the Cuban take on race is quite simple: you are what the mirror dictates. If you look white, that's what you are. And if your fraternal twin sister happens to look black, well, she's black. And you're still white. There's no arguing with optics; no wrestling with one-drop rules. My brother was one of only two Cubans in that school at that moment.Much to their credit, school administrators did the right thing,perhaps figuring, correctly, that more of these nondescript, olive-skinned creatures might soon arrive to further confound their notions of race. They removed the signs from the drinking fountains.Problem solved. Oh, if only everything was that easy... Recently, a gigantic statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was hoisted off its pedestal in downtown Richmond, Va. where it had been since 1890. This was greeted with much fanfare; removal of Confederate symbols all over the South has become a way to make white Southerners face the truth of their violent racial past and all the pain they inflicted n others, to strip away their cover story of the Civil War as a lost but noble cause. Nurturing illusions of past greatness was how Southerners consoled themselves in defeat and how the rest of the country finessed them back into the fold. For over 100 years, the memory of soldiers on both sides was honored,the Civil War remembered as a generic catastrophe that affected the whole nation---much like World War I--instead of an act of treachery by one segment of the population.Growing up in the South, this is how I assimilated history, but now it seems the time for finessing is over and the brass knuckles are out. And while I understand the downpour of long-supressed rage from those who've had to suffer the glorification of slavery for so many years,it still shocks me to hear war veterans described as "traitors". They were products of their time and place,they thought they were doing right-- most didn't even own slaves. You could say they didn't know any better, though their descendants arguably should. But should we now ask these people to remove from their walls all those yellowed photos of ancestors in Confederate garb? That's a part of their history, and you can't erase it--you can only try to cast shame on it through public acts. Unfortunately, ripping Confederate statues off pedestals won't yield the same quick beneficial results as removing "white" and "colored" signs off drinking fountains.People can be coerced to immediately say and do what's considered right at the moment, but it always takes longer to truly change hearts and minds.

NY’s Disgraced Gov Cuomo: Let’s Not Pretend He Did Any REAL Good

After being made to resign by official accusations of sexual harrassment,NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is finding nuggets of forgiveness among some prominent Democrats. They claim that, except for,you know, the sex thing, he wasn't all that bad.In fact, he was kinda good. In fact, he did "a helluva job" , to quote President Biden.

The majority (though not all) of these semi-sympathizers are men. Most prominent women won't dignify with any kindness the governor's thuggish,piggish behavior towards his female staff and acquaintances. Even if some of these accusations had been fueled by spite, I believe most are genuine. Otherwise,how could so many ladies have stepped forward at once, telling the same horror story? Still, I can see how Cuomo apologists might believe that the sex thing didn't matter that much in the end. Because in the end,it might have just been the best pretext to pry a cynical despot off his ironclad perch. Notice how the impeachment drive evaporated once Cuomo quit. Now his female enemies claim that he got off too easy; the men are more philosophical: he's gone, no need to crucify him. Getting rid of him has been hard enough. There are no term limits for governors in New York and Cuomo seemed well entrenched. Previous attempts to primary him out the door had failed. Meanwhile, he was doing a lot of harm and very little good. He was reputedly ill-tempered, rude and vindictive, arrogant and vain,more interested in polishing his image than in governing fairly. He neglected state business but worked hard at his public relations, surrounding himself with famous people who sang his praises, staging televised lovefests with admirers, but no reporters to question him. He excelled at grandstanding--empty political gestures to fool constituents into believing something great had been achieved on their behalf. His famous "infrastructure" projects were like facelifts for patients with organ failure. Cuomo built flashy cosmetic additions to the mass transit system, but neglected its real problem: trains and buses running poorly due to severe technical, budget and staffing problems. Cuomo rebuilt the Tappan Zee bridge, then renamed it after his own father and rushed to inaugurate it before addressing its structural safety concerns. His "good" moves were invariably offset by nastiness performed on the sly. His handling of the pandemic was marred by lowballing nursing home deaths, and then illegally using staffers to write a self-congratulatory book. The press reported all of this and yet, the beat went on. Nothing happened. Only NY government workers complained about this man who tried to balance the state budget on their backs by screwing them out of their modest yearly raises,by threatening them with layoffs, by publicly blaming them for the state's financial shortfalls... even though these shortfalls were manufactured by Cuomo himself, who held on tightly to government purse strings while asserting the state was broke. That was his way of flipping the bird at labor unions and dodging contractual agreements with his own employees. But alas,if NY state workers were wise to Cuomo, NY voters were totally blinded by his posturing. New Yorkers LIKED their rugged, swaggering macho governor, who claimed to be "New York Tough". Never mind that he disbanded a state commission tasked with investigating him, that he jealously pushed out a popular, competent head of mass transit,setting adrift a system that had been on the mend,never mind that he refused to work with the progressive mayor of NYC, that he consistently sided with Republican interests although he's a Democrat, that he cut public funding for health and education while refusing to tax his rich friends and that, despite all of this, he had the gall to masquerade as a liberal-- none of it seemed to matter. But the sex thing did. He'd done all kinds of horrid things--did I mention he abandoned his dog at the Governor's Mansion as he was moving out? Or that he dumped his longtime girlfriend after she had a mastectomy? Deplorable acts, but it took a sex scandal to turn public opinion against him. Fine. If that's what it took, so be it; the result was beneficial in the end. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Now on to the next governor--let's see what SHE does...

Apartheid comes to Paradise

I moved to Roosevelt Island in 1994,at the suggestion of an enterprising realtor. I was fed up with Queens (too blue-collar ethnic) but couldn't afford Manhattan, and this seemed like a good compromise.Roosevelt Island lies on the East River, between the two boroughs. At the time,it was New York City's best kept secret, with gorgeous river views, roomy apartments and state-controlled rents. There are green spaces everywhere, a riverwalk lined with cherry blossoms, open air markets on weekends. Its previous incarnations as the site of a prison and an insane asylum must have left their essence behind; the modern inhabitants were quirky and colorful. It was sort of a colony for artists, weirdos, and people from the United Nations, which is close by. In the 1970's,developers had repackaged Roosevelt Island as a utopian experiment, where people from different income levels would live happily side by side. To that end, they furnished it with a public assistance building,two buildings for seniors, several middle-class buildings and one co-op. The mix worked, and still does. Roosevelt Island is considered one of the safest neighborhoods in NYC. There is no friction among neighbors; everybody knows, or knows of, everybody else. The races coexist with no glitches. Muggings are unheard of; vandalism, rare. In the summers,I'm never afraid to walk past the groups of juveniles hanging out on street corners because I've seen them grow up.Entertainment is always at hand, with concerts, receptions and free movies on offer. Or you can head for the local diner to greet others and catch up on gossip. This is home, and I love it. But alas, it was only a matter of time before gentrification reared its ugly head and brought the class struggle that is wrecking America to our doorstep. Almost overnight,million-dollar condos and $4,000 rentals sprang up in the 'hood.The older buildings have wriggled out of government rent control and are trying to price their middle income tenants off the premises. With the new housing has come a new population: yuppies with attitude. They're now entrenched on either end of the island and they never set foot in the middle, where we original settlers live. On one end, these oligarchs are clustered near our transportation hub and they zip back and forth to Manhattan without ever visiting the rest of the island. On the other end,they board a special bus that sweeps them past us peasants and straight to the train, ferry, or aerial tramway. It's apartheid by design.It's also happening in Queens, in the neighborhoods that border Manhattan: the new yuppy enclaves have their own buses that take them shopping or to the ferry, to avoid contact with old-time residents. You can ignore this kind of bullshit until it smacks you in the face. One day,we decided to try a new restaurant near the yuppy colony by the train station. Although the place was only half full, the hostess seated us all the way in the back, where we couldn't be seen from outside. As if to confirm my suspicions,across the aisle from us,also hidden from public view, was a table full of Arabs. White yuppies were seated all along the front and middle of the restaurant, fully visible through the glass windows. To boot, the food was mediocre and the servers petulant, like they were doing us paying customers a favor. I couldn't believe it. I have NEVER in my life experienced such a blatant show of contempt and prejudice, particularly not in New York, specifically not on Roosevelt Island,and certainly not at a place that's little more than a glorified diner.Fine restaurants don't mistreat their customers.If this dump plans on surviving exclusively on the local yuppy clientele, I wish them luck. Those people prefer restaurants across the river, in Manhattan. But in case anyone's wondering, and just for identification's sake, the place is called Grannie Annie's Bar and Kitchen. Apparently, there's an establishment by the same name in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a region with its own history of intolerance and discrimination. If it's the same ownership, that might explain a lot.

BUILDINGS THAT SWAY, BUILDINGS THAT FALL

When I lived in Miami, I worked near the airport at a building which was fairly new back then. One day I felt something like a dizzy spell and I gripped the sides of my desk, waiting for the bad moment to pass. It did within seconds, but as I'd find out later, there was nothing wrong with me. It was the BUILDING that swayed whenever an airplane flew by. Putting a building so close to an airport is not a good idea, but nobody in there ever mentioned the swaying out loud, so of course, nobody on the outside knew about it. They probably still don't. The building had been designed by the yuppy sonny-boy of the company's general manager. It was a South American company and in true indentured banana republic fashion,when the building shook, the employees kept quiet. It's still standing, as far as I know. But now we hear that another building, a high rise condo, actually collapsed on itself in Surfside, a subdivision of Miami Beach. Miami-Dade County has done an impressive job of handling the catastrophe, but the death toll is in the dozens--and nobody knows exactly what happened. How did an entire building go pfffttt! in a matter of seconds? Was it because of a sinkhole? Faulty infrastructure? Lack of timely inspection and certification? All of the above? They say that years ago, tenants could feel the building vibrating from construction activity nearby, and that there was some evidence it was gradually sinking, before it went and sank

in one tragic shot. So who's to blame? Lackadaisical tenants? Maybe nobody wanted to hear that their costly, oceanfront pied a terre was seriously damaged and required even more money in repairs. Or was it the powerful Latino developers who practically run Miami? They have deep pockets, and rumors of past bribery attempts are afoot.Yet there had been plenty of warnings before the catastrophe. Three years ago,an engineer had reported structural weaknesses in the building, but was ignored. And only hours before the collapse, tenants reported hearing strange creaking noises. All signs of impending doom were shrugged off. And here we are. Ethnic resentments and finger-pointing are bubbling to the surface. The mayor of Surfside, all pale, tight-lipped indignation, declared that buildings don't normally collapse in America, only in Third World countries. The guy obviously needs to get a better grip on his bearings. (This is Miami, after all.) However, I do hope that on top of everything, we won't soon discover that someone's nephew designed or built the fallen structure and was allowed to cut corners while everyone else looked away.

In the Hype

After much inaugural hoohah at New York's Tribeca Film Festival, "In the Heights", a musical about Gotham Latinos,ellicited a monumental yawn in the provinces. Opening day revenues were flat in the rest of the US. New York critics and media were stunned, the way most elites are stunned by any serious questioning of their criteria. What happened? Everyone can see that the photography unfolds as gorgeous, love-letter views of Manhattan, the score is rousing, rollicking salsa, the voices are thrilling, soaring, melodic, the dancing kicks butt. Oh, and "In the Heights" can also tug at your heartstrings with the sweet longing and tenderness that imbue its narrative. SO WHAT HAPPENED? Huh. Maybe we should ask: why should the rest of the country be interested in a movie about an ethnic subgroup in New York City? More specifically, we're at a moment where white nativist ideas struggle for dominance everywhere between the coasts. So why would nativist types watch a musical about brown people's struggles and aspirations? Other issues hinder "In the Heights'" national debut. Through the movie runs a subtext that few have cared to note. It's the threat of Washington Heights, an old Latino neighborhood in Manhattan,succumbing to gentrification, to affluent whites moving in, driving up rents, and obliterating local color. It's a protest against encroaching white influence--against the same yuppies and hipsters and tourists who flocked to Tribeca to see the movie and came back with breathless reviews. This particular set of New York whites has overlooked the movie's subtle indictment of their kind, but I'll bet that whites elsewhere get the message and they reject it. Anything else? Well, yes. "In the Heights" details the trials and triumphs of two young urban couples-- and ALL of their family, neighbors and friends. It's a cluttered story line. Even so, it almost disappears within a maelstrom of noise, color and movement, a gaudy song-and-dance marathon assault on the senses. Singers and dancers perform in cinematic mobs worthy of DeMille. Worse, you're expected to countenance over two hours of this manic-operatic display, which manages to be exhausting, boring and enervating at once. I hear that Latinos haven't taken to "In the Heights", and I can guess at a few more reasons why. The two male leads are slight of frame and mild of manner, not believable as the red-blooded macho love interests they're supposed to be. The two female leads are skinny, pale and flat, not the lush Latina babes one would expect. Both couples' frantic musical cavorting evidences no sexual attraction. (Surprised?) Also,I suspect that the movie's portrayal of Hispanics as ghetto dwellers who like to squawk, shake their asses and wear tacky rags hasn't gone over well with real Hispanics. A local Puerto Rican wunderkind is being hailed as the thing's "creator" by New York critics (who no doubt had some nudging from his well - connected daddy, a veteran public relations operative.) And the young "creator" DID create the music and lyrics and what he calls the"concept", whatever that means. But let's not dwell on him ad nauseam,the way half of New York has done. If you ask me, he's already taken too much credit for this enterprise--virtually pushing aside the woman who wrote the book. Who knows? Maybe some day, she'll thank him.

Dancers go in through the back

When he worked for El Mundo newspaper,my great uncle Victor Munoz popularized the idea of Mother's Day in Cuba in the 1920's. I know very little about the guy, except that he was my great grandmother's brother, that he managed to get his face on a Cuban

postage stamp, that he was a lector (reader) in the legendary cigar factories of Key West when they were hotbeds of revolution against colonial Spain,and that he enjoyed a considerable measure of popularity and influence in his Havana days. He died 99 years ago in New York. Unfortunately, sportswriters seldom make a lasting dent in the annals of literature and much of Uncle Victor's legacy seems to have dissipated within the mists of time. But he's still the Founder of Cuban Mother's Day,still my maternal kin's biggest claim to fame and was definitely a point of pride for me when I decided to become a journalist.

Needless to say, our careers were to follow very different paths. I first broke into writing at Cosmopolitan in Spanish, as "La Chica Cosmo", with a piece about what it's like to be a professional escort. But I chickened out of going on real "dates" and quit, two days after being hired by some pimp with a jewfro. Instead, I spoke to several male friends who had used escorts, and I wrote the piece based on their input. (So there,my first published article was a fake.You read it here first.)

My editor, a corpulent fairy, loved it,and I doubt he would've cared that I made it all up. Subsequent endeavors at Cosmo would be legitimate, mostly interviews with Latin American singers. I arrived at empty theaters before showtime, carrying my little tape recorder, and invariably, security guards blocked me, saying: "Excuse me, miss, but dancers go in through the back." And I had to explain that I wasn't a dancer, but a JOURNALIST, thank you. It annoyed me; I felt demeaned. That was, of course, many years and many pounds ago, and I was too young and full of myself to realize that I was being paid the best kind of compliment: an unwitting one. Nobody mistakes me for a dancer now, nobody would hire me as an escort, but that's okay. I'm still a woman. Una mujer completa, as we say-- I even gave birth and get congratulated on it at least once a year. So from myself and Uncle Victor, wherever he may be, Feliz Día de las Madres to you all.