LIVING IN SPANGLISH
The Search for Latino Identity in
America
By Ed Morales
St. Martin's. 310 pp. $25.95
Since the 17th century, when American settlers made war against Indians
and imported black slaves from Africa to show them how to farm God's
promised land and do the hard work for them, race has run through U.S.
history, alongside expansion and democracy, as a major leitmotif. Class
has remained a more obscure factor, in part because blacks were the
effective workers of the South -- even after slavery.
The 19th-century conquest of Spanish-owned territories brought new
ingredients into the American racial and class brew. The term "Latino,"
however, applied equally to blond, blue-eyed Spaniards, dark-skinned
Spanish Moors and to mixed bloods dating from Cortes's union with La
Malinche, as well as to any combination of the above.
Out of this mixing and migrating, conquering and subduing, Ed Morales
has developed a 21st-century metaphor. His notion of Spanglish transcends
the simple mixing of Spanish with English; he refers to a pastiche of
literary and cultural trends that have come to influence daily life and
language. Morales, a writer who has covered issues in the Latino community
for 15 years, understands that multiculturalism and diversity have taken
on the aura of modern buzz words; they've become shorthand employed by
liberals and conservatives so they can revel in pious ideological modes of
discourse. Morales wants to remove this important theme from both its
narrow academic and its charged politicized context and instead dramatize
the impact of race- and culture-mixing on modern America.
Growing up as a Puerto Rican in New York, a "sheltered Project Boy in
the North Bronx," he knows the street and can use this savvy to
personalize his essays. But he's far from your typical homey in that he's
equally comfortable critiquing films, plays, TV shows and the Pentagon's
use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a weapons-testing lab. "At
the root of Spanglish," Morales explains, "is a very universal state of
being. It is a displacement from one place, home, to another place, home,
in which one feels at home in both places, yet at home in neither place.
It is a kind of banging-one's-head-against-the-wall state and the only
choice you have left is to embrace the transitory (read transnational)
state of in-between."
Morales's words apply to modern urban culture in the era of corporate
globalization, to the newly migrated urban characters in John Berger's
Once in Europa, to the Anglo-Indians and Pakistanis in Salman
Rushdie's novels and to the heroes of films such as "My Beautiful
Launderette." "To be Spanglish," according to Morales, "is to live in
multisubjectivity; that is, in a space where race is indeterminate, and
where class is slipperier than ever." Or, as he notes elsewhere,
"Spanglish culture springs from a reaction to racism."
Spanglish as a combination of two languages, cultures and ways of being
defies analytical scrutiny due to the very broadness and vagueness of the
concept. So one must ignore the title's logical resonance and try to
appreciate Morales's fertile and playful mind and his occasional flights
of prose elegance. The book guides the reader to think of Spanglish on the
one hand as a hybrid language experiment that has helped the poor from
Spanish-speaking countries gain some base of identity. On the other hand,
it suggests an amalgam of music, literature and cuisine that has become
more than just a bipolar way of thinking and measuring. Taco Bell and "I
Love Lucy" vie with authentic restaurants from Chiapas and serious films
like"Amores Perros" as representatives of the Spanglish
culture.
Unfortunately, Morales's free-flowing but undisciplined approach to
this fascinating subject is often frustrating. His prose wiggles around
the core issues of race, class and commerce and spins off into the
periphery. Instead of trying to separate the issues and then analyze how
they overlap and interact, Morales offers a fruitless blend of word salad.
If we are, as Morales concludes, inevitably "moving toward a Spanglish
hemisphere . . . an America that is united, a region where the inevitable
mixing of north and south comes to full fruition," then will the upper one
percent of rich and light-skinned Anglos and Latinos also mix their wealth
with the vast mass of impoverished and dark-skinned people?
Morales clearly sympathizes with the poor, but his book doesn't offer
clarity as to whether the ubiquitous commercial apparatus that
incorporates Latino culture also invades, co-opts and ultimately conquers
the cultures that he celebrates. Caramba, I say to myself,
mainstream cultural impresarios hire Gloria Estefan and Cristina Aguilera
to close the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, making supposedly Latino
culture part of the commercial world, just as Wayne Newton provides ersatz
indigenous flair for the worst of pop music in the gambling hotels of Las
Vegas. Some of the entries in Morales's roster of Spanglish culture might
better be labeled Spanglitsch or Spankitsch.
Insightfully, Morales shows how recent modes of assimilation no longer
coincide with the old saws of how immigrants arrived and gradually adapted
to the new country while simultaneously adding their ingredients to the
overall culture. In the modern era, however, the sartorial and romantic
activities of Jennifer Lopez and rapper Sean Combs seem to find their way
to the once-mean streets that Piri Thomas described as he grew up Puerto
Rican in New York.
Morales tries to bring together centuries of history in one-sentence
descriptions of figures ranging from Cuba's apostle, José Martí, and the
Mexican writer José Vasconcelos to modern playwrights such as Luis Valdez,
author of Zoot Suit. But his rambling literary and art critiques,
strung together without consistent threads, suffer from superficiality, as
do his attempts to incorporate revolutionary and counterrevolutionary Cuba
into his Spanglish model. "So the flaw of the Cuban revolution is revealed
as the flaw of all those protective fathers who wish to shelter their
children from the world's inevitable corruption," he writes. Then he cites
as the authority for this conclusion the "anti-Castro Cuban novelist and
noted homosexual Reinaldo Arenas, who transforms the oppressive apparatus
of the ruling party into a carnival of repressed sexual desire." Yet, he
concludes, the revolution has helped the Cuban people to retain "the sense
of humanity, that romantic 'realness' that we in the developed world are
rapidly losing."
Morales shows flashes of brilliance in his prose and poems, but has not
yet made coherent his combined experience and observation. He does show
passion, intelligence and imagination, which augur well for his future
works. •
Saul Landau is director of Digital Media Programs and International
Outreach at Cal Poly Pomona's College of Letters, Arts and Social
Sciences. His latest film is "Maquila: A Tale of Two Mexicos."
