NewsTaco

By Daniel Hernandez, Latino USA

Commentator Daniel Hernandez is a pocho, a Mexican-American, living in Mexico City. But lately he’s noticed he’s not the only one, and the line between pochos and chilangos, what Mexico City natives call themselves, is blurring.

This article was first published in Latino USA.

Daniel Hernandez is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City and a news assistant in the Los Angeles Times bureau in Mexico. He’s been a staff writer at the L.A. Times and LA Weekly. A native of San Diego, Calif., Daniel is author of the 2011 book “Down & Delirious in Mexico City.”

[Photo by Distra]

By Especial Correspondents, Pocho Ñews Service

(PNS reporting from the NUTMEG STATE) Connecticut became the 17th state to approve Medical Menudo yesterday when the state’s Senate gave overwhelming approval to a bill passed earlier by the Assembly.

“This is a new dawn for all Connecticutitians,” Sen. Juan Gopher (D-Bridgeport) told supporters. “The days of twitching, throbbing and sobbing alcohol victims waiting on sketchy corners for their menudo are over.”

The legislation, which awaits the expected approval of Gov. Nancy Wyman, allows non-profit collectives to dispense Medical Menudo (MM) to patients with a mariachi’s recommendation.

Prospective MM patient Rocio Balboa appeared excited by the news. “Gaaaaaaaah! My head. Ooook. It’s so bright. And stop shouting!” she told PNS.

But the policy does not enjoy universal support.

Critics decried the vote, citing the negative health effects of MM, including problematic sweating, high cholesterol and chronic potbelly.

Jennifer Loesch of New Haven doesn’t approve of the law. Even though she doesn’t eat Medical Menudo, she complained, she’s still exposed to the second-hand side effects, such as the smell which emanates from wherever it’s being prepared and consumed.

“It’s not fair that I have to inhale Medical Menudo when I don’t even use it,” she told PNS. “If you want to do that in your own home, that’s fine, but I don’t need to see it, smell it, or know that my child’s teacher is tripping on it.”

William Bob, Grand Dragon of the New Haven Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had nothing but negative things to say about MM:

We don’t like Manuredo up here. Hate that goddam band. Shoulda deported ‘em with them other fellers, whatchamacallit, Santaner.

Conservative Latino think tank NOTOKES considers medical menudo a “gateway” dish.  They fear that sanctioned use will lead to widespread addiction to other, more dangerous foods, such as mole and posole.

This article first appeared in Pocho.com.

[Photo by Uriangatense]

POCHO ÑEWS SERVICE PNS IS A WHOLLY-FICTITIOUS SUBSIDIARY OF POCHISMO, INC., A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION, WHO IS A PERSON ACCORDING TO THE SUPREME COURT.  DON’T ASK US, WE JUST WORK HERE.

Pocho.com aims to be the go to place for Latinos in United States looking for their fix of satire and comedy. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because the site first premiered in the 1990s, under the  astute and hilarious direction of cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz.

In the 2012 incarnation, today is the site’s official launch, Alcaraz and the rest of the Pocho.com crew are bringing their Twitter and Facebook arsenal, as well as The Daily Show Senior Latino Correspondent Al Madrigal. Content on the site ranges from Alcaraz’s stinging cartoons, to video, to lists and other types of posts.

Alcaraz joked to NewsTaco that the site is now back because, “I decided to bring it back because I’m always 10 years ahead in my ideas and concepts, which is why most of the time people sit around and scratch their cabezas when they read my work. So I decided to sit on my hands and do absolutely nothing with Pocho.com until now, to let people catch up to me.”

The site notes that, “we want to provide you an antidote to the mainstream media’s attempts at pandering to your hot Latino ancestry,”  yet clarifies that the site is for everyone. While “pocho” has historically been applied to people of Mexican descent, Pocho.com wants to reimagine the word to apply to anyone who lives in two worlds, even noting “If you aren’t Latino, we love you anyway.  A Pocho can be a Latino-wannabe,  a Latino lover or just someone who is always mistaken for Latino (come on Middle Easterners, own it.)”

Alcaraz told us that now is the perfect time to relaunch the site because, “Pochismo has proven to be a national force in the United States, it is a phenomenon not only with Chicanos but with many groups in the U.S. Gringos are even falling all over themselves to try to be Latino-adjacent. We are just so damn cool everybody wants to be us.”

To prove this point, the Pocho.com crew includes non-Latinos and Latinos who are not of Mexican descent. And, full disclosure, we’ll be partnering with Pocho.com to provide some awesome content for you here at NewsTaco. For more information, here’s the website, Facebook  and Twitter pages.

There is a particular shame associated with being a Latino in the United States: you may not speak Spanish, and if you do, you will never speak it well enough.

I know I grew up with this sometimes not–so–secret–shame, as did many of my friends. In some places, such as Texas, there were historical and very tangible reasons for this. Older generations were not only incessantly chastised for speaking Spanish in public, or in school in particular, but were punished — sometimes physically — for speaking their family’s language.

In other places, and as with most of that immigrant groups that came to this country, proficiency in Spanish is just lost over the generations, as assimilation and other priorities take hold in daily life. I myself spoke very basic “kitchen Spanish” until I studied in Mexico my junior year of college with the explicit goal to learn to speak well, as well as read and write well in Spanish.

The funny thing is, once I got back, I had somehow moved from the “Please don’t judge me for my bad Spanish” part of the continuum one to the “Stop acting like you’re better than me because you speak Spanish well” end of the continuum. Suffice to say, at least in my experience, no one can ever possibly win in this faux debate.

These days, I can barely get through conversation in just English or just Spanish without wanting to switch to the other. My tongue has evolved from English (with great effort to switch to Spanish), to fluency in Spanish, to somehow managing to think in both languages, depending on the most appropriate context. I’m fluent in Spanglish now.

The endgame is, nobody wins when we’re playing mind games with each other as to who is “more Latino” because they speak Spanish. Because even when you do speak Spanish, the odds that you’ll speak it as well as English are pretty slim, I know for myself the seeming endless landscape of the English language totally overshadows the field of view I see in Spanish. Which leads me to ask, what game are we really playing here?

If you don’t speak Spanish, that’s okay, you can learn if you really want to. If you speak Spanish más o menos, that’s okay, you can stay that way or learn more if you’d like. If you speak Spanish, great, you’re fortunate and could make the world a better place by sharing your knowledge. As Latinos increasingly become woven into the fabric of Americana, I think it’s important that we recognize that while language is very important, it’s not the only thing that makes us who we are.

[Photo By smasha_moro]

Que desgracia que haya Latinos en este país que no hablen español. It’s a shame that there are Latinos in this country that don’t speak Spanish.

I think it was the Dominican producer talking to her Venezuelan co-worker who said that. I was a half-step behind, following them through the halls of a television studio in Miami, on my way to do a guest shot on Univisión’s “Al Punto.”

They were immigrants, which is not their fault – recently arrived, and luckily landed on a pretty good gig prepping guests for the Sunday morning Spanish language issues program, taped on Friday. They were young and filled with their own sense of certainty, and they had no concept of the long history of Latinos in the U.S.

The conversation had started moments before when I muttered something about the variety of Latinos in this country: recent arrivals, multiple generational, varying language capacities and countries of origin. The majority, I said, are Mexican-American and many of us don’t speak a word of Spanish. We were walking already, and they were incensed.

¿Como es possible? No saben el daño que le hacen a sus hijos al no hablarles español. How dare anyone not speak español.

These were professional journalists, mind you, encumbered by their chosen profession to be objective and weigh things within their particular and specific context.

I thought of my mother, a Tejana who married a Mexican man and followed him to live in Mexico. She was belittled by some in her new Mexican family, my cousins and aunts and uncles, because of her pocho Spanish. Mom endured their laughter, asked for the correct way of saying what she had just mangled and slowly perfected her fluency.

There’s a part of the Latino surge that we don’t talk about too much. It has to do with the condescending attitude of some, not all, Latin American immigrants who feel a sense of disdain for Chicanos, pochos, who they consider a watered-down version of “legitimate” Latino. I ran into this a lot in my days as a Spanish language journalist. It was a certain sense of entitlement of Mexican or South American reporters who felt a slice above native, English-dominant, Latinos.

What you don’t realize, I told the Univisión producers, is that those pochos have been busting their backsides for generations in order for you to have the liberty to say what you just said. We’ve been fighting political and cultural and economic battles for decades. You can’t stand here, fresh off your flight from Caracas and judge what you don’t know.

Okay, I was a little perturbed and if my voice were solid it would have left a mark. The two women said nothing more.

There was a time in San Antonio, in Spanish language television, when viewership was determined by counting UHF antennas on the roofs of houses on the West and South sides of the city. The Univisión station (channel 41 back then was part of the S.I.N. network) was the only one on the UHF dial, so the only reason for a family to put a UHF antenna on their roof was to watch Spanish television. Spanish TV was invisible to the Nielsen ratings company. We were considered second-class broadcasters. Now Univisión is a powerhouse and the swagger in the halls is understandable. But it wasn’t always that way – it’s been a grueling journey.

Pochos have fought the good fight, paved the way, made the Spanish media of today possible so that a pair of producers from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic could walk the halls of a pretty good gig and lament the lack of Spanish among native born Latinos.

Si supieran, I said. If you only knew.

In the studio Jorge Ramos greeted me with an abrazo – we’ve known each other for many years, although we hardly, if ever, cross words.

¿Como están las cosas en San Antonio? How are things in San Antonio?

La lucha continúa, I said. The struggle continues.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda

[Photo by carlos.tejo]

The first thing that happens when you begin reading Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s book “High Pink: Texas-Mex Fairy Tales,” is that you lose yourself in the stories the artist and former attorney tells you. Although I myself am obviously not a gay man, I found myself laughing and crying along with Mondini-Ruiz’s memories of identity struggles, career choices, familial vignettes and general coming-of-age tales. I met with him recently, and that’s what I told him: the book is about being human.

Of course, the particulars do matter, and going through the 126-page book — mind you every other page is a photo of one of the sculptures created by the artist/author — is a cinch. You can finish it in one sitting, but the stories in the book will stay with you long after you close the book. Some of the stories are four sentences, some longer, some written as poems. Each one, though, has something to offer.

There’s the one about falling in love with a Mexican man, that is, a Mexican national. There’s the one about not being accepted by your parents. Parents and their quarrels with each other, with themselves. About feeling in or out of place. There’s so much about culture passing you by, grasping your culture, recycling it, until you create a culture almost of your own. In short, there’s literally a story for everybody in this book.

My favorite thing about “High Pink” is that, whether you’re white or Mexican, a man or a woman, straight or gay, the stories in this book are about being human. And as a Latina constantly on the lookout for positive portrayals of Latinos and Latino live, this one stood out for it’s matter-of-fact approach to everything from sexuality to culture to family dysfunction (or what we perceive as such). In other words, Mondini-Ruiz talks honestly about things without imbuing them with drama or racism or homophobia.

Mondini-Ruiz just is, and as he tells his story, you get the feeling that you can be, too.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

“Franciiiscoooo, eh,?” That was the way my former roommate pronounced my birth name with just enough mockery and disdain to let me know there was something wrong with it. “Uh, no. Call me ‘Frank,’” I proudly corrected him at the time. Whew! I thought to myself, glad I cleared that up! I remember this incident, which took place over 12 years ago, because at the time I believed that speaking Spanish and pronouncing Spanish words correctly was embarrassing.

During my elementary years, I recall my mother picking me up from school and asking me in Spanish how my day went. I would mutter, “No mamá, no me hables en español, háblame en ínglés y no me llames Pancho.” Essentially, I forbade my mother to speak Spanish or address me by my nickname. Looking back, it’s ironic that even my Latino peers and I would make fun of those who spoke Spanish! We thought that anything having to do with Mexico was dirty, poor, inferior, and just the mere mention of it brought shame.

For many years I introduced myself as “Frank,” with the mentality that, if I lived in the United States, I should assimilate and become part of the mainstream predominately English-speaking culture — even if that meant dropping my name and denying my Mexican roots. Sadly, I did not realize it at the time, but in doing so I was essentially negating a part of my identity.

Perhaps it was Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Latinos in the media, xenophobic attitudes, or fear of the unknown that lead to such hatred of my own culture. Either way, the fact remained that I was ashamed of my roots for a great portion of my childhood and adolescence. The negative consequences did not bode so well during cross-border family reunions. My siblings and I would make sure that we pronounced every Spanish word correctly for fear that if we mistakenly said something or mispronounced a word, our cousins would make fun of us.

Our insecurities turned out to be true when one of my siblings referenced the English word tuna in Spanish believing it meant the same thing. Much to his embarrassment, one of our cousins immediately corrected him, “¡Es atún, guey.!” Much to our dismay, as much as we wanted to become closer to our relatives, these reunions were the source of much anxiety just as we tried to ensure we would speak Spanish properly.

This anxiety did not lessen with time as one of my siblings overheard a cousin referring to us as “los primos pochos,” the pocho cousins. Or, as the dictionary defines it: A pejorative term used by native-born Mexicans to describe Chicanos or Mexican-Americans who are perceived to have forgotten or rejected their Mexican heritage to some degree. Typically pochos lack fluency in Spanish. [To read more about pochos, click here]

For me, the catalyst to fully embrace my background without shame occurred during the early 2000s when Latino pop culture soared to incredible and unthinkable proportions when Latino musicians like Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, and Jennifer Lopez made being Latino trendy. Latino pride consumed me from one moment to the next. I no longer was ashamed of being Mexican-American. From then on, I introduced myself as Francisco Cepeda to anyone without fear or embarrassment. I became engrossed in my desire to learn more about my culture and speak Spanish perfectly. I even studied abroad for one semester in Monterrey, Mexico to improve my written and spoken Spanish. No longer was it a stigma to be a Latino.

Even during my television stint in Corpus Christi, (city with a high Latino population), my news director at the time notified me that a viewer had called the station to complain that I was not pronouncing the names of adjacent and neighboring towns “correctly.” The caller was referring to the way I pronounced Spanish names like, Hidalgo and Nueces, I pronounced them in Spanish, not in their Anglicized form like many others did. I immediately knew it was the caller who was mistaken. Presumably, it could be that with each passing generation, one unknowingly distances him or herself from their Latino roots.

Today, I can fully embrace and respect being bicultural without fear of having to define or stand up where I come from. It feels good to be Francisco Cepeda. And so, it’s this peace of mind that helps me understand others who have chastised or discriminated against me on either side of the fence in the past. So while I can’t help but be disappointed that it took pop culture, and not my own developmental maturity, to fully embrace my biculturalism, I’m grateful that I finally came around.

Follow Francisco on Twitter @SeguroCepeda

What’s a pocho, or a pocha for that matter?

It’s a question that’s not confusing to me, but my piece last week about how dating Latinos doesn’t make me racist generated some commenters who didn’t know what these words meant. And, truth be told, unless your family is Mexican or you grew up around Mexican families, you probably won’t know what this is.

Pocho is an insult, a culture, a way of life, a manner of speaking, a language, a style, gesticulation, the way you dress, types of foods, your understanding of the world, an accent, where you go during summer vacation, who’s at home when you get there, the way you relate to your family, etcetera, and much more. A basic definition of pocho is that you’re the child of Mexican immigrants, and so you become neither black or white, but gray — ni de allá, ni de acá (from neither here nor there).

I would extend this definition, however, to include people like myself, the grandchildren of immigrants, who strongly identify not necessarily with Mexican culture from México, but with the immigrant way of life, or the border way of life, or that gray way of life that is neither completely Mexican nor completely “American” (whatever that means).

Pocho/a is when you speak Spanglish, or get hooked on telenovelas in 2 minutes or less, or when all you want after a long day are some beans, or when you speak one language in the world and another at home, or when you make Pepito jokes or naming your children things like Jasmine Guadalupe, it could also be the way you celebrate 5 de mayo instead of el 16 de septiembre. The list is long, but the point is that you can’t fit yourself into one square box, you simply dabble, and fall along the spectrum somewhere beween apple pie and Tenochtitlan.

I think back in the day the term pocho was a derogatory word that Mexican nationals would use against Chicanos/Mexican-Americans to put them down for somehow being inauthentic. But, nowadays, there are just too many of us, I think, for the term to be something of shame.

I had very little to do with becoming a pocha, for it’s entirely due to circumstances in Mexico and the U.S. that I’m here in the first place. My grandparents couldn’t find work in Mexico, but they did over here. Punto. I’m not ashamed of being a pocha, and I don’t think I should have to be; as a matter of fact, if there were a box on the Census that said pocha, that’s what I’d pick because I think it’s the best, spot-on description of who I am. Al contrario, I’m proud of being a pocha, of riding that gray line. of being ni de allá, ni de acá, because to not be would mean I’d have to reject one or the other, and I’m certainly not going to do that.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD