This morning, as I was browsing around for relevant stories to either read for interest, maybe post to our news items, or even potentially discuss on my blog, I found an interesting announcement about an upcoming documentary on the Mexican-American struggle for Civil Rights in the west.  As I read about the landmark Hernandez vs. Texas case, I was reminded of what little knowledge I have about the U.S. Civil Rights struggle among other minority groups.  More important than that, I was reminded of the power of invisibility, and how easy it becomes to dismissed something that has been ignored, lost, or even forgotten.

If you visit the PBS site where the documentary is being promoted you will see a collage of pictures from the past.  One section shows, very clearly, a hand-written sign that reads, “We Serve White’s [sic] Only, No Spanish or Mexicans.”  Sounds familiar?  It should.  Simply replace Spanish or Mexicans with Colored or Negroes and you get the same effect.  Get the idea?

In gathering this information all at once, I am also reflecting on the power of narrative and the placement of our lives in that narrative.  When I was growing up, I don’t recall grammar and high school textbooks in my Louisiana classes emphasizing Mexican-American Civil Rights.  In fact, the very notion that more than one third of the United States had been Mexican didn’t even register in my formal training in such a way that it would remind me, or explain to me, that the people who lived on that previously Mexican territory remained the same, even 100 years after the U.S. had annexed their lands.  The topic would have been a simple academic history blip, something to be remembered for a test, along with a host of other mundane dates and mundane events. The truth is, these events were not, and still are not mundane, simply because the struggle for true human rights is an ongoing civil rights struggle today, despite the many victories in the courthouses over the last fifty years.

Growing up, there was no narrative being told or shared that would remind me, or any of my fellow (mostly Caucasian) students, that the United States grew through a slow acquisition of various ethnicities and languages and identities. I think of this and think this is a disservice to the richness and diversity of this country, on the lighter side; or I think of this and think this as an insidious attempt to maintain a false narrative about American identity.  In the brief description about the documentary, there is a passage that states that some of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices who heard the Hernandez case didn’t realize that Hernandez was a U.S. Citizen.  To me, this signifies that the narrative of the Anglo-Saxon American way of life was (and still is, though it is expanding every day) so powerful that it blinded everyone, from the least powerful to the most powerful, in this country to the reality that surrounded them.  This reality cried for recognition of millions of people who were being relegated to a non-narrative, to invisibility, to non-existence, and in practice, to second-class citizenship, despite the fact that they were entitled to the same constitutional rights.  What’s even more sad about this reflection is the notion that fifty more years later, in 2009, we see similar ignorance.  Jim Crow may be gone in our daily social life, but it is only gone in explicit practice.  There are too many people still under the false impression about superiority of race, about a single American narrative, and about the category of “American” citizen.

The majority of Mexicans in this country are U.S. citizens.  They have been so since the United States annexed northern Mexico in 1848.  Yet, we still see an insidious ongoing denial and ignorance, not unlike those 1950’s Justices who were completely clueless about the same topic.  We see town after town put up laws against “illegals,” a term that more often than not is equivocated with “Mexicans.”  You don’t believe me?  Then ask any perpetrator of such rhetoric if he is also willing to toss out the “illegal” Frenchman, or the “illegal” German, or the “illegal” Italian living in this country?  I would venture to suggest that you might find excuses for separating those illegals from Mexican illegals.

In the end it comes down to gathering up our full, collective past and taking ownership.  This country doesn’t know how to do that.  Throughout its history it has systematically denied many aspects of its past.  The more this continues, the more we continue to see “English only” or other similar Jim Crow-like ideas bantered about by those in power and those in fear and denial.  Our past has much to educate us about our present and future.  There is not a single human being that is immune to this, so why not begin the process by opening up the past completely, gathering it up, and learning all that we can from it–we may just learn something about ourselves that could revolutionize the way we see ourselves today.

Tags: civil rights, lucas diaz, mexican-american, puentes director, US Mexican war

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 8:11 am and is filed under Puentes Director. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.