Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 28 September 2007 · 9:36 pm

The 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments in the Pacific War

I have heard endlessly about the exploits of the Japanese American units during World War 2, the 100th Battalion and 442d Regimental Combat Team, but I had never heard about the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments. Here are a few excerpts from a much longer account at the California State Military Museum website.

The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 treated the Filipinos in the U.S. as aliens. Although the Philippine Commonwealth Constitution permitted the United States to draft Filipinos in the Philippines to defend American interests there, Filipinos in the United States, quite ironically, were exempt from military service.

Thousands of Filipinos had petitioned for the right to serve in the U.S. military immediately after December 7, 1941. On January 2, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a law revising the Selective Service Act. Filipinos in the United States could now join the U.S. Armed Forces and they were urged to volunteer for service. President Roosevelt quickly authorized the founding of a Filipino battalion, which would be organized for service overseas. It estimated the number of available Filipino volunteers between 70,000 and 100,000.

The 1st Filipino Battalion was formed on March 4, 1942 and activated in April 1 at Camp San Luis Obispo, California. Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Offley, who had served in the Philippines and spoke passable Tagalog, volunteered to be assigned to the unit as its first commander. He assumed command in April 8, 1942. The War Department also directed Philippine army officers and soldiers who were stranded in the United States at the start of the war to report to the unit. An unusual point is the designation of the unit. Previous Filipino units in the U.S. Army had been designated “Philippine” such as the Philippine Scouts. All units raised in the U.S. during the war were designated “Filipino.” Also, it would not be until the end of the war that the Filipino military units would carry the designation “Infantry” in their title although their regimental colors from the very beginning were displayed on a blue field, the traditional color of the infantry branch of the army.

A number of wounded Philippine Army and Philippine Scouts had escaped to Australia from the Philippines on board the USS Mactan in December 1941. Some remained in Australia to form the nucleus of what would eventually become the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, but the rest were sent to the United States for further medical treatment. These men eventually reported to the 1st Filipino Battalion.

Contrary to popular belief, the 1st Filipino Battalion was not established as a result of the American policy of social segregation. Only Filipinos who volunteered for assignment to the unit were sent to it. Many others, such as Eutiquio V. “Vic” Bacho, served with distinction in “American” (white) units in the European theater of operations during the war. Doroteo Vite wrote in a national magazine that Filipinos should take the opportunity to serve in all-white units to educate them so that at the end of the war, white Americans would support the Filipino American agenda of equality….

In April 1942, Lieutenant General John L. Dewitt, Western Defense Commander, ordered the Japanese on the West Coast into concentration camps. Miguel Ignacio, secretary of the Filipino American community of San Francisco, called attention to several American-born Japanese women, citizens of the United States, who had Filipino husbands, and Filipino-Japanese children who were U.S. citizens by birth. Despite the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union, Dewitt ordered the women and children to spend the duration of the war in the internment camps. Many of these Filipino husbands went on to serve in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments, defending the nation whose racist policies held their families hostage.

In September 1942, the first group of qualified Filipino enlisted men was sent to the Officer Candidate School, Fort Benning, Georgia. Upon graduation, they were commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Army. The War Department planned to have Filipino officers eventually command the majority of the combat units in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments. Events beyond the control of the military planners in Washington, D.C. intervened to prevent this from being fully implemented.

So many Filipino volunteers came from all over the United States that the 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment was formed at Fort Ord, California on November 22, 1942. In January 1943, the 1st Regiment was reassigned to Camp Beale, near Sacramento and the 2nd Regiment to Camp Cooke, near Santa Maria. The two regiments were to be joined by a third regiment consisting of Filipinos from the Hawaiian National Guard. However, the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association argued successfully with the martial law commanders in Hawaii that not only was cheap labor on the plantations necessary to support the war effort, the Filipinos in Hawaii were forbidden by the Tydings-McDuffie Act from going to the continental U.S. The men could not leave the sugar plantations and were paid substandard wages for the duration of the war. This would have serious consequences in 1946 when the militant Filipino labor unions shut down the islands until their demands for wage increases and better working conditions were met.

As a result of a May 1942 Gallup Poll showing strong support for the naturalization of Filipinos, the Filipino Naturalization Bill was passed. Pinoy GI’s were urged to apply for U.S. citizenship. A mass swearing in of over 1,000 soldiers was held at Camp Beale on February 20, 1943. Many of the men, however, resisted becoming citizens. T-5 Julius B. Ruiz stated that although he had lived in the United States for many years and was now serving in the U.S. Army, his goal was to liberate his country, the Philippines. by the time the 1st Regiment left for the western Pacific in May 1944, over half of the men in the unit were U.S. citizens….

Before the 1st Regiment departed for the western Pacific in May 1944, Colonel Offley had a major dilemma on his hands. Even though his regimental chaplains were prepared to perform marriage ceremonies between the Filipino soldiers and their white girlfriends, the strict anti-miscegenation laws in California prevented the men from applying for marriage licenses. Colonel Offley solved this by sending his soldiers and their sweethearts to Gallup, New Mexico on chartered buses that soon came to be called the “honeymoon express.”

Meanwhile in New Guinea, the 1st Regiment quickly integrated its first batch of replacements consisting of Filipino Americans from Hawaii. Colonel Offley gave Lt. Col. Leon Punsalang, a West Point graduate, command of the 1st Battalion. This was the first time in the history of the U.S. Army that Asian Americans commanded white troops in combat.

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Filed under Japan, Philippines, U.S., war

by Joel | 27 September 2007 · 9:55 pm

Yap’s Role in the Saipan Campaign, June 1944

When I was looking up stuff about Yap, Micronesia, for a recent post, I came across a very informative website, with both photographs courtesy of the Micronesian Seminar and the National Archives—and even video—about the bombing of Yap during the Pacific War, about which I heard many stories during my time there in 1974. I have corrected obvious spelling errors in the following extract.

At dawn, on the 15th of June 1944, American amphibious forces swept into Saipan to begin the hard ground fighting that was to bring the Japanese homeland within range of our Superfortresses. For more than two weeks prior to the landings, Thirteenth Air Force Liberators, based on Los Negros, had been pounding Truk to neutralize the strategic Japanese base and to prevent the enemy from reinforcing Saipan by air.

A large Japanese task force, estimated at 40 ships or more, was sighted some distance north of Yap Island, on the 19th of June 1944. Carrier planes from this task force lashed out at the powerful units of the United States Pacific Fleet which were then supporting Allied ground forces on Saipan. The conflict that followed was the first major battle between elements of the Japanese and United States fleets in nearly two years. As at Midway, two years earlier, all of the offensive action was by carrier-based aircraft. By the time the Japanese fleet broke off the engagement, U.S. Task Force “58” had destroyed nearly 400 enemy aircraft and had sunk or damaged 14 Japanese ships.

Liberators of the Thirteenth Air Force were called upon to reach out more than 1,000 statute miles from their Los Negros base to hit Japanese warships that might seek refuge or fuel in Yap Harbor. On 22 June, 33 Liberators were over Yap in the longest mass mission the Thirteenth had yet flown. Trained eyes peered down on the harbor far below. There were no warships to be seen. The heavies wheeled and made their run on the secondary target, Yap Airdrome. Their 33-ton bomb load struck the runway and the dispersal areas with devastating effect.

View a large Yap Area Map

The Japanese were caught completely by surprise; not a single one of the more than 40 planes on the ground was able to take off and fly into the air. Nineteen enemy planes were definitely destroyed, and 15 were damaged; the runway was cratered and rendered unserviceable.

For six consecutive days after the raid of the 22nd of June, the Liberators blasted Yap, keeping the runway unserviceable and preventing its use in ferrying planes from the Philippines to the Marianas to aid the hard-pressed defenders of Saipan.

English as an Indigenous Pacific Island Language

From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 3, 9-10:

IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN LINGUISTIC FACT that among a group of Western Pacific islands English is maintained as a community language of the indigenous population. These are the Bonin Islands. Today, these islands (also called Ogasawara Islands) are part of Japan and their population, Japanese citizens, but the English language has survived there, as both a tool of communication and a marker of their unique identity. This book attempts to provide an outline of the English of the Bonin Islands in its various forms and incarnations from 1830 to the present….

The Bonin Islands appear to have lain completely uninhabited until Pacific Islander women and European and American men of widely varying linguistic backgrounds began to settle there in the early 1800s (see sections 2.1 and 2.2). Evidence from a variety of sources indicates that a Pidgin English (with a substratum formed from the other settlers’ native languages) developed as the community’s common tongue. Later the children born and raised in this language environment are thought to have acquired this as their native language (i.e., creoloidization occurred).

In the 1860s and 1870s, Japan laid claim to the islands and they experienced a huge influx of Japanese settlers. The Japanese established the first-ever schools on the islands, initiating bilingual (English and Japanese) education. Increasingly intense bilingualism initiated the processes of SYNTACTIC CONVERGENCE, leading to the development of a second contact language (a Mixed Language) comprised of a Japanese substratum and a lexicon supplied by the earlier English-based creoloid.

After World War II, the linguistic situation on the islands took another sharp turn when the U.S. Navy took control, allowing only those islanders of “Western” ancestry to live on the islands and subsequently establishing a school conducted in English. This period of American occupation and absolute isolation from Japanese ended abruptly in 1968 when the islands were returned to Japanese rule and the displaced Japanese islanders (living then in mainland Japan for a quarter century) were allowed to return home. The Ogasawara Mixed Language and Ogasawara Creoloid English have long coexisted with Japanese and English acrolects, but increasing mobility and improved communication technology seem to be accelerating decreoloidization and (dare I say) “de-mixed-language-ization.”

In the 170-year linguistic history of the Bonin Islands, the dominant language has shifted from English (from 1830) to Japanese (1876), back to English (1946), and back again to Japanese (1968).

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Filed under Japan, language, Pacific, U.S.

by Joel | 22 September 2007 · 8:54 pm

Liberal vs. Conservative Interfaith Dialogue

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal published an interesting op-ed on interfaith dialogue, something I’m in favor of if it also embraces those of us who are faithless—and we include them, too.

There is an assumption by commentators on the right and the left that as far as religion goes, it is liberals who work–and care to work–across faith lines. Interfaith activity is understood as a politically and theologically liberal enterprise. This stems in part from the fact that the most widely recognized examples of interfaith cooperation have occurred on the left. Martin Luther King Jr.’s partnership with Abraham Joshua Heschel (the prominent Jewish theologian and civil-rights leader) is probably the most famous. Other figures who have reached across religious lines include The Very Reverend James Parks Morton (former dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) and international icons like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu.

But during my years at the Interfaith Center of New York, a nonprofit organization devoted to fostering interreligious civic relationships, I found that the stereotypes about who is willing to form partnerships were wrong. When the center first opened, we received enthusiastic support from liberals and were ignored by conservatives. Our programs looked diverse, and they were, religiously speaking. But participants were homogeneously liberal.

The more conservative religious folks were not interested in talking about spirituality, peace-building and social justice. So we refocused our programs to include seminars and information sessions on issues such as domestic violence, health-care access and immigration rights. Suddenly, every kind of religious leader came, including conservatives. Their religious perspectives did not change, but our assumptions did.

Sheikh Musa Drammeh, an African lay leader who runs an Islamic school in the Bronx, first came to a retreat we held on immigration issues. Sheikh Drammeh believes that Islam is the one true path, that premarital sex is not moral and neither is homosexual behavior. He runs a school that teaches Muslim children these values. In preparation for opening the school in 2001 he introduced himself to local pastors and rabbis, inviting them to come observe his classrooms. He attended a week-long program on religious diversity to better understand the other religious groups in his community. He also works with a Latino Pentecostal minister on the Bronx District Attorney’s clergy task force. For him, interfaith partnership is critical for good citizenship and safe neighborhoods. “The more friends we make,” he says, “the less likely we are to shed blood.”

Rabbi Emmanuel Weizer is another one of our regular participants now. An ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Rabbi from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he is the vice president of Congregation Beth Yitzthock. Rabbi Weizer strongly believes Orthodoxy is the right path (for Jews) and strongly disagrees with the theology of nonmonotheistic faiths. He will not participate in interfaith prayer services, nor will he enter another religion’s worship space. But he has worked across religious lines for years, for example, on our interfaith mediation team, a program of the New York State court system that includes Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs.

Interestingly, it was the liberal leaders who had problems with our new conservative participants. Some wondered aloud “who let them in.” Others wanted us to advocate for positions that would keep some conservatives out, like opposition to the war in Iraq and tolerance for homosexual behavior.

Instead of excluding conservatives, though, we adopted a different understanding of interfaith activity. It is not an understanding based on the idea that with a little conversation we can iron out all our theological differences. Rather, it is one based on the idea that religious beliefs are distinct, deep-set and deserve to be taken seriously. On that point, it turns out that Rabbi Weizer and Sheikh Drammeh understand each other well.

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Filed under religion, U.S.

by Joel | 19 September 2007 · 10:04 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Huarachudo, Ejido, Municipio, Piloncillo

From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 206-210:

The municipio of Turicato [in the State of Michoacán] has always divided along these town-rural lines. The hill folks resented the power, money, and education, relatively speaking, of the people in town. The city folk feared the hillbillies but saw no reason to extend power, or municipal services, to people they considered ignorant and barbaric. In these years the Barajas family—a family of local merchants—dominated Turicato politics….

In this atmosphere “Los Villa,” as the Villaseñor family was known, emerged first as rebels. They took up the cause of the “huarachudos,” the “sandal wearers”—whom they rallied to their cause against the city folk…. The Villaseñores were huarachudos themselves. They were sixteen children whose father, Tomás, had been born a peon on the hacienda San Rafael. In the 1930s President Lázaro Cárdenas ordered a section of the hacienda transformed into a communal farm—an ejido—owned by those who had worked it as peons….

The Villaseñor piloncillo operation also grew. Piloncillo is a small cone of brown sugar about an inch in diameter, processed by a simple mill. It is used to sweeten coffee, in household cooking, or by the soft-drink industry. In the 1990s, piloncillo has all but vanished as a product from the Turicato region. But in the 1970s and 1980s, many sugar cane growers were producing piloncillo. In the Turicato region in the 1970s and 1980s, owning a piloncillo mill was the difference between a life of comfort and one of hopeless poverty….

The emergence of a hillbilly family brought with it the kind of abuses that town residents had feared all along. “What happens is they form into groups,” says Trigo. “There’s one who’s a leader, and around him form people who like to fight and look for trouble. They like to walk into a cantina and throw everybody out. They figure that’s a real achievement. This grows; the group gets larger. Then it becomes, ‘Let’s take over this land.’”…

Yet the Villaseñor family never did fully dominate local politics. They proved in the end to be poor politicians. Their frequent warring—“their bellicose nature” as one man put it—earned them many enemies. By 1989 a significant part of the municipio nurtured in dark silence a pure and vital hatred of the Villaseñores, and among them were many of the same poor peasants—the huarachudos—that the family once rallied to its side….

In 1994 the military put a roadblock between Turicato and Puruarán and set about arresting or killing off the bandit gangs. Others saw that the military meant business and laid down their guns. So five years after the Nueva Jerusalén vote threw Turicato into a civil war, a version of peace came to the municipio.

The chapter from which these excerpts come is a well-told tale, but one sadly familiar in its broad outlines: ambitious évolués (sponsored by distant elites, in this case the PRI) lead others among the oppressed to overthrow and replace an oppressive elite, only to impose a new kind of thugocracy at least as violent and oppressive as the old one. Sort of a Zimbabwe in microcosm. (Zimbabwe, whose independence I long ago celebrated at a big gathering of African students in Honolulu.)

But I want to comment on just two of the four words italicized in the extract.

The Spanish term municipio may have survived in the form of an English calque more than a century after the Spanish ceded Micronesia to the Germans. Each of the Federated States (formerly Districts) of Micronesia is divided into what are now called municipalities, a term that no subsequent German, Japanese, or American administrator would likely have come up with, although the Americans are credited with introducing the term by the anthropologist Lingenfelter, who worked in Yap during the early postwar years. If so, U.S. Navy administrators probably calqued on the basis of usage in the Philippines. Micronesian municipalities have never been centered around a town and its hinterland. Instead, they seem to be more like alliances of contiguous villages.

I’m old enough to have purchased a pair of Mexican huarache sandals in the 1970s, when I was a grad student in Hawai‘i. The dye made my feet break out, so I stayed with rubber slippers (zori). (I hardly owned a pair of shoes all through grad school.) The relation between Spanish huarache ‘sandal’ and huarachudo ‘sandaled’ is parallel to that between English beard and bearded. Spanish and English are both related languages. But the same parallel can be observed between, for example, Chamorro sapatos ‘shoes’ (from Spanish) and sinapatos ‘shod, wearing shoes’, or Chamorro relós ‘wristwatch’ (also from Spanish) and rinelós ‘wearing a wristwatch’. Among its myriad functions, the -in- infix in Philippine languages can form adjectives out of nouns in a manner similar to that of participial affixes in Spanish and English.

UPDATE: The Micronesian Seminar‘s Francis X. Hezel, S.J., weighs in on the antecedents of the term municipality in Micronesia.

The term as used in Micronesia after the war has no direct relationship to the Spanish colonial period in these islands. The Spanish weren’t here long enough and they weren’t influential enough to have the term stick. There are very few Spanish loan words that have made their way into the island languages. Actually, islanders used the Japanese term kumi to describe a segment of the island, even well after the war. Muncipality came into the languages through the English term, via the Navy.

The usage of Japanese kumi ‘club, association, gang’ is very interesting, and seems a much more appropriate term for the traditional political alliances before they were recast by the U.S. Navy as local-government structures. The Yapese dictionary translates municipality into Yapese nuug ‘net’ (presumably meaning ‘network’ of political alliances). Other Micronesian dictionaries I’ve consulted don’t list municipality in the English finder list. So it seems U.S. Navy administrators were influenced by Spanish local-government terminology already long-established in the Philippines.

The U.S. Census Bureau glossary does not list the term municipality at all, but it does list and gloss municipio as: “Primary legal divisions of Puerto Rico. These are treated as county equivalents.” The Wikipedia entry for Municipalities of the Philippines begins thus: “A municipality (bayan, sometimes munisipyo, in Tagalog) is a local government unit in the Philippines. Municipalities are also called towns (which is actually a better translation of bayan).”

SHARP DETOUR: My wife and I taught University of Hawai‘i extension courses on Yap, Micronesia, in the summer of 1983, just before heading off to spend a year in Romania on a Fulbright research grant. In fact, she was still there when I got the word that my nearly forgotten application from a year earlier had been approved and that the orientation in Washington, D.C., would begin before she got back to Honolulu. Trying to place a telephone call through to Yap was not easy in those days.

Anyway, for my introductory linguistics course on Yap I used the first edition of Peter Trudgill’s little Penguin paperback Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. Even the main islands of Yap have a good deal of regional variation in pronunciation and word choice, and the outer islands speak dialects of the far-flung Trukic language continuum, only distantly related to Yapese. The variety of Yapese spoken in the major municipality (Rull) closest to Colonia—the capital and only urban center—provided the basis for the standard orthography, but the pilot school for testing Yapese language curriculum materials (with bilingual education funding from the U.S. DOE) was located in the major municipality (Tomil) with the most divergent pronunciation. The three major municipalities were those chiefly alliances (called kumi in Japanese) dominant at the time the Germans took control: Gagil, Tomil, and Rull.

My wife and I first met while we were both assigned to that school in the fall of 1974—she as a new Peace Corps teacher for two years, me as a visiting linguist for one semester—and we both learned our Yapese in that very rural municipality. (Mine faded much more quickly than hers.) So we were quite aware of regional variation and of the principal shibboleths of Tomil dialect, chief among them being the pronunciation of standard /ae/ as /ee/, as in the pronoun gaeg vs. geeg ‘me’ or the plural marker on verbs -gaed vs. -geed, both high-frequency items.

For my introduction to linguistics course in 1983, I decided that the most important things I should focus on were the respective relationships between writing and pronunciation, on the one hand, and between dialects and standard languages, on the other. One of my assignments was for my students to assemble a list of common words for which there were regional variants, then track down the boundaries between those variants (the isoglosses). The most interesting findings involved variants whose isoglosses failed to align with the existing boundaries between municipalities, perhaps revealing earlier linguistic and political fault lines.

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Filed under language, Mexico, Micronesia, Philippines, U.S.

by Joel | 17 September 2007 · 6:04 pm

Mexico’s Fayuca Boom and Bust

From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 239-240, 242:

Fayuca. The word meant contraband, illegally imported merchandise: stereos, televisions, calculators, cameras, silk shirts, tennis shoes, blue jeans, blenders, and blouses. The government slapped this stuff with steep tariffs when imported legally as a way of protecting Mexican industry. Tepito brought it in illegally. To Tepito, fayuca meant easy money and lots of it. Despite the official prohibitions, Mexicans gorged themselves on the outside world’s baubles. Tepito was their dinner table. It was a time tailor-made for the Tepito mind-set. In the go-go era of fayuca, what mattered was not what you sold or how you brought it in but how fast it would move. The trickle of suitcases containing small items like perfume, watches, and jewelry in the mid-1970s became, by the 1980s, torrential truckloads of twenty-one-inch televisions and full home stereo systems.

To a government running a desiccated economy, it quickly became clear that the contraband did two things. First, it appeased the middle classes, who didn’t really care where they bought this stuff so long as they could buy it. Second, fayuca also helped dampen inflation. The prices in Tepito were usually well below what the same goods sold for in the stores that had legally imported them. “The authorities wanted to lower prices without really entering the global economy,” says Gustavo Esteva, a sociologist who lived in Tepito for several years during the fayuca boom. “So the government used Tepito and the fayuca to fight inflation.” Though fayuca was illegal, it was bought and sold openly in Tepito. The regime couldn’t appear to allow it in and yet didn’t dare keep it out. Eventually the industry was carved up among Tepito’s fayuqueros, commandants of customs, the judicial police, the highway police, and other government officials. After a while the highway police in San Luis Potosí, midway between Laredo and Mexico City, decided they wanted their cut too. The wife of President José López Portillo, Carmen Romano, was said to be one of the greatest fayuca importers.

The arrival of fayuca was a key moment in Mexico’s economic history. Fayuca was in its own way as important in rocking the regime’s credibility as the 1968 Tlatelolco [student] massacre, the periodic peso devaluations, and the fraud-riven elections of 1988. Its presence showed that the protected, state-run economy no longer had a prayer of providing what Mexicans now expected out of life. Though Mexicans talked economic nationalism, they voted with their feet and mobbed Tepito, looking for the smuggled imports.

And for the first time Tepito got rich. In Tepito the fayuquero took the place of the boxer as the model for economic advancement, though in this case the road to riches was accessible to thousands of people and few of them missed the turnoff Since the fayuca, Tepito has produced no great boxers. Instead Tepito’s fayuqueros took on the status of legendary renegades; at least two B movies were made about them….

Mexico’s entry into GATT, then NAFTA, brought the fayuca boom to an end. The Mexican government began to lower tariffs on consumer goods. Customers began finding what Tepiteros were selling in legitimate stores that offered service, guarantees, and receipts and didn’t have thugs around the corner waiting to rob the clientele. When the peso was devalued in 1994, sales plummeted further. People still go to Tepito, since merchandise is a little cheaper and carries no sales tax. But the fayuca gold rush is a memory.

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Filed under economics, Mexico, nationalism, U.S.

by Joel | 11 September 2007 · 6:17 pm

The Oaxaca Diaspora’s Protestant Ethic

My rule of thumb is to try to blog no more than about a page per chapter (depending on the lengths of the chapters) from the books I buy and read, but the following excerpt is from my favorite chapter so far in a book where I can hardly resist “reading aloud” every few pages. I was undecided about which of three thematic passages to cite: on Mexico’s Okies (the victim angle), Oaxacan self-help (the agency angle), or religion (the spiritual angle). I ended up concatenating two of the three. So I’ll have to do hard penance by biting my tongue through several other chapters. From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 102-103, 110-111:

Mexicans generally view the border and those who live there as only semi-Mexican—too close to the gringo, where too many of his ways are imitated. In truth, that is what shaped the [San Quintín] valley. With drip irrigation farmers saw the potential of growing for both the United States and Mexico and dropped subsistence farming for a very American capitalist ethic. Acres under cultivation went from two thousand in 1980 to almost twenty thousand in 1990. Nighttime electricity came to San Quintín. Then a few stores, a couple of motels, a movie theater, satellite television.

“I have uncles in the state of Zacatecas who grow chile,” says Ruiz Esparza, “They harvest the crop, but only apart of the profits goes back into the fields. They’re afraid of risking it all. Here, it seems they’re a little crazy. They risk it all every year. People here aren’t interested in having money in their wallet. Everything they have goes back into the fields.

“I look at the farmers of Oceanside, Bakersfield, Oxnard battling against the city, high water prices, taxes, and I see them keep going. They’re very brave. I think having those people before us as examples inspires us to do the same. If they can do it, why can’t we?”

From the north, San Quintín had its market, and from there it imported machinery, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit. What the valley of San Quintín had never had was abundant labor. And that came from the south.

The Dust Bowl in all this became the states of Guerrero and, above all, Oaxaca, both states with enormous Indian populations who retain the customs and languages of their ancestors. Like the northerners with whom they now live, they are considered somewhat less than Mexican, disdained as “dirty Indians.” It was a strange yet perhaps appropriate pairing: two outcasts coming together to create something in the dust of the northern Mexico desert.

Agriculture in Oaxaca, like that in Oklahoma during the Depression, is a limp and stagnant thing. Inefficient farming and the division of land into ever smaller slivers have bequeathed the state a withering poverty, bloody feuds over land ownership, and generations of uneducated children. Hundreds of thousands of Oaxacan Indians—Mixtecos primarily, but also Triquis and Zapotecos—have been leaving home for four decades now. They are Mexico’s migrants, the cheapest labor in a cheap-labor country. “They provided labor that was easily exploited,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Human Rights Center in Tijuana. “They were docile, didn’t speak Spanish, would accept almost any treatment and work hard.”…

But in Tijuana, migrant Indians also discovered San Quintín’s almost unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. Through the late 1970s and 1980s the valley evolved into a major stop on the Indians’ migrant trail, part of what came to be known informally as “Oaxacalifornia”—the diaspora that starts in San Quintín and runs through North San Diego County and up the state. Entire families came to the valley to live in labor camps designed for transient men. The camps teemed, and the work was tough in the hot sun and choking dust. But it was work, which was something Indians had never had in Oaxaca….

Indians transformed their new home when they came here to live. But just as profoundly, their new home changed them. And the clearest distillation of all those changes is the Protestant Church. “If you take a poll, you’ll find that 80 or 85 percent of those who are established here now are Protestant,” says Meza. That number might be high. But Protestant churches—especially of the more fundamentalist bent—proliferate in the valley. Indians here have become Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and scads of obscure denominations to which Luther’s Reformation gave rise. The new churches are symbols of economic success, of modernity, of the monumental power and attraction of the United States. The adoption of a Protestant faith is almost standard issue in leaving Oaxaca for a future.

And that process is best told by one man who, now in his late forties, stands clapping in unison with the rest of the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus. Twenty years ago Luis Guerrero took his family and left his Oaxacan Indian pueblo and its traditions, moved to the valley of San Quintín, and hasn’t yet looked back in fondness.

Guerrero, a Mixtec Indian who speaks halting Spanish in a thick Indian accent, faced a brutish dead-end life as a subsistence farmer, depending on unpredictable rains, in the village of Santa María Asuncion, where landholdings were no longer measured in acres but in meters.

In 1972 Guerrero was among fifteen people who had to pay for the village’s traditional party for its patron saint, the Virgin of Asuncion. It was the custom: every year a few people had to become deeply impoverished to throw the three-day party for everyone else. His job was daunting: he had to give 2,000 pesos—the equivalent of two and a half years’ local wages at the time—to buy food and alcohol for everyone, fireworks, candles, and more. The responsibility almost broke him. He borrowed the money at high interest rates, then left his young family and pueblo for that year to pick tomatoes in Sinaloa to pay it back.

In 1974 he began migrating to San Quintín with his family. Finally in 1978 they moved here to live, leaving Oaxaca forever.

Away from the cloistered atmosphere of his Oaxacan village, Luis Guerrero began a religious and secular awakening, one he likes to illustrate by talking about the books he bought.

In San Quintín he bought his first book ever—a Bible. In Oaxaca he had never read a Bible; though the whole village was Catholic, no one owned one. Like everyone else, he depended on a priest to know what it said. “I began reading it and I began to awaken my mind…. I like knowing myself: I went to the Catholic Church, the Apostolic Church, Prince of Peace, Los Olivares, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Open Door—to see how each denomination preached.” He finally settled on the Apostolic Assembly.

Now thirsting for more, he bought his second book—a copy of the Mexican constitution. “In our pueblos in Oaxaca, we didn’t know the earthly law, or how to defend ourselves [legally]. Also we didn’t know spiritual law. So I searched on my own to discover what constitutional law said. I searched on my own to discover what the Bible said so that I myself could understand earthly law and spiritual law.

“Earthly law allows you to speak up for your rights with the police, the bosses. That’s why I put forth an effort to learn it. [In the villages] people don’t have education. The [local] authorities pressure them to fulfill tradition. They want them to put on traditional parties. [In Oaxaca] you can’t give your children education because the little money you earn you have to spend on parties for the saints. Our children have no shoes because of tradition. We came here to leave all that behind.”

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Filed under economics, Mexico, migration, religion, U.S.

by Joel | 6 September 2007 · 6:23 pm

Authentic Mexican American Narcocorrido Polka

From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 11-12:

His name was Chalino Sánchez. His singing career lasted just four years and he was killed when he was only thirty-one, yet he’s one of the most influential musical figures to emerge from Los Angeles or from Mexican music in decades. “When we were small, we always wanted to fit in, so we’d listen to rap. The other kids were all listening to rap, so I guess we felt that if we listened to Spanish music, we’d be beaners or something,” says Rodriguez. “But after Chalino died, everybody started listening to corridos. People want to feel more Mexican.”Six years after his death, Chalino Sanchez is a legend, an authentic folk hero. L.A.’s Mexican music scene and Mexican youth style were one way before Chalino Sanchez. They were another after him. After Chalino, guys whose second language was an English-accented Spanish could pump tuba- and accordion-based polkas out their car stereos at maximum volume and pretty girls would think they were cool.

Chalino renewed the Mexican corrido. In the Mexican badlands, where the barrel of a gun makes the law, for generations dating back to the mid-1800s the corrido recounted the worst, best, and bloodiest exploits of men. Corridos were the newspaper for an illiterate people in the days before telephones and television. Corrido heroes were revolutionaries and bandits—people who had done something worth singing about.

In Chalino’s hands, the corrido came to reflect the modern world. The corrido became the narcocorrido, the Mexican equivalent of gangster rap, with themes of drugs, violence, and police perfidy and an abiding admiration for the exploits of drug smugglers. And because of Chalino, Los Angeles, an American city, is now a center of redefinition for the most Mexican of musical idioms. Chalino democratized the genre, made it modern and American, and opened it to the masses. In Los Angeles almost anyone can have a corrido about him written, recorded, and sold. “In L.A., without exaggeration, 50 percent of the [Mexican] music that’s recorded here is based on the legacy he left,” says Angel Parra, the engineer who recorded most of his albums.

It boiled down to this, in the words of Abel Orozco, owner of El Parral nightclub in South Gate: “Chalino changed everything.”

Ever since I saw his interview with Ray Suarez on the NewsHour, I thought Quinones might turn into my new favorite writer on Mexican–American relations. My wife is reading his latest book, and I’m reading his earlier one, both of us enthusiastically.

The Guilty Pride of Our Betters

From Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 8-9, 18:

One of my first encounters with an early pioneering family in the black upper class was meeting members of the aristocratic Syphax family from Virginia. I had grown up hearing my father tell me about their family history, as one of his father’s business associates had known several family members. Talking to Evelyn Reid Syphax at a Links meeting that my mother had brought me to, I learned one way in which some black families—including her own—gained wealth and a place among the upper class. “My family had owned fifteen acres of the land where the Arlington National Cemetery now sits,” Syphax explained as she recounted the history of her family, which can be traced back to Maria Custis, the mulatto child of First Lady Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who owned the mansion that sits on the cemetery today. “Custis fathered Maria with Ariana Carter, one of his female house slaves,” explained Syphax, a well-to-do, retired real estate broker who lives in Virginia, “and when Maria asked her father, who was also still her owner, for permission to marry Charles Syphax, a black slave who worked for her father, he released both from slavery, gave her a wedding in the mansion, and offered her and her new husband fifteen acres of the Arlington estate. That mansion and the surrounding property—minus Maria Syphax’s fifteen acres—was later given by Custis to his white daughter, Mary Custis, who eventually married Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee—thus making the house a famous building in the southern state.”…

One can find both pride and guilt among the black elite. A pride in black accomplishment that is inexorably tied to a lingering resentment about our past as poor, enslaved blacks and our past and current treatment by whites. On one level, there are those of us who understand our obligation to work toward equality for all and to use our success in order to assist those blacks who are less advantaged. But on another level, there are those of us who buy into the theories of superiority, and who feel embarrassed by our less accomplished black brethren. These self-conscious individuals are resentful of any quality or characteristic that associates them with that which seems ordinary. We’ve got some of the best-educated, most accomplished, and most talented people in the black community—but at the same time, we have some of the most hidebound and smug. And adding even further to the mix are those of us who feel we need to apologize to the rest of the black world for our success and for being who we are. For me, the black upper class has always been a study of contrasts.

I think the same is true of every type of elite in these normatively egalitarian times. Among fellow members of your elite, you perform rituals of solidarity that distinguish you from your inferiors–gratuitous political swipes being among the most common solidarity rituals on college campuses (or in news rooms, apparently) where everyone who matters can be assumed to be of like mind. Those who are more sensitive take care to repress those same ritual behaviors when face to face with their inferiors–most especially when seeking votes or funding from those less like-minded.

My wife and I were witness to many impressive rituals of elite solidarity over last Memorial Day weekend when we attended graduation events at Yale–where the ritual of playing Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance at graduations began at Woolsey Hall in 1905. We had both graduated from little no-name colleges in North Dakota and Hawai‘i, respectively, before completing graduate degrees at a cheap, run-of-the-mill state university (Hawai‘i).

Our first event that Saturday was a Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony in Battell Chapel. Before it began, the mistress of ceremonies came down the aisle chatting up the audience of parents and friends of the inductees. When she found my wife and me with our noses in books, she exclaimed how you could be sure that Phi Beta Kappa parents were avid readers. She asked me what I was reading, and I showed her the cover of Lawrence Graham’s Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. That stopped her cold, and she quickly moved on to my wife, who was evaluating Graham Salisbury’s juvenile novel Blue Skin of the Sea for possible use in an ESL class. That allowed our emcee to retreat into the comfort zone of noblesse oblige, expressing concern that Yale was not doing enough for some of its rising numbers of foreign students whose mastery of English was not up to earlier standards. Later in the ceremony, while explaining the not-so-secret Phi Beta Kappa handshake, she managed to adopt just the right tone of irony that allows one to perform required social rituals while purporting not to take them seriously. It was a tone we heard again and again from public speakers throughout that ritual-soaked weekend.

I had planned to begin reading Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class as we traveled through the South during our road trip in May—for which my Minnesota in-laws had prepared by reading up on plantations, slavery, and riverboat gamblers. But Yale was the better venue for it. In fact, it provided belated but valuable context for the tome I bought and read when our daughter matriculated there four years ago: The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Yale law professor Stephen Carter.

I acquired a measure of elitist pretentions during my four years at an international high school in Japan. That was where I eliminated the last southernisms I was aware of in my American accent. (Few Americans can guess my family heritage from my accent.) My ambitions at that time were more literary than academic, but my journalism professor at the University of Richmond—where I started college with little enthusiasm and later dropped out—told me that I wrote more like a scientist than a journalist. He had been a practicing journalist, not an academic, so I’m not sure it was intended to be a compliment.

Although Our Kind of People is a case study of the cultivation and preservation of America’s black upper class, much of it would also seem to apply to the care and maintenance of exclusivity among other types of elites. His final chapter on light-skinned blacks who “pass” as whites is particularly poignant, especially his tales of those who chose to abandon their relatives and engineer their own equivalent of a witness-protection program—and pray like hell their kids don’t turn out too dark.

As a “no-accent” white of expatriate southern heritage who has spent a lot of time among academics, I think I have some sense of how blacks who “pass” episodically or by accident feel when they happen to encounter demeaning or disgusting attitudes from interlocutors who aren’t aware of their hidden heritage.

When we took our daughter to visit Carleton College in Minnesota after her junior year of high school, I overheard another family doing college visits tell about how frightened they were at the prospect of driving through Virginia to Norfolk on highways (I-95 and I-64!) that they imagined to be filled with crazed pickup-driving rednecks taking potshots at cars with northern license plates. I dearly wanted to speak up and assure them, in my best Hollywood southern accent: “Why we wouldn’t shoot y’all! The most we’d do is mebbe take out a headlight or taillight, mebbe aim for one of yo’ rear tires or yo’ Yankee license plate. But we wouldn’t shoot at people, even if they was Yankees!” But, of course, I kept my trap shut, not wanting to ruin my daughter’s chances at the college that was then at the top of our list of prospects.

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Filed under education, U.S., Virginia

by Joel | 29 August 2007 · 9:43 pm

Photodude Debunks Civil War Photog Mathew Brady

Atlanta-based blogger Photodude takes Andrew Sullivan to task by debunking Mathew Brady‘s role as the photographer of the American Civil War. I’ve seen many, many Mathew Brady photographs, but never heard this angle. Did the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War mention this? (UPDATE: I’ve corrected the spelling of Brady’s first name except where quoting Photodude below. More on Brady here and here.)

As someone intimately familiar with both the history of photography and the Civil War, I can tell you that Matthew [sic] Brady was well known as a sour self-promoting character with far more ego than talent. Yes, he did take some famous photos during the Civil War, but he also took the work of talented photographers like Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and others, and proudly presented it as his own. The quote I recall is along the lines of “that photo is so good I’m going to tell the world it’s a Matthew Brady photograph.” He was brazen about it. You might say Matthew Brady invented the concept of “work for hire.”

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Filed under publishing, U.S., war