Here is an interesting opinion piece from Ruben Navarrette. Ruben is syndicated writer based out of San Diego CA, his column appears all over the country. I love reading his column/opinions and sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I don't but I still like his column. It's Food For Thought Baby~! X The puzzle of the Latino identity
I've long thought that someone should make a documentary on the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the Latino experience in the United States. The project would have to deal with identity. For many Latinos, that's a puzzle where the pieces never quite fall into place. But the film could also touch on politics, business, entertainment, marketing and the media. Along the way, it could confront the contradictions and mixed messages that Latinos send everyone else. After all, this is a community of question marks. People wonder about our loyalties, whether we're liberal or conservative, whether we prefer English or Spanish, whether we relate to immigrants or the native-born, and even what we call ourselves. Now, someone has created just such a documentary and released it in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. That someone is Los Angeles filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez, and his most recent offering is called “Brown Is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream.” It airs tonight and at other times this week and next on PBS. Yes, that PBS. The public television network wound up under fire earlier this year from an army of Latino organizations furious over the fact that another filmmaker, Ken Burns, had put together a seven-part PBS documentary on World War II that had a blind spot concerning the contributions of Latinos. Burns eventually gave in to pressure and added new material to his documentary, which is set to air later this month. But the damage was done. Throughout the Burns flap, PBS didn't look as progressive as it pretends to be. The network looks better now after partnering with Rodriguez. “Brown Is the New Green” is like a hearty stew. The filmmaker sees it more as “an essay that is trying to unpack a whole lot of things.” Some of what gets unpacked has to do with Lopez, a comedian so successful in breaking into the mainstream that his recent HBO special was appropriately titled “America's Mexican.” But the film is also about the field of Latino marketing and how ad agencies around the country spend every waking moment trying to find new and creative ways to separate Latino consumers from their money. Latinos now spend more than $800 billion annually on goods and services, and that figure is expected to top $1 trillion by 2010. And, finally, it's also about the many threads that run through the fabric of the community – the generational differences, the varying degrees of assimilation and Americanization, the distinct experiences of Mexicans vs. Cubans vs. Puerto Ricans, etc. It's a tall order, but Rodriguez fills it. “There's so much that has been unsaid about the Latino experience that I find myself having to explain the history of the world from our point of view,” he told me recently. Rodriguez notes that Latinos are often as different from one another as they are from everyone else, and he argues that even the government-issued term “Hispanic” doesn't do justice to a community whose members are more likely to identify themselves in relation to their country of origin or that of their ancestors. Yet, he also catches an important exception to the rule – the commonality that many Hispanics discovered when confronted with an immigration debate that turned anti-Hispanic. There is one insightful scene, which was filmed at one of last year's immigration rallies in Los Angeles. A U.S.-born Mexican-American is explaining why he felt compelled to hit the streets to lend support to Mexican immigrants, despite the fact that this is really not his fight. “If we don't argue for them and help them stand up for their rights,” the young man says of the immigrants, “then who will?” That sort of meddling may only further confuse, and even anger, some Americans. But what's new about that? “Latinos are such an enigma to America,” Rodriguez said. “And they remain an enigma after so many years.” That's correct. But why should that surprise anyone? America itself is an enigma and has remained so after all these years. It's still the land of second chances, a place where people come from around the world to wipe the slate clean and reinvent themselves. Can Americans help it that sometimes, as the decades pass and once-separate cultures blend together, we're not always sure what we've invented? |
11/02/2007
