The Fresa Naco Divide

The Fresa-Naco Divide

On my Academia de Cruz Medina blog, Enrique Reynoso posted on the fresa-phenomenon that he situates as a response to the pejorative use of pocho against Americanized Mexican Americans.

I found this interesting 2009 popular article about youth culture in the Guadalajara Reporter that defines fresas in comparison to nacos:

"Naco, naca: classless, pretentious, obtrusive, the Mexican version of white trash.
Fresa: superficial youngsters many of whom come from a high class family."

The reporter goes on to point out the differences as centering around low vs. high culture, where low culture tends to be more related to "real" Mexican culture:

"More likely to be fans of cheap tequila, banda or mariachi music, lucha libre, street tacos and soccer, nacos are in touch with the grass roots of Mexican culture whereas fresas tend to look north, peppering their speech with English phrases. “Happy,” “sorry,” “fresh,” “que cool,” “super” and equally infuriating Spanish phrases like “que oso,” “o sea” and “vales mil” are the hallmarks of the fresa vernacular."

To bring it back to the context of the U.S. and without being fully familiar with the essence of the naco social construction, I'd speculate that nacos sound a bit like those who self-identify with the "patriotic"(bordering on nationalistic), "redneck" or "country" as is done in the U.S. The assertion that nacos maintain a sort of pretentious quality about them makes me wonder what a "redneck" crossbred with a hipster would look like?

Read the rest of Tom Marshall's article at:
http://guadalajarareporter.com/features-mainmenu-95/908-features/24877-youth-culture-101-nacos-a-fresas.html

There is a good amount of Naco material online. Here's an interesting image I found on photobucket from fatimitha19:

Rhetorical Role of Pocho as Trope

"Bruised Fruit" Implications of Pocho Label
I've been talking with Enrique Reynoso, a fellow grad student in Rhetoric and Composition, studying at Purdue, about writing up something on pochismo. He told me the label "fresa" came to mind. Fresa is a term used against those who traditionally deploy pocho as a deficiency, which means "stuck up" and embodies a kind of "princess" meaning. I'm interested to see what he has to say because this term of difference could infer larger issues of class, nationalism and sexuality.

  (from www.patricio00.com)

Guest Blogger on Academia de Cruz

Andy Besa de Tejas Talks Mistaken Identity

Check out the recent Guest Blogger on my Academia de Cruz blog:
http://writerscholarprofessional.blogspot.com/2011/03/presenting-guest-blogger-andy-besa.html

Writer Andy Besa discusses how mestizaje makes him a target of microaggressions.  When Polynesians aren't sure of his ethnicity, they welcome him. When Anglos think he's native American, he's made to feel as though he's lacking if he doesn't fulfill their desire to interact with an 'other.'

(Besa and Walter Mignolo at New Directions Conference 2010)

Pocho versus Nationalism

Author Luis Alberto Urrea

Fiction and non-fiction writer Luis Alberto Urrea spoke at the University of Arizona this past Friday as a part of the UA Reads Program and as a part of the Tucson Festival of Books. During his talk, Urrea discussed his travels that accompanied his writing. A Tijuana native, Urrea cautioned against the nationalistic messages he heard on radio stations while traveling in Mexico. Urrea warned that many of the messages about Honduran immigrants paralleled rants from the conservative right in the U.S. about Mexican immigrants.

Urrea reminded me not only of the dangers of nationalism, but also of how that nationalistic message is a part of the discourse surrounding the connotations of pocho. When deployed in the manner that nationalist Mexicans, who see outside cultural influences as negative, pocho takes on a very negative meaning situated in opposition to "true" or "puro" Mexican identity.

An interesting podcast from Onda Latina about the novel Pocho that addresses the notion of nationalism within the opposition of Mexican and American identities.
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/program?sernum=000536942&header=Culture

Cross Posting Pocho Desmadre

Introducing Romeo Guzman from Pocho in Greater Mexico

My blog, like many projects/ideas, has multiple origins. First, I hated writing: it was hard, stressful, and rarely pleasant. I read as many books about writing as I could manage. I gained some confidence, but was still unable to place my readers in a particular time and place. I started reading journalism with more attention to word usage and started a daily writing practice….Second, my pocho-ass was far from home. I was Mexican, kinda, sometimes, but it was experienced/thought about in drastically different ways. In Mexico City, my conversations with Froylan Enciso , Daniel Hernandez, Diego Flores Magon, Guillermo Osorno, my sis, Carri, and others were particularly enjoyable and often over beer.

As I experienced Mexico City I wanted to convey to friends back home what the city felt like: the archives, belonging to an intellectual circle, the appropriation/adoption of American and pocho/chicana cultural production, the yummy tacos chupacabras. In short being both a “cousin and stranger.” This sense, to quote a friend from Mexico City, of between in/out of space was felt in New York City. A city with a more recent migration, particularly from central and southern Mexico, Mexicanos who aren’t short and pale (like my ass). Not being recognized as Mexican was really odd, but seeing how more recent migration happened “on the ground” was/is a lesson in history. Yet, a ton of blogs were simply about experiencing aspects of Mexico City and NYC: graffiti in Neza, day of the Virgen in Manhattan, pink floyd being played by a banda, watching Mexico beat the US in Mexico City, radiohead being played at a graduation in a Mexican school…

            The more I wrote, the more enjoyable it became, though you all can decide on the quality. More importantly, it became a way to share my intellectual ideas and pursuits with los primos/as, my siblings, my tios/as, and parents. It provided needed breaks from long academic papers and made academia less alienating. Along the way friends and family encouraged me to continue writing the blog, in some cases suggesting to publish a post or two (Thank YOU). I submitted the eulogy I wrote for my gramps to acentos review. It was accepted and Cruz Medina and I started a cyperspace friendship: we learned that we are both pochos from so cal and that we both find studying poch@ productive. Cruz suggested we guest blog as a means to build pocho community in greater Mexico. An important beginning. The images on his two blogs are pretty dope, his fiction is really moving, so I was more than pleasant to partake in this collaborative pochismo. 

I this sense I am interested in hearing how folks think we can continue to build community on the net. I am currently involved in helping found a cultural, intellectual, and archival space in Mexico City. Mainly, I’m trying to get as many pocho/a artists, intellectuals, writers, etc down to Mexico City to engage Mexicans and as many Mexicans up here to engage Chicanos/pochos/etc.  You can follow its progress here and more importantly can email me for more information/to propose projects, to talk shit, etc. As I sit in an archive in DC with my friend Israel Pastrana and research South El Monte it seems appropriate to conclude with what we feel is the most pressing question of our generation: how do we build a politics that reflects our transnational/undocumented/documented communities? 

Pocho Collaboration

Check Out my Guest Blogging on Pocho in Greater Mexico

This blog has done its fair share of talking pocho, but I take the opportunity to reflect on ser un pocho in different locales. I definitely go more personal than I have in the discussions I've done here, which is something I'm glad to be able to do because personal experience fuels academic endeavors.

http://pochoingreatermexico.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/introducing-cruz-medina-fellow-pochoacademicbloger/

Coming Soon: Pocho in Greater Mexico Guest Blogging!

Digital Mestiz@ Collaborative Blogging Bonanza

Okay, "bonanza" is a strange choice, evocative of cowboy narratives in which brown folks were either banditos or taking siestas. But I wanted to give a heads up that Romeo Guzman, blog creator of Pocho in Greater Mexico  will be guest blogging--I will cross-post it here and on my Academia de Cruz blog in order to spread as much pocho love across time and cyberspace as possible.

I will also be guest blogging on Pocho in Greater Mexico soon, dropping thoughts on pocho identity in Tucson and Califas.

(man, I can't believe I found an image for "digital mestizo"--thanks Google images and radiochango.com)

Be on the look out.

Gender and Poch[o]tec@

Decolonial Imaginary for the potential of future

In Nahuas After the Conquest, James Lockhart makes mention of female merchants in the squares where the pochteca traded. Still, Lockhart makes the point that there were no hints, besides these pictures of women in the market, that women were of the pochteca class of merchant. For my work, this is not helpful because the "@" symbolizes the inclusivity of gender that the "a/o" binary previously noted.

However, I am not daunted by reading this because I rely on Emma Perez's notion of the decolonial imaginary that reconstructs historical narrative for their potential, instead of uncritically going along with colonized historical narratives. I could only speculate whether Lockhart had any agenda with regard to dismissing the potential of women as pochteca, but I would add that it's the many Chicanas with whom I've worked with and studied under who have inspired me with their networks and negotiation of ideologies that I do not face because of male privilege that I have done nothing to earn and benefit from, many times when I am unaware.
 

After all, if we don't disconnect the pocho from deficiency rhetoric, what will be left with?

Poch[o]tec@ as (Re)appropriator of Technology

Putting the Tech@ in technology
As a part of the tec@ that this blog performs, I experimented with visual representations of pochismo. I've mention Bill Nericcio in a post post, but the images on his Tex[t]-Mex blog have always been extremely inspirational. With that said, I see the performance of the poch[o]tec@ as a new media mestiz@, renaming the Franco-filia flâneur for a Xikan@ identity.

Twitter has been an interesting new/social media site for poch[o]tec@ practice, but the motivation for this post was my amateur (re)appropriation of images as a demonstration of pocho agency.

The "So Cal" is a nod to the geographic space of Califas that mi amigo Tejano Andy Besa says breeds a different kind of Mexican.

Pocho as Spanglish & Bruised Fruit

A Note on "Pochismo" Author(s): William E. Wilson
Kicking it old school, here is an excerpt from a 1946 article that speaks of pocho as a Spanglish kind of dialect.
 
From The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 30, No. 6, (Oct., 1946), pp. 345-346

"POCHISMO, derived from pocho, an adjective which originally meant discolored, has now come to mean a type of popular slang in Mexico. In the evergrowing list of pocho expressions are many hybrid words, artificial combinations of English and Spanish. Indicative of its spread is the inclusion of many words of this type in a Spanish vocabulary list prepared for U. S. Border Patrol Trainees.' with the remark that "those words underlined are colloquialisms but are often used on the Mexican border and the officer will get better results if he understands them." Typical examples in this list are bebi, baby; yaque, jack; diche, ditch; lonche, lunch;pene, pen (penitentiary); esteche, stage; traque, track, and huachar, to watch. Mexican intellectuals and conservatives have long endeavored to check the spread of this hybrid language, and even held an Anti-Pochismo week in August, 1944."

 (Sun Mad Ester Hernandez)

This image kind of goes along with the theme of the bruised fruit or even dead on the vine as it were.

Pocho.com on LatinoGraduate.net

Latin@ Role Models and Academic Identity

In an interview with the cartoonist/author of "La Cucaracha" and Pocho.com's Lalo Alcaraz, the Latin@ Graduate gets at the issue of representation that Alcaraz faced in high school. Bussed to what Luis Urrieta Jr. would call a "whitestream" school, Alcaraz explains he was the only Latino to graduate from his bussed-in cohort.

When attending San Diego State University (home of Tex[t]-Mex czar/prof. Bill Nerricio), Alcaraz acknowledges the supportive role that MECHA played because the other students has similar experiences to what Alcaraz was going through as an undergrad.

 (art copyright Lalo Alcaraz, on the LatinoGraduate.net website)

Read the entire article and see some more of Alcaraz' art at:
http://www.latinograduate.net/new/rolemodels/alcaraz.shtml

Or of course check out Alcaraz's website at:
http://www.pocho.com/

When discussing an academic identity, there are many factors to consider. Alcaraz's experience as one of few Latin@s makes his background very much different from some of the students I speak with, who are from predominantly Latin@ schools, but feel the stark contrast in college of being one of few Latin@s.

Macroparasitism and Microparasitism in Mesoamerica The Aztec

The Humbleness and Forced Humility of the Pochteca

The pochecas were not allowed to flaunt their success for fear of being put to death by jealous nobility. This is worth taking into consideration.

I'm not sure of the author of this pdf strangely enough:

"The pochteca grew to be quite wealthy, but they were restricted in terms of the “flaunting” of their wealth and how much they couldaccumulate. First, they did not want to inflame the jealousy of the ruler. Many a merchant was put to death by a noble who desired the merchant’s fortune - an experience not uncommon among European Jews"(24).

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20Economy,%20Society/aztec2006.pdf

Rodolfo F. Acuña's "The Making of the Political Pocho"

Pocho as Socially Comfortable Middle-Class
A function of this blog is to document the different definitions, connotations and embodied rhetoric that 'pocho' takes on. It should be noted that many of the people in the 'list' section have 'owned' pocho, reclaiming it as a self-identification. Acuña's article http://www.aztlan.net/pocho.htm seems to denote 'pocho' in the vein Gloria Anzaldua uses when she describes it as 'cultural traitor.'

From Acuña's article:
"I make the analogy of the pocho because when many of us entered the public schools we spoke fluent Spanish. In fact, it was our only language. Because of the lack of maintenance of Spanish our development in the language remained at a primary school level. It did not advance to reading Spanish language literature. English in many cases became our primary language. Meanwhile, we were not able to take Spanish classes until high school when we repeated like parrots, "?HOLA PACO, QUE TAL? ?COMO ESTAS?
Many former Chicano activists through a lack of political maintenance have become political pochos. They learned the basics of Chicano studies, its language, but have not advanced beyond a cultural level. They identify with the culture, but not the political dimensions of culture. Over time, they begin to think about the barrio as a justification for their entitlements. Notions such as the transformation of the barrio become alien to their political vocabulary"

It is true that Acuña is calling into question the political commitment of middle class Latin@s and Chican@s; however, I am interested in the use of 'pocho' and how it is deployed to denote transgression.
Update: 
No, I have no real great insights that I have come to about the perceived transgressions of pochismo at this time; rather, I tracked down the Chuck Norris image that kept coming to mind every time I looked at the "El Pocho" movie poster above so I had to add it for visual juxtaposition purposes.

Pochteca Deity Yacatecuhtli

From: Aztec Mythology: The Influence of Aztec Mythology on Mexican Culture and History

By: James W. Salterio Torres

Description of the Yacatecuhtli:
"Yacatecuhtli, like the Greek Hermes, is the god of merchants, traders and travelers. He is pictured with white and black facial decorations, his hair is bound in a high sheaf, and he carries a staff and a flywhisk. He is honored by having his statues wrapped in paper wherever they are found. Merchants hold their walking stick, a massive cane called an utlatl in high esteem. They carry these walking sticks when traveling and when they arrive at a place they are to sleep, they gather all of their sticks in one bundle and tie them together, lay them at the head where they are to sleep and spill drops of blood in front of them from their tongue, ears or arms and legs; they offer copal and light a fire that burns before the walking sticks which they hold as the image of the god himself. This is their way of asking for the god’s protection from all dangers. (Restored by the author from the Codex Fejervany Mayer)"













I'm not sure how the deity of the pochteca affects the embodied rhetoric of the pochteca as a figure. Although Dolores Delgado Bernal has looked at the role of spirituality in the academic identity of Latin@ students, so this could be an aspect to consider.

What's up with the "@"

Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire

 Sandra K. Soto describes the use of the "@" in "Chican@ [because it] signals a conscientious departure from certainty, mastery, and wholeness, while still announcing a politicized collectivity," adding that the "@" catches "our attention with its blend of letters from the alphabet on the one hand...at first sight looks like a typo and seems unpronounceable"(Soto 2). 

The "@" in poch[o]tec@ announces its gender inclusivity while making Soto's same political announcement. The "@" separates some of the trapping of "a/o" binary of gender and other trappings that might be associated with older unifying messages. 

This reminds me of the Kid Frost song "This is for La Raza" in which there are messages of Chican@ pride that might be conflated with misogynist ideology. Chican@ scholars like Soto point to gaps where the generative aspects of something can be emphasized and the less desirable aspects dismissed.

Kid Frost "This is for La Raza": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REEu9Oua47M


Click on the subtitle or here for the Google Book link: http://books.google.com/books?id=MWuGctuYpj0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=sandra+soto+reading+like+a+queer&source=bl&ots=fqAwDRGvuT&sig=SXkxTn-GX-ZdSVBLXq838C7Jge4&hl=en&ei=ARxtTZW6Oon0swPrnZzABQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false