Can We Escape Richard Rodriguez

The Bad Old Days of Chicano Conservatism

I somewhat tongue-in-cheek call it the bad old days, but I still know/have older family members who prefer not to think of themselves as Chicano. Hispanic is a term created during Nixson to categorize the growing percentage of Latin@s in the census. Hispanic comes from "Spanish" (Hi-Spani-C), and was perhaps some kind of pandering towards the generation of American Latin@s who had been through the World War, naming with an euphemism that has little allusion to the indigenous roots of Latin@ people. But I guess you could call the erasure of indigenous heritage business as usual by the U.S. government.

What brought me back to this idea of Hispanic Conservatism was a conversation I had with my colleague and companera Aja about pocha/o and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory came up. If you're not familiar with it, it's a fairly well known text within assimilation discussions and many within the academy oppose Rodriguez' assimilationist message, which might be an assumed component of what is thought of regarding pocho/a.

 

Rodriguez describes a scene when he is teased and mistreated by people in his community about his pocho/a identity--language, and inability/loss of ability to speak Spanish is how pocho/a is discussed. This is something I knew, having taught the first chapter in one of my composition courses, and Rodriguez' presence in my own work reminds me how far we haven't come in some ways. Like I said, I still have older family members who hold on to some of these conservative beliefs and I know that the conflation of education and loss of culture continues.

(Xico Gonzalez' art: http://xicogonzalez.com/casa/)