Latino USA Episode 03

[Opening music]

This is Latino USA, a radio journal of news and culture. I'm María Hinojosa. Today on Latino USA, what it's like to be Latino and gay.

It's very, very difficult just to be lesbian or gay and be Latino, but I guess that at the same time, it's very beautiful.

A conversation with a music man named Dr. Loco.

We decided to take a cultural position in saying, “we're pochos and proud of it.” You know, somos bilingües. So what?

And a commentary from the streets.

I can't join a crew. I just renounced one, but I've got to protect myself. So the only thing left for me is to get a gun, or is it?

All this, here on Latino USA, but first: las noticias.

This is news from Latino USA. I'm Vidal Guzmán.

Sigue la música. Sigue los éxitos. Twenty-four hours a day!

[Radio station recording]

WAQI Miami. Aquí, Radio Mambí.

The growth in Spanish-language media is one indication, and now it's official. The Census Bureau reports that next to English, Spanish is now the most-used language in the nation. Seventeen million people in thirty-nine states speak Spanish daily. This 1990 census data says that one out of seven Americans speak a language other than English. This nation's outgoing and Spanish-speaking Surgeon General, Dr. Antonia Novello, recently added to the controversy regarding President Clinton's healthcare plan.

Los virus no identifican persona por pasaporte ni por tarjetita. En ese sentido, hay que de quitarle el temor a buscar salud…

Novello stated that it should include coverage for undocumented workers for public health reasons and added that viruses and bacteria did not ask for green cards. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, head of the Health Care Task Force, says that the healthcare plan would not provide courage for the undocumented. That topic and other healthcare issues of interest to the Hispanic community were on the table when Mrs. Clinton recently met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. From Washington, Patricia Guadalupe reports.

Mrs. Clinton came to Capitol Hill promising greater minority-group participation in changing the healthcare system. An issue of particular worry to Congressman José Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the caucus, is the lack of sufficient medical data on Hispanics.

One of the things I mentioned to her, for instance, was that tuberculosis in New York City's Hispanic community was always a problem but now has become a national problem when it reached out. So we need research to know what unique medical needs exist.

Puerto Rico's resident commissioner, Carlos Romero-Barceló, told Mrs. Clinton that residents of Puerto Rico don't enjoy full-healthcare rights as other U.S. citizens.

We have the absurd situation that here we have citizens who are not covered by Medicaid and even veterans in Puerto Rico not covered by Medicaid.

According to the National Council of La Raza, one-third of all Hispanics have no medical coverage. Members of the Hispanic Caucus want the Clinton administration to extend universal healthcare to the uninsured and undocumented workers, over half of whom are Hispanic. For Latino USA, I'm Patricia Guadalupe.

There have been a number of recent Latino appointments to the Clinton administration. They include demographer Leo Estrada as director of the Census Bureau; former California State Supreme Court Judge Cruz Reynoso, named to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; Suzanna Valdez, a former aid to Vice President Gore, has been named White House liaison to the Hispanic community; and Alfonso Diaz was named Deputy Associated Administrator for NASA. You're listening to Latino USA.

Preparations are underway in Los Angeles for the June 8 mayoral runoff election. Chinese American councilmember Michael Woo is vying with millionaire Richard Riordan to succeed Tom Bradley as the city's top official. Only eight percent of registered Latinos voted in the April 20 primary election, and analysts say the candidates will have to work hard to inspire greater Latino participation in the upcoming mayoral race. From Los Angeles, Alberto Aguilar prepared this report.

Latino community could have turned out up to 70,000 voters very easily had candidates invested intelligently into the Latino community, but they chose not to.

Southwest Voter Registration Executive Director Richard Martínez said in Los Angeles that none of the front-runners captured the imagination of the Latino leadership nor the Latino voter.

The Latino community could not see itself in their issues. It's like looking in the mirror and seeing somebody different. So, I think the Latino community sent a message to the elected officials. "We are not for sale just because it's you. You have to show us that you care and you know us, or else, we're not going to give you our votes."

Latinos make up 10% of the city's registered voters. Their absence in this election may signal trouble for a city that is desperately trying to live with its own diversity. In Los Angeles, this is Alberto Aguilar reporting for Latino USA.

A flotilla organized by a Florida humanitarian group called Basta, Spanish for "enough," recently sailed to Cuba to help feed malnourished Cubans who have been hit hard by the U.S. trade embargo and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The flotilla delivered food and hospital equipment to the Cuban Red Cross and to church groups, but some Cuban exiles in Miami opposed a flotilla, saying the food would support Fidel Castro's regime. I'm Vidal Guzmán. This is news from Latino USA.

[Transitional music]

[Crowd chanting]

Many Latinos from across the country were among the hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians who recently converged on Washington, D.C. They gathered in the nation's capital to celebrate their identities and demand lesbian and gay rights. In the wake of that event, Mandalit del Barco in New York spoke with several gay and lesbian Latino activists, and she prepared this report.

It's very, very difficult just to be lesbian or gay and be Latino, but I guess that at the same time, it's very beautiful.

Gay activists like Hector Seda are becoming more politically active, out there proclaiming their identities and working on issues like AIDS and equal rights. Seda is a board member of LLEGO, a national organization of lesbian and gay Latinos. He sees in this country and in Latin America an emerging political force.

It's beginning. It's happening in Puerto Rico. It's happening in general, all…I mean, it's happening in this country right now. Everybody, us, general Latinos and gays in this country, we're fighting for basic human rights.

We also have to be ready for the backlash because with visibility, there comes a very strong backlash, and usually, it's very violent.

Juan Méndez is a gay Puerto Rican who documents cases of gay bashing for the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. Méndez rejects the stereotype that Latinos traditionally have more difficulty acknowledging homosexuality than do other cultures.

Homophobia is not any more or any less than in any other community, and I think that when people start talking about the taboos and machismo, you know, and things that, really, we have a very…I would call it a racist slant or context, because, you know, I don't see any other culture that has it any different.

Many gay Latinos, like Méndez, believe that the issues important to them are not necessarily reflected in the agenda of the gay movement as a whole. For instance, he says, the issue of including gays in the military was declared an issue by white gay activists.

I, as a gay person, have no interest in being part of a military core that has invaded not only my country, but has also supported dictatorships, right-wing dictatorships in many Latin American countries, and no one in the gay and lesbian community has stopped to think about what this means for non-white lesbians and gays.

The emphasis on this issue also bothers Terry, a New York City lesbian who declined to give her last name for fear of alienating her Cuban abuelita, her grandmother. She says that when she was at the march in Washington, she was so offended that she found herself booing when they called out the names of gay military men.

Clearly, I see that the mainstream gay and lesbian movement has become more and more focused on their primary desire is to be regular Americans. That is what is happening in this gays and the military thing. They want the right to be regular Americans. Well, we're not regular Americans, no matter what we do, so I don't fit into that agenda, and I don't want to, and I never would, even if I tried.

These activists say that while some differences exist over so-called gay and lesbian issues, what is important is for lesbian and gay Latinos to develop their own unique political agendas, and not only within gay political circles, says Méndez.

We have to fight within the gay and lesbian community at large for our issues as Latinos, but we cannot forget to fight within our Latino community at large for our issues as gay and lesbian people.

For Latino USA, I'm Mandalit del Barco in New York.

[Transitional cumbia music]

By now, Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band has a reputation up and down the California coast. Their fun-loving style is broad in its range, from cumbias like this…to Dixieland, the blues, or a mix of gospel and soca, with a little bit of Afro-Cuban percussion for spice. The members of this nine-piece band like to think of their work as Chicano world music. The band leader is Dr. Loco, also known as Professor José Cuéllar, PhD and chairman of La Raza studies department at San Francisco State University. Dr. Loco says his music is an example of what Chicano culture is all about, mixing and blending unlikely elements to create something entirely new.

We see Afro-Cuban rhythms that have been a part of our culture since the '20s. We see Germanic elements that have been part of our music since the late 1800s. We see indigenous rhythms and indigenous instruments and the reintegration and the influence of nueva canción of the '60s, the cha-chas and mambos of the '40s and '50s, the doo-wop of the '50s, and the rhythm and blues, and, more recently, the rap influence as well as influences from rhythms around the world: songo, soca, and et cetera. So we decided to call it Chicano world because we think it's Chicano music and it also represents the influences of the world on our music.

You know, you've also done something that is really somewhat daring. You've taken a term, “pocho,” which if it's used by a Mexican towards a Mexican, it can be taken as an insult that you're too pocho. That means you're too Americanized, but you've in fact taken this term, and you've said that you pocho-sized something.

Absolutely! We're very proud of being not only bilingual, actually multilingual, and not only bicultural but multicultural. And for the longest time, we were put down on the one side for being too Mexican and on the other side for being too anglicized or too Africanized. And uhh...we decided to, you know, take a cultural position in saying, “we're pochos and proud of it.” You know, somos bilingües. So what? In fact, we see that being bilingual, even when changing the lyrics, we're speaking to two different, actually, three different groups: monolingual English speakers who fill in the blanks, monolingual Spanish speakers who fill in the blanks, and bilingual razas, who trip off on how we can do this.

You mean they're the lucky ones out of…they're the luckiest ones because they can understand everything that's going on?

Well, they appreciate… you know, we appreciate it at a deeper level.

You can really hear the pocho-sizing of your music when you take a song, like "I Feel Chingon" from your album "Con Safos" or "Chile Pie" also from "Con Safos," both of these are like '50s remakes of Black songs, que no?

Absolutely, absolutely…those…I feel "Chingon" is our Jalapeño version of James Brown's "I Feel Good," and "Chile Pie" is the classic…a remake of the classic. It's always reverberated in the Chicano community…resonated. It's the "Cherry Pie."

[Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band music]

Black music is a very important part of the Chicano experience from the West Coast.

It's been an integral experience throughout. I mean, whether we're Chicanos in Tejas, we had the influence of the Louis Armstrongs and the Dixielands way back. I mean, Ernie Cáceres, Emilio Cáceres, the jazz musicians, were tremendous in the '30s, were influenced by Afro-Americans a lot from New Orleans, and then throughout the '40s and '50s, the blues had been strong. Some of our greatest blues singers, Chicano blues singers, have been tremendously influenced by the blues. Freddy Fender, you know, wrote "Wasted Days," the first Chicano blues.

Well, one of the themes that runs through most of your music is the idea of Chicano pride, and it's really especially apparent on your most recent CD called "Movimiento Music," but at some point, Dr. Loco, don't you feel like, for example, let's take "El Picket Sign." I mean, it sounded kind of predictable, kind of a throwback to the '70s or '80s, real staid, predictable, even like rhetorical kind of political music. I mean, at what point do you continue to talk, let's say, in music that is considered panfletária, really propagandistic, and, on the other hand, really wanting to do something that is communicating something else on a cultural level?

Well, you know, the reason we included that song…in fact, that song was the reason …the rest of the album grew out of that song, conceptually, for me, and that song was a song that we performed because the farm workers are still boycotting grapes and because we're so close to really having more and more people understand the dilemma of pesticides, you know, on our food and our jobs and how many people in Earlimart and in other communities are really suffering from these pesticides, and there's other…there has to be other ways of dealing with our food so that we have safe food and safe jobs.

Well, what do you say to people who believe that political music like this is really passé, that it's something of the past and that it's really from an old school, an old trend that's already gone?

Well, you know, I say to them, you know, the lyrics of "The Picket Sign," you know?

El picket sign. El picket sign. Boycott the Jolly Green Giant. El picket sign. El picket sign. Let's stop, run away in the street. El picket sign. El picket sign. Support the displaced workers. El picket sign. El picket sign. [unintelligible]. From San Antonio to San Francisco.

We were encouraged to produce the music because of the movement, not because of the other way around. We were encouraged by what seems to be conditions all around us.

The last piece on your CD is an interesting remake and an interesting version of "We Shall Overcome."

Nosotros venceremos. We shall overcome. Nosotros venceremos. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome someday. ¡Soca, Loco!

We believe that this is the essential song for the movement of social justice. I mean, it has been…it's the one that's sung all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Berlin to South Africa to the fields of California. So we decided to do a remake, our own remake blending something that would kind of reflect both its historical essence…and its rooted in the South and southern spirituals and the African American experience, but that has gone around the world and back, and with different and interesting influences. So, that's why we decided to do it in a blending of spiritual soca with Chicano Jalapeño flavor.

Speaking with us from KQED studios in San Francisco, Professor José Cuéllar, leader of Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band.

[Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band music]

[Change in transitional music]

Bullets, guns, violence, and gangs are a fact of life for an ever-growing number of young people in this country…white, Black, Asian, and Latino. Many Latino kids know this reality only too well and too early in their lives. John Guardo, who came to New York City when he was 12 years old, was a member of a crew for most of his teenage life. Crews are what gangs are called in New York City. Now, Guardo is trying to leave that life behind, but as he tells us in this commentary, leaving his crew may be easier than escaping the violence of the streets.

Last night, I was speaking to my girl on the phone, telling her how bad things were getting around my block and that I decided to buy a gun. She got mad, raising her voice and asking me, "How could you be that ignorant? You know what would happen if you got caught with one?" I said to her, "Yo, I ain't going to be carrying it around and showing it off. Imma keep it at home in case someone tries to break in or mess with my family." She got quiet then.

I was searching for a better answer. I realized what a vicious cycle I was willingly getting into. You see, around my neighborhood, things ain't no joke. I'm a former gang member, so I know what dangers roam the streets. Drug dealers, stick-up kids, crackheads, the whole nine. A glance is reason enough to get jumped. Having outgrown that lifestyle, though, I'm trying to live a regular life, working and going to school. Unfortunately, that also means my family's been taken off the untouchables list. We have all become prey to these urban predators.

Now, under this new set of rules, what am I to do with this trouble? Call the cops? Ha! No one I know, including myself, would do that in case of an emergency. In my eyes, cops are more interested in filling their quota than in serving their community. Dialing 911 has simply become taboo. At this point, I am sandwiched between two problems. Number one, I don't trust the police. The only times they've been there for me was to ram flashlights into my skull while cursing me out. If not that, they've stopped me in front of my building to frisk me as my neighbors watch. Number two, if I remain vulnerable for too long, something bad may happen to my loved ones.

What can I do? I can't join a crew. I just renounced one, but I got to protect myself. So the only thing left for me is to get a gun. Or, is it? You see, I really believe if the cops got their act together, there wouldn't be so much static in the streets. What I mean is not that we lack police presence but that it doesn't matter if there's cops in every corner when they're going to be there to magnify the distrust we already have for them.

Policemen should figure out who the real criminals are, I know, and go after them instead of treating all of us like such. They're the ones who have to change since the problems of the street are always going to be there; there's always going to be crime, and we need protection. These issues may be the bigger picture, but I'm still unable to answer my girl. Every day, I have to deal with these problems, and although I may forget about them, what worries me is that it might be one of my friends who falls into the cycle and goes out to buy the nine. In street slang, that's a nine-millimeter handgun. I'm John Guardo, speaking for the street.

[Transitional music]

The word mentor is derived from the ancient Greek from the name of the man who spent 10 years teaching the son of the poet Homer. In ancient Greece, young people often studied in apprenticeship programs. Today, some Latino students are learning a variety of skills, from chess to chemistry, in a mentorship program taking place in New Mexico. Debra Beagle prepared this report.

Here, I'm thinking of placing my knight on D5. It attacks his queen.

Now, had I scanned a little better, I would've seen that the knight would've come to that square…see, and I would not have put my queen where it is, because now I need to move that queen…

Thirteen-year-old Miguel Atencio of Chama, New Mexico, beats his father in chess almost every game. He began playing when he was nine. Two years later, he joined the high-school chess team. That's when someone from Celebrate Youth, a six-year-old mentorship program in New Mexico, spotted the talented youngster and invited him to work more seriously on his game. This year, Miguel won the state middle-school chess championship.

In math, it's helped me. I can like work out problems in my head and all that. It's helped me like to remember like what the things I read and all that, because you have to remember things. You have to remember positions and all that. So, I've been getting a little bit better at that.

Miguel Atencio is both highly motivated and very talented. These are the characteristics Celebrate Youth director, Paquita Hernández, looks for in students. She also pursues teenagers who are equally talented but living in what Hernández describes as economic and social poverty.

A child who is economically poor but is matched with a mentor who is an artist or is a physicist or is a chemist or is a great writer, offers challenging conversations, exciting questions, um…different opportunities to look…through which to experience the world…I think that they flourish in ways that are magnificent.

The adult mentor meets with the student once a week for six months. Each student develops a project, perhaps a dance, a piece of sculpture, a science or math project, an essay or poem, or a piece of music.

[Person playing the piano]

Okay, now do the last two lines, and make a difference between your…your forte in the top line and your fortissimo in your bottom line.

[Person playing the piano]

Ninth grader Alyssa Montoya works with Mary Agnes Anderson of Española as her mentor. Anderson has mentored three students so far.

It gives them courage to be different, a reason not to be like everyone else, to have faith in themself. Watching this happen is my basic reward on it.

Other mentors have seen more impressive changes as a result of the program. Paquita Hernández tells the story of one talented teenager who is likely to follow two older brothers into drugs and depression. After delving into a science research project for two years in the Celebrate Youth program, he entered college and now plans to become a doctor. Success stories like these, Hernández says, are less likely to happen within the current school system.

I think there's a vacuum in the schools, not only in New Mexico but in the whole nation. I think the schools need to change, and I think they need to change radically because they are not reaching the majority of young people. I think those kids who don't drop out of school physically actually drop out often, even though they're sitting in the classroom with the books in front of them.

Those involved in Celebrate Youth say the goal is to promote excellence over mediocrity. Achievement is measured against one's own abilities rather than in competition with others. This is the attitude Miguel Atencio takes.

All right, and here's the last move, and I'm going to checkmate in one move. I'm going to move Queen on E7 to B7. Checkmate.

That's the end of the game.

These days, Miguel is sharpening his chess skills to prepare for the annual Celebrate Youth Festival in June. Nearly 400 students, including 30 chess players like Miguel, will gather for three days at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which co-sponsors the program. There, they'll perform their dances, hang their paintings, and display their research projects that demonstrate the skills they've worked so hard to develop.

[Person playing the piano]

The Wild Rider. The Wild Rider. Everyone has trouble with the Wild Rider. He's a hard-bucking horse.

For Latino USA, this is Debra Beagle in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico.

And for this week y por esta semana, this has been Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture. Latino USA is produced and edited by Maria Emilia Martin; associate producer is an Angelica Luévano. We had help from Vidal Guzmán and David Gorin. Latino USA is produced at the studios of KUT in Austin, Texas. The technical producer is Walter Morgan. We want to hear from you, so llámenos on our toll-free number, 1-800-535-5533. Major funding for Latino USA comes from the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the University of Texas at Austin. The program is distributed by the Longhorn Radio Network. Y hasta la próxima, until next time, I'm María Hinojosa for Latino USA.