Annotations for Communities: Multiracial People

Hollywood movies and television commercials often give us quick, concise images of people and places along the US-Mexico border. Going beyond those media-made notions towards real understanding is difficult, even impossible. Without firsthand contact. In the nation's capital, there was an attempt to go beyond those media images of the border. It was part of the Smithsonian Institution's annual Festival of American Folklife. But as Franc Contreras reports from Washington, real, cultural understanding required more than a taste of border foods or the sounds of border music.

[Natural sounds of Washington D.C.] Some young guys from Mexicali were standing in a crowd between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument. They wore baggy pants, some had dark glasses, and others' headbands pulled way down low. To some people, they looked like gangsters, but they're not. They're cholos with a distinctive style of dress that comes straight from the border. Suddenly, they started speaking Spanish out loud.

Bueno, aqui pasa todo los dias la patrulla fronteriza. Que tal si sacamos la lengua?

Border patrol goes through here every day. Let's stick our tongues out at them.

[Natural sounds of Folklife Festival] Then from behind a food stamp where some beans were cooking, A guy came out wearing all white with a pointed hood clan style. [Highlight, natural sounds of Folklife Festival] It was the border patrol chasing down one of the Cholos people watching realized it was a play by a theater group from Mexicali, a border town south of California. The actors were hitting one of the main issues on the border, immigration. Their translator is Quique Aviles.

A lot of people complain that they don't understand because the show is being done in Spanish, but at the same time, that's what life is. When Latinos come here, we don't understand either. So, we were talking about that last night. It's sort of like returning the favor.

A woman walked past us, dressed like the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. She went past a display where a man was making guitars by hand, past a group of muralists from El Paso who were painting an eagle, and over to a food stand where a Black woman who speaks only Spanish was serving tamales and Tecate beer, and next to her was a woman from Texas.

We're breaking a lot of preconceived ideas, a lot of biases that perhaps have been most influenced by the media.

Cynthia Vidaurri teaches at the Southwestern Borderlands Cultural Studies and Research Center in Kingsville, Texas. She says, the American Folk Life Festival in Washington is an opportunity not only for people who've never seen the border, but also for people who've come here from the border to share their cultures.

The rest of the world perceives us as what the media makes us out to be, the movies, the news, and they're really thrilled to have a chance to say, this is who we are. We are living, breathing human beings that have the same needs as you do. We just take care of those needs in a slightly different fashion.

That sounds fairly straightforward, and some people walked away from here with more understanding about the people of the borderlands, but not without some effort. At one display, Romi Frias of El Paso was trying to explain to some people from Delaware, what a low rider is, you know, a highly stylized car, usually an older model with small thin tires, maybe a mural painted on the hood and lowered about an inch from the pavement.

[Laughter] I tell people that it's really going to mess you up. You're doing about 55 and there's this monster pothole and you've got about an inch clearance. I've got a lot of friends that face that situation and unfortunately hadn't learned the hard way.

Later under a shaded area, there was a storytelling session. It was supposed to be about women on the border. An Indian woman from the Mexican side sat on the left. On the right was a white woman who works for the US Border Patrol in the middle of the two women sat a university professor. He was monopolizing the discussion. Then at another storytelling session about immigration, the professor was taking over again. Some people in the back were saying it was typical. Here's this white male, the expert, not letting the others talk. After the session, I went over to him and learned his name is Enrique Lamadrid, a man of mixed races whose family migrated to the Americas from France and Spain like many others along the border. His family goes back generations. Lamadrid says he saw many surprised people at the folk fest who learned of the amazing cultural diversity along the border.

I mean, just the amazement that you can see in people's faces when they encounter these two black women over here from the black Seminole community. They're Mexicans. So these are really complex cultural entities.

Complex, like the land where they live. The border is often characterized by clashing cultural forces. Lamadrid says People living on the border cross the international boundary daily, but it's no big deal because it's part of their daily life. And he said the people living along the 2000-mile separating line did not come to the border. It came to them. Then he mentioned a series of treaties between the US and Mexico dating back to the late 18 hundreds. It's a complex history, a balancing act, he says, because the needs of border people compete with the national needs of Washington and Mexico City, and the result of that struggle is border culture.

But culture isn't in your blood. Culture is something that you learn. Culture and identities are things that are negotiated and forged every day of our lives as we live our lives out in specific areas of the country.

Lamadrid told me about a sewer line that broke during the festival Sunday morning. Smelly dark sewer water flooded a small area around some of the exhibits. He and the other said it reminded them of some border towns where pollution has become a major problem. But on the day the sewer broke, people taking part in the American Folk life Festival this year continued their efforts to share their life's experiences as the smell and humidity surrounded them. For Latino USA, I'm Franc Contreras in Washington.