Back in 2000 studying English at McGill, the assistant of the Hard Boiled Novel teacher class told me “you Mexicans are like dwarfs, you will never get English literature as well as us, don’t even try to”.

I don’t know why he said that… I never carried my Fisher-Price lawnmower to class.

I just discover this site and this forum thanks to @ernestopriego’s twitter, thanks.
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We Irish survived!

As did we all.

Now, let’s do the numbers.

This race, that. This nation, that.

Same planet. Same death!

Time to figure it out, no?
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Just yesterday a friend was telling me about the slang term “peckerwood” (aka “peckawood” via Faulkner):

“2. slang (esp. in African-American usage). depreciative. A white person, esp. a white person regarded as poor, rustic, or unsophisticated;” (from the OED)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=peckerwood

Does race trump class discimination or vice versa? I think they are inextricably linked. Sometimes it isn’t race but ethnicity that is the issue. Think the Irish 19th century America.
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Fantastically well put!

You have hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, if humans could ‘get it’, would we even be in this predicament? I tend to agree with some evolutionary biologists who believe that overpopulation is genetically mandated. It is Nature’s mechanism of survival…no matter how many die, some will live.

As Wolf Larsen said in ‘The Sea Wolf’: “Nature is a spendthrift.”
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But in the end none of this parochial squabbling matters. What trumps it all is the killing off of nature. Ain’t nobody guiltless of that. It pains me to realize how poets, in America at least, are generally insensible to the murder. Jeffers was right you know. The perfect metaphor for describing the preoccupations of the human race is incest: way too preoccupied with ourselves, especially when we define ourselves against competing groups of other human animals, to notice the killing off of nature. But this too is old news.

Terreson
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There was a very interesting “desencuentro” between Mexican and Chicano poets in Hayward, California a few years ago. The kick-ass Chicano writers, including Juan Felipe Herrera and Lorna Dee Cervantes, were decidedly browner than their polished upper-middle Mexican counterparts. The Chicanos, educated here, were highly political, and very conscious that they were a generation at most from working-class roots. The Mexicans felt they had a high culture to defend.

The Chicanos were anxious for the approval of the Mexican poets — Huerta, Cross and Bracho among them — representing the “madre patria.” The Mexican poets — indoctrinated against the political poem by Paz — were condescending, and talked down about the way the Chicanos spoke Spanish.

As an Anglo poet and translator fluent in Spanish I was one of the few present not on either side of that particular fence. All kinds of class stuff was at work, and the work of Paz, Blanco, and Herrera equally inspires the sixth-grade barrio kids I teach, but with younger Chicano poets such as John Olivares Espinoza, we’re getting beyond the false dichotomy between kick-ass and polished.
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Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that

1) Javier must have been very young (or very badly-read) to have discovered Octavio Paz as late as 1998, and that

2) what I find surprising of his being surprised at the “Literario Mexicano..” headline was because of the unusual combination of words, and not because “literario” is the wrong adjective in this context (it should have been “literato.” “Literario” is a quality of objects and phenomena, thus an adjective: “literato” is a man of letters, thus a noun.)

Needless to say, as a Mexican and as a writer, I don’t see anything wrong with the combination of the nationality with the profession.
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“Blackface and the Poetry Foundation?” [second post down]

http://www.digitalemunction.com/

Kent
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So you haven’t read him, then.
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Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. Your response was so incisive you’ve dragged me from the sidelines to the comment fray.

Your right: the offense is caused by the assumed superiority. When I told the story to some students recently, one said, “Couldn’t someone come as a Mariachi musician, say, without being offensive?” Maybe.

The class issue you bring up is dead on as well. Paz is a sort of absurdly patrician figure in Mexican letters. And maybe I should have had that class read Latino poets like David Hernandez or Luis Rodriguez, for example. I guess I was trying to offer a sort of polar-class-opposite. The first time I thought about my father’s “station” was when I applied to college and had to fill out his “profession.” I almost cried when he said “laborer.” I thought it would doom my application.

My Halloween costume idea (which I thought of long before the post, btw!) is to go as a prawn from District 9, an interesting recent movie on this whole topic.

Last, James Wright is just about the last poet I would have expected to challenge stereotypes. I’d be interested to hear more about that.

Thanks again for your comment — and for all the comments! I really do appreciate knowing that people find some of these topics interesting and/or useful.
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Thanks for the post. and Thanks for your work as a high school teacher.

I want to begin with a confession, but I confess I don’t know what confession to begin with.

First Confession:

As someone who self-identifies as Mexican but who does not pretend to speak as a representative of any “Mexican” group, I don’t find Robert’s costume idea “sickening” and actually think that it is rather humorous.

The humor of the costume lies in its contradiction of work and play. Had Robert used a real lawnmower in addition to the dirty flannel clothes the joke would have fallen short. But the use of the Fisher-Price mower was a stroke of comedic brilliance.

It is not the costume then that is offensive, but the Hobbesian attitude behind it. We laugh, Hobbes argues, at the failings, infirmities, and absurdity of others because that ridiculing allows us to conceive our own eminence. What is sickening is Robert’s imagined superiority. And, John, thanks again for addressing this problem in your classroom.

I do think, though, that this imagined superiority goes far beyond Robert. What should the lesson be? To respect and value those who work for us and who are beneath us in class and social standing. Or should we ask Robert to question his privileged status at this mostly white affluent school and the notable absence of the “Mexican” at this same school. What is sickening is how imagined superiority naturalizes the historical and economic factors that allows the lawnmower to become a symbol for the “Mexican.”

Second Confession:

When I was 16 I spent my summer working la yarda. Adolescence is a time of identity crisis. I wanted to work for a landscape company because I, as Robert did, identified being Mexican with the lawnmower. My aunt’s husband worked for this landscape company, so did a friend of the family who was living with my aunt and her husband. More importantly so did Carlos, the 16 year old brother of my aunt’s husband. Carlos had recently arrived from Mexico and when given a choice to work or to go to school he decided to work. I had become good friends with Carlos. I wanted to show that I, too, could be a good “Mexican,” so I decided to work alongside Carlos. I was privileged enough, however, to work only for the summer. I always knew that I would return to school in the Fall.

Carlos still works in the landscaping business. For some people, the lawnmower isn’t a stereotype but a livelihood. Carlo’s life, though, can’t be reduced to the lawnmower. He goes home to his wife and two children.

Third Confession:

I first learned of Octavio Paz on April 19, 1998, the day he passed away. I read of his death in one of the local Spanish newspapers in Houston. The headline grabbed my attention: “Literario Mexicano Octavio Paz Ha Fallecido.” It grabbed my attention not because it announced the death of the Mexican Nobel Laureate—my confession is that I had never heard of Paz—but because the combination of “literario” and “mexicano” sounded so strange to me. A Mexican man of letters? I spent the rest of my Spring 1998 semester at the University of Houston reading everything by Paz that I could get my hands on.

Though I admire the work of Paz, I’m not sure he is the right poet to bring up in battling the stereotypes of the “Mexican.” I would argue that Paz is as far removed from an understanding of the Mexican with the lawnmower as Robert is. John, your post shifts from the yard worker to the major Mexican intellectual of the 20th century without complicating the class differences between the two. Paz knew that his experience differed from the experience of the Mexican worker in the United States. In the controversial first chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz describes the pachuco in particular and the Mexican-American in general as “one of the extremes at which the Mexican can arrive.” If we want a literature that battles negative stereotypes of the Mexican in the United States, we should turn not to Paz but to Chicano/a Literature. And because the focus of the discussion has been the yard worker, I would recommend the poetry collection The Date Fruit Elegies by John Olivares Espinosa. He has a beautiful poem that challenges our images of the yard worker: “Grass Isn’t Mowed on Weekends.”

Fourth Confession:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/10/worst_halloween_2.php

<>

Now I have to rethink my costume for this Halloween.

Fifth Confession:

To answer your last question, John, I think the poetry of James Wright challenged some stereotypes I had. Not sure what specifically those stereotypes are, but I’m sure they have something to do with Terreson’s claims for class as a problem.
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I am guessing Teri G has not yet come to terms with class discrimination, which is very much alive in America. I’ve recently realized there is a new kind of discrimination, that based on meritocracy. Lawyers only hear other lawyers. Doctors only hear other doctors. MFAs only hear other MFAs. The intelligensia only hears other intellectualls And so forth.

Teri G if you think I am a Rush Limbaugh type you are full of shit and reading your own script having nothing to do with me or reality. Class has always been the greater
problem, much more serious than ethnicity or race. So prove me wrong.

Terreson
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They’ve been looked down on by practically everybody. A class thing. And they’ve tended to be an unruly lot. In Florida under Spanish occupation they could be squatters. Later they would become cattle wrestlers whose cowboy wars got deadly. In the Appalachians their feuds were famous and violent. During slave holding times a Cracker, or cracka, could be employed as a slave driver feared for the crack of his whip. As late as the 1980s in south Florida whole towns got their income on cocaine smuggling. I have a deceased uncle who was a career criminal, bootlegging in the twenties, embezzling in the fifties, and growing marijuana in the eighties. One historian has explained this penchant for the illegal as an expression of an anti-authoritarian inclination. It’s an explanation I can buy. A yeoman will always be a yeoman no matter the times or means.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, himself of Cracker descent, recently wrote a book extolling the virtues of Crackers, how they’ve always been given the shitty jobs, either in the coal mines, the tobacco fields, in the savanahs, or in the swamps, and how they’ve maintained a kind of independence in their way of proceeding. (When he was not preaching my grandfather was managing turpentine farms in north Florida’s pine forests.) I think he is right, even if I also think he chose to overlook the dark side of Cracker independence, which amounts to a degree of amorality.

But here is the thing. Cracker has for long been the English-speaking world’s “N” word. And now it has come full circle.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cracka

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cracker

I guess stereotyping cuts all which ways. Once a class pejorative, now racist.

Terreson
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