"José Can You See": Latin@ Responses to Racist

05 sommer ch 3 8/21/03 1:41 PM Page 51 3 “José, can you see?” LATIN@ RESPONSES TO RACIST DISCOURSE Ana Celia Zentella “José, can you see?” is the punch line to a bad joke. José, a new immigrant, praises American hospitality because at his very first baseball game, he was sent way up to the best seat in the stadium. Just before the game began everyone stood up, turned to him—perched on the flagpole—and sang out, “José, can you see?” Jokes like this one, along with exaggerated imitations of a Spanish accent, as in, “Es no my yob,” and “My ney José Jiménez”; racist labels such as spic, wetback, greaser, beaner; and public insults like J. Edgar Hoover’s admonition that one need not worry if Mexicans or Puerto Ricans came at you with a gun because they couldn’t shoot straight, but if they had a knife, watch out—are examples of the blatantly racist discourses that construct Latin@s in the United States as stupid, dirty, lazy, sexually loose, amoral, and violent. Linguistic anthropologists, notably Bonnie Urciuoli and Jane Hill, have analyzed the ways in which these forms of speech and evaluations of language succeed in constructing whiteness, with standard English as its voice box, as the unmarked, normal, and natural order in the United States. In her powerful study of language prejudice and Puerto Ricans in New York City, Urciuoli docu- ments how the English of working-class Puerto Ricans and other racialized groups—in schools, workplaces, and all gatekeeping en- counters—is intensely monitored for any signs of an accent, nonstan- dard grammar, pronunciation misfires, or vocabulary gaps. On the other hand, their use of Spanish is censored as out of place, even offensive, in any public domain except those that are clearly marked as “ethnic,” like folklore festivals or restaurants in which Spanish is spoken. The normal bilingual practice of switching from one language to 05 sommer ch 3 8/21/03 1:41 PM Page 52 52 Í ANA CELIA ZENTELLA another is despised in all settings. Monitoring for linguistic signs of disorder may be carried out in the name of improved communication and national unity, but instead it creates levels of tension and insecu- rity that can effectively silence New York Puerto Ricans and others who are monitored in similar ways. Jane Hill’s work in the Southwest of the United States focuses on particular Anglo American uses of Spanish, which she calls “Mock Spanish.” These include the insertion of Spanish words and phrases like mañana, Ah-dee-os, macho man; Hasta la vista (with heavy aspi- ration of the <h>), and the invention of words meant to sound like Spanish, like “el cheap-o” or “correctomundo,” the latter spoken by Samuel L. Jackson as pathological murderer in the movie Pulp Fic- tion. The link between Mock Spanish and uncontrolled violence is underscored when movie killing machines such as Schwarzenegger’s Terminator alien says “Hasta la vista, baby” before blasting a victim, and when the perpetrator who is trying to get away with seven heads in a bag mocks a Mexican bellhop with “I can’t wait uno minuto, I have a plane-o to catch-o.” If these usages seem innocuous or inno- cently humorous to most Americans, some of whom surely would warn us against adopting chilling attitudes of political correctness, Hill points out that the jocular key is deceptive because Latin@s are always the butt of the joke. As she explains, “in order to ‘make sense of’ Mock Spanish, interlocutors require access to very negative racializing representations of Chicanos and Latinos” (Hill 1999: 683). In my own analysis of the “chiquita-fication” process that is central to Hispanophobia because it reduces Hispanics to an undifferentiated and uncomplicated but huge and threatening mass, I cite examples of Mock Spanish, such as “no problemo,” as indicators that Spanish is minimized and dismissed as a simple language. The implication is that all you have to do is add an -a or an -o to an English word and anyone, even alien terminators, can master it with little effort (after all, Latin@s speak it). Hill’s main point, building on Urciuoli’s work, is that both the monitoring of Latin@ speech and the use of Mock Spanish accomplish “the elevation of whiteness” (Hill 1999: 684) by indexing Latin@s indirectly as inept and disorderly—read “out of control and dangerous”—and therefore in need of linguistic and other controls, ranging from remedial English and Spanish classes to nationwide English-only laws. At the same time, those who monitor Latin@ speech and speak Mock Spanish are directly indexed as “in control” and therefore worthy of being in control of others. More- over, they come across as knowledgeable and cosmopolitan, people with a good sense of humor, and with the best interests of the United 05 sommer ch 3 8/21/03 1:41 PM Page 53 “JOSÉ, CAN YOU SEE?” Í 53 States at heart. Because they function as the “invisibly normal” (Hill 1999: 683), Anglos are allowed to do and say all kinds of things with- out appearing overtly racist. They can mispronounce Spanish with impunity, create a simplified grammar, and jumble English and Span- ish together indiscriminately, yet all of that remains invisible. My Puerto Rican family would label this a classic example of la ley del embudo (the law of the funnel), ascribed to those who reserve lo ancho (the wide part) of the funnel for their own unfettered actions but force their lessers to struggle through lo estrecho, the narrow neck. In this example of la ley del embudo, Latin@s are visibly constrained by rigid norms of linguistic purity, but white linguistic disorder goes un- challenged; in fact, white linguistic disorder is essential to a congenial persona, and passes as multicultural “with-it-ness.” Urciuoli and Hill are to be applauded for their insights into the linguistic practices that define and sustain “white public space”: “a morally significant set of contexts that are the most important sites of the practices of a racializing hegemony” (Page and Thomas, cited in Hill 1999: 682). While I concur with their analyses, I have been wrestling with some discomfort, even after I distinguish my sympathy for Anglos who genuinely attempt to communicate with immigrants in their rudimen- tary Spanish from my disgust with those who bellow “Comprenday, amigo?” I also admit that I find references to “the whole enchilada,” the “Frito bandito,” and “dropping the chalupa” less offensive than “hot tamales” and “grassy-ass,” perhaps because I am not as sensitive as I should be to disparaging Mexican stereotypes.1 But the root of my un- easiness lies elsewhere. I am most concerned about the fact that given the hegemony of racializing discourses, there seems to be no way out— that is, no way to subvert these racist practices, to escape the strangle- hold imposed by white public space. Me explico. If we try to resist by not apologizing for—or not trying to change—our accents, or refuse to restrict our use of Spanish, or eliminate the other ways of speaking that the dominant society judges as disorderly, we end up entrenching dam- aging evaluations of us as dangerous and in need of control. On the other hand, the more we force ourselves to function within the limited linguistic space allotted to us—no accent, no switching, watching our ps and qs—or thetas (q) and ss—the more we confirm the notion that linguistic purity and compartmentalization are valid objectives and achievable goals, if only we Latin@s tried hard enough. And, conse- quently, we distance ourselves from those members of our communi- ties, particularly immigrants, who cannot perform as if a bilingual were two monolinguals stuck at the neck, that is, with one tongue in control of two inviolably separate systems. Is there really no way out? 05 sommer ch 3 8/21/03 1:41 PM Page 54 54 Í ANA CELIA ZENTELLA Certainly, the power of the dominant discourses is oppressive and destructive. After all, we cannot have it both ways—we cannot claim that a wave of Hispanophobia is sweeping the nation, but insist that Latin@s have resisted and emerged unscathed. Ever since the 1970s, when demographers began to predict that Hispanics would become the largest minority group in the nation in the early part of the twenty-first century, policies that restrict legal, educational, health, and employment services have been implemented at local, state, and national levels.2 Those policies frustrated immigrant efforts to pull out of poverty, while an elite class amassed unprecedented wealth, based in part on the cheap labor of Latin@s and other immigrants. The re- sulting economic disparities constitute serious challenges to our de- mocratic ideals of equality and justice, yet they receive much less attention than the English proficiency of immigrants. Between 1972 and 1999, the top 1percent of the U.S. population increased its income by 119 percent, averaging $516,000 per person after tax income, while most Latin@s remained among the poorest segments of the 20 percent of the population with the lowest income. This group suffered a 12 percent decrease in its earnings, and in 1999 its members averaged $8,800 after taxes (New York Times, September 5, 1999, p. 16). The backlash against remedies that have attempted to correct these inequities, including quotas, set-asides, affirmative ac- tion, and bilingual education, has led to the identification of working- class Latin@ bilingualism with unfair privileges, turning reality on its head.

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