On Hispanic Heritage Month and the ironies of La Vida
"I want to learn Spanish, move to Spain and marry a Spanish woman," said Brian, a man in his mid-30s, in a thick, Southside Irish accent.
I, as a broke grad student with newborn baby and partner at home, was tutoring Spanish to keep us afloat, taking anyone, often in students' homes across DuPage County.
As a Mexican American born in DuPage County to former migrant farmworkers - who came up from far south Texas each year to pick sugar beets in Danville and cucumbers in Joliet, until my father found warehouse work as a Teamster in the former Dominick's warehouse in Northlake in the 1960s -, I am a fan of spirited stories, characters and eccentrics (we have a good few of our own!). I admired Brian's spirit. My dear student, good-humored and heavy set, after weekly lessons in the basement office of his home, would go on to learn somewhat passable Castilian Spanish (if you didn't pay too close attention), and would move to sunny Barcelona - where he later learned they spoke mostly Catalan.
After a month or two there, spent mostly in Irish bars shooting the breeze with British expats and Aussies, two things became clear to him as the fall approached. One, he needed to come home for the looming Bears season, and two, there are no giant Mexican burritos in Spain - or any midnight Mexican food for that matter.
So Brian made his way home to suburban Chicago, without his Spanish woman. Though burritos are nowhere to be found in Mexico proper, close enough. Mexican food is integral to American life.
Salsa now outsells ketchup. Tortillas outsell buns, and it is debatable that tortilla chips outsell potato chips.
So, as we enter Hispanic Heritage Month, we take stock of how much Mexican life is integrated into American life: Cowboys, Indians (Mexico, except for much of its criollo rich, proudly an Indigenous nation), corn - of which Illinois is stuffed - pumpkins, turkeys, Grandma - yes we cherish our abuelas! All staples, realities and generative themes of Mexican life.
It might be said that all these things and going beyond that, all that is truly American, and not imports from England of Northern European, is at least in part, if not wholly, Mexican. Even the traditional peanuts and Cracker Jack that we enjoy at the old ballpark, like any self-respecting working-class, Chicagoland Mexican, at the old Comiskey (They'll never get me to utter is new name, I'm with Brian that one!)
And while the future-oriented United States became a powerhouse economically and politically, Mexico, always rooted in the past, would be percolating, integrating and assimilating thousands of years of established, civic Indigenous life in Mexico City with hundreds of years of Spanish elements - as many rejected as accepted - to become a powerhouse culturally and I dare say, in community.
In high school in the late '90s in the face of grunge rock, suburban alienation and hate-my day, hate-my-life ethos among my many Anglo classmates, I was happy to go home to my mother waiting for me in the kitchen, cousins filling our back yard on the weekends, cookouts, camp-outs, always together-outs, always family and in community. In the Mexican community, we have to shake every hand and welcome every visitor, and upon leaving, we can't just sneak out. We have to shake every hand again and more often than not, with that hug, abrazo!
Said the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican Poet Octavio Paz: "A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future, its memories are no less revealing than its aims."
And in that context, Mexico - ironically more in tune with America - and Mexican Americans are in many ways a constant reminder of the Indigenous past and present of the United States - affable, collective, spiritual, welcoming and warm.
With technology, the internet and the fast pace of society increasingly taking us to task on the great existential questions of the day, read: our inventions in the West are increasingly sidelining us. We reflect not just on the low hanging fruit (preferably avocados!) of the importance of Mexican gastromony on our lives and the plethora of cultural references in the US that came originally from Mexico ("Three Amigos" anyone?), but let's fill in the voids of community love, community participation, celebration and general human centrism often lacking or severely diminished in typically suburban Anglo life with that Mexican joie de vivre, because as we know well in Latino life, without amigos, familia and community, as the old song says, la vida no vale nada.
And you are lacking this, become friends with a Mexican and even better, struggle for the cause of immigrant rights, especially the cause of the thousands of Mexican essential workers locally who were made sick and poor by COVID in local food factories, warehouses, construction sites and as janitors cleaning and disinfecting schools and public buildings, who are at the present time disproportionately facing evictions, behind on bills, scapegoated in elections (One party promises us while the other attacks us) and still without immigration reform after 40-plus years of hard work that allows us to call ourselves U.S. citizens.
• Cristobal Cavazos, of Wheaton, is co-founder of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, and a longtime activist for the Latino community in Chicago's Western suburbs. He is a member of the Daily Herald's Editorial Board Sounding Board advisory panel.