GRIEGO: Future will be what kids make it

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, April 7, 2008

I keep a handful of columns from the late Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar. He was killed in L.A. in 1970 after a tear-gas canister, fired by a sheriff's deputy, struck him in the head during the National Chicano Moratorium March, a Vietnam War protest.

Not long before he died, Salazar attempted to answer the question of what "Chicano" means.

"A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself," he began. "He resents being told Columbus 'discovered' America when the Chicano's ancestors, the Mayans and Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations long before Spain financed the Italian explorer's trip to the 'New World.'

"Chicanos resent also Anglo pronouncements that Chicanos are 'culturally deprived' or that the fact that they speak Spanish is a 'problem.' Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English and so the 'problem' is not theirs, but the Anglos who don't speak Spanish."

The Mexican-Americans flaunting the word Chicano, he wrote, do so as an "act of defiance and a badge of honor."

This is on my mind as I take a seat in a crowded auditorium Friday at Tivoli Student Union for a daylong symposium and tribute to Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, a Chicano if there ever was one.

Gonzales died three years ago this month. He was, as Luis Torres, Metro State College's deputy provost, tells the crowd, "many things to many people."

It's fair to say the Crusade for Justice founder represented both the pride and the fury of the Chicano Movement and its demand for equality and justice. He embodied the movement's vision, its promise, its contradictions, its shortcomings. For all his anger - and Gonzales had reason to be angry - he was not one to succumb to cynicism.

He found hope where many of us still find it today, in young people. So, I'm not surprised to find the auditorium brimming with students.

The gathering takes place on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, and remembrances of both him and Gonzales provoke assessments of progress made and work ahead. That progress has been made is undeniable. So, too, is the fact that challenges remain.

Just two days earlier, the Colorado Department of Education released its 2007 graduation rates. All ethnic/racial groups saw improvement, but Hispanics continue to lag behind everyone else. What constitutes improvement for this group is an increase from a 56.7 percent graduation rate in 2006 to a 57.1 percent rate in 2007.

To remember Gonzales' legacy is to raise questions about the fate of the Chicano movement. In response, I hear: The Chicano movement lasted 10 years and then died in the mid-'70s.

Or it still exists, changing as circumstances warrant.

Or it is resting, collecting itself for the next big campaign - likely around immigration reform.

Or it has been reborn in a less confrontational, but still uncompromising cultural medium of spirituality, art, music, dance; its emphasis shifted from past injuries and the view that "white society is to blame for everything."

"We're way past that stuff," Cisco Gallardo, one of these young leaders, says. "The question is, 'How will we take our history and put it to use?' "

It's a movement that reinforces Gonzales' strongest messages to youth: Strive to be a good human being. You are master of your own destiny.

"Never let the world change you. Change the world. It's yours."

What's a Chicano, I ask P.S.1 charter school students Angel Montez, Veronica Trujillo and Virginia King, all attending the symposium. King says that Chicano is to be both Mexican and American, but to be accepted fully by neither.

What do we teach our children? Like so much else, this day is about history and identity, which means that it is about stories, those we use to define ourselves and our place in the world. How do we embrace an often-painful history without becoming its captive?

I find the answers in the day's music, poetry, dance and conversations , in the celebration of Indian, African, European, Asian, the blend that is mestizo, in the message: You young people have much good to offer this world, so say it, sing it, dance it, paint it. Do not let anyone tell you that you are the outsider here, that your culture has nothing to offer.

Everywhere is repeated a mantra of self-determination, and with it, an admonition.

From gang-prevention worker Eddie Armijo: "By not going to school, by killing each other, by disrespecting your elders, you trample on the graves of Corky Gonzales and the leaders who came before you."

From Metro's Chicana/Chicano studies department chairman Ramon del Castillo: "You may not be responsible for being down, but you are responsible for getting up."

"The vision is equality," del Castillo tells me. "We want the same thing everyone else wants, cultural pride, dignity and to contribute in a positive way."

You may ask why you should care about any of this. Here's an answer. It comes from Luis Torres, who notes the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education just released its latest projections on high school graduates.

"A demographic sea change," the report says, means the U.S. is not only entering a period of overall decline in the number of graduates, but will see an ethnic shift among them "with rising numbers of graduates from populations our educational institutions have not served well - especially Hispanics - offsetting a substantial decline in white, non-Hispanic graduates."

What that means is obvious. "Our future has always been bound to that of the larger society," Torres says, "but more and more, the larger's future will be bound up with ours."

So, you see, we are, in our past, our present and our future, intertwined.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

• April 7, 2008

  10:20 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Konyok writes:

  As usual, Tina is right on that Hispanic youth are key to the future.
  But, she leads the reader into a quicksand of labels and identities in this piece. Having spent so much time on Border Street, she really ought to know better.
  Ruben Salazar's poetic definition of chicanismo notwithstanding, "chicano" has always been nearly synonomous with Mexican American, with a temporal component - the descendents of those Mexican citizens resident in Texas and the states conquered from Mexico in 1849 and the first great Mexican immigration after the Mexican revolution.
  What happened to the chicano movement?
  It was subsumed in the greater hispanic identity, and then the latino identity.
  It was overwhelmed by the immigration from Mexico since the 1970's. Immigrants who do not share the chicano sense of being aggrieved stakeholders in America, but, instead seek economic opportunities with little awareness of politics.
  Perhaps most of all, it was a victim of its success. The great sop that the "dominant culture" gave the chicano movement was bilingual education.
  Now thirty years later the same drop out rates and the same achievement gap plague the community. Thirty years later the same sanctification of Corky Gonzalez by the same insular chicano intellectuals.

• April 7, 2008

  1:26 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  redwhiteandBLUE writes:

  It's almost May 1st, so lets start with these articles, again.

• April 7, 2008

  3:05 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Rocco3454 writes:

  Yes, FYI - As long as Temple is editor of the News she'll have full charter to keep printing this racist dribble over-and-over-and-over again.

• April 7, 2008

  9:40 p.m.

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  ElGordo writes:

  Man do I feel so sorry for that little girl who made that comment. I think she watched the Selena movie one too many times. These Chicanos like many other minorities who are considered (hyphenated)-Americans spend too much time complaining and not taking action. I myself am the son of Mexican immigrants. Was born and raised in southeastern Colorado, so I have known my share of Chicanos. A lot of them are some of the biggest racists I have known. So my definition of Chicano, someone who can't speak English or Spanish correctly. Also to my Mexican Chicanos, yes you are Mexican, El Salvadorian, etc. Just because a dog is born in a stable does not make it a horse.

• April 7, 2008

  10:32 p.m.

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  redwhiteandBLUE writes:

  Yes, it's time to take action!!!!!!!

• April 8, 2008

  3:54 p.m.

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  Jimminy writes:

  Tina has said something very wise-that the present is the future of the past.We now live in what the love-and-peaceniks have made for us.How do you like it?

• April 9, 2008

  8:18 p.m.

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  arby writes:

  Sorry Tina,
  To compare Corky Gonzalez with Martin Luther King is completely stupid. Corky was violent and a thug. He made his living as a bail bonds man exploiting his own people. His Crusade For Justice tore this town up in the 60's and 70's There were violent shoot outs with the police and relations between Hispanics and Anglos have never returned to the level they were before Corky and his violent big mouth tried to destroy them entirely. He is no hero!

• April 9, 2008

  11:18 p.m.

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  redwhiteandBLUE writes:

  And his daughters school panders to all the illegals..$$$$$$!!!!!