Well, shrugging off our absence from such lists apparently isn’t so simple for many Latinos in this country. By now I have overheard probably dozens of comments from Latinos about “The NEWSWEEK 100.” In San Francisco, where I live, patrons in a local taqueria championed their own personal favorites: Edward James Olmos. Christina. Raul Julia. And at Stanford, where I teach, students defended their own choices. Sandra Cisneros. Ruben Blades. Gloria Anzaldua. Culture Clash.
Having no Latinos on the NEWSWEEK list might not get under our skin were it not so utterly familiar. We Latinos are regularly treated as if we aren’t “big-time players”-usually by many of the same potentates who made the list. Check out the latest books promoted by the prestigious houses, the latest movies released by the big studios, the latest (off- and off-off-) Broadway productions and every fall’s new TV schedule. We’re all to conclude, I take it, that even in 1992, there are almost no stories we tell, almost no stories to be told about us and almost no roles we competently fill.
But our absence from the nation’s consciousness isn’t limited to “simple” matters of pop culture. When Los Angeles exploded last spring, it took most people weeks before they realized Latinos were involved everywhere-as burned-out merchants, unemployed workers, injured bystanders, eager looters and, yes, as common residents in the neighborhoods like South-Central. Latinos simply didn’t fit the stock story lines about race and urban problems. Apparently, it had been decades since most folks had taken a careful look not just at Los Angeles but at Chicago, New York, Dallas and even Washington, D.C.
In fact, when people visualize the goings-on in this country they most often don’t even seem to see the 25 million or so Latinos who live here. Although the nine states with the highest concentrations of Latinos account for 202 of the total 538 electoral votes in this country (three fourths of the 270 votes needed to win), the presidential campaigns in those states look like spitting images of the bus and train rides the candidates have taken everywhere else. Whatever the outcome in November, “even” Latinos get the point. The candidates apparently believe we influence presidential politics about as much as NEWSWEEK thinks we influence popular culture.
Of course, overlooking Latinos may seem justified. If everyone with clout is interested only in other big-time players, then we probably just don’t cut it. We certainly don’t produce major sitcoms, run the National Endowment for the Humanities or own the country’s largest chain of bookstores. And, though we write, direct and design, only a handful of us have become household names. We obviously don’t have easily identified spokespersons pumping out pithy quotes to journalists trying to meet deadlines. And, even if our voting numbers are on the rise, we may still “give away” our votes so predictably that national candidates think nothing of blowing us off.
But these justifications are too facile. Maybe we haven’t yet hit the big time not because of our lack of talent, insight or interest but because of how doors get opened, how media networks operate and how votes get diluted. In any event, it seems profoundly disingenuous for presidential candidates, NEWSWEEK and everybody else with sizable clout to deny that it is within their power to make some Latinos influential. Think only of how the New Right and the media marketed Linda Chavez as an expert on pretty much everything.
It’s not obvious what Latinos should do about being so far outside the nation’s consciousness. One understandable impulse is to continue to push for representation in matters of cultural and political significance. We might insist that NEWSWEEK reserve a few slots on its lists, that the media nominally mention Latinos when talking about race relations and urban problems (besides, it’s not-and never has been-just a black/ white thing) and that the campaigns nod in our direction in their strategies. Change habits and minds will follow, goes this familiar way of thinking.
But let’s face it. Much as some have tried, this approach has not paid big dividends. Even if we had a few more representatives, it would hardly prove a panacea for most of us. Just ask low-income African-Americans whether the conspicuousness of Jesse Jackson or Spike Lee has done much to get them anything better than dead-end jobs, abysmal education and a lot of flak for allegedly being “pathologically” attached to welfare.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not against our making elite lists, being on people’s minds and being taken into account in national campaigns. But making “The NEWSWEEK 100” is hardly worth spending our time scrambling around, too often at the edges and near the bottom, squeezing ourselves into categories and programs often formulated with other groups in mind. The fact is, more than 5 million of us-fully one quarter of us-live in poverty; more than 42 percent of our young adults dropped out of school in 1990, and a disproportionate number of us face threatening environmental dangers.
What we Latinos need is not so much popular recognition as effective ways of working together-and with others wherever possible-to fundamentally change the entirely unacceptable situation we still find ourselves in. And for that we must now look-as many of us always have-not so much to the powers that be as to our own considerable collective ingenuity.
