Ethnic Envidia: WHEN ACHIEVEMENT MEANS SELLING OUT

The savaging of one by another over individual differences is learned behavior. Learned early. A friend recalls, with pain in her voice, a certain afternoon, almost 20 summers ago, in a small town in Arizona. Her mother had gone to great expense to buy her a pretty dress for school. When she arrived, she was teased by a group of Mexican children who insulted her attire for being too prim, too proper. “Aw, look at her pretty dress. She must think she’s white or something.” My friend ran home with tears dripping down her face and onto her blue dress.

Privately, I wonder where children learn to devour one another so viciously. It is, I suspect, something they learn from watching their elders.

As the nation’s fastest growing minority group, Mexican-Americans continue to fall behind other ethnic groups economically and politically. Part of the reason may be how they relate to one another.

On college campuses, among shelves of Shakespeare and vaulted dining halls, we train our intra-racial assassins. There, privileged young Latinos, afraid of being found out as ethnic frauds, sharpen their skills at destroying one another, fueled by hatred and competition and intolerance of personal differences.

A friend remembers seeing an ambitious Mexican-American law student at Boalt Hall sternly scolded by Chicano classmates. She had announced her intention of pursuing a career in corporate law. Since the Latino left contingent at the law school--those who did not fulfill their thirst for Mexican blood in college--had decided that the ethnically correct career path led not to corporate America but to public service, they took it upon themselves to harass the young woman for her error. When my friend entered the room, he found her sitting on a couch in tears while a handful of Chicano brethren lectured her with pointed fingers in a spectacle resembling a feeding frenzy.

And, there are professionals. Grown-ups who should know better. A Latino attorney in Beverly Hills tells the tale of being an ethnic outcast since he practiced law from what the Latino left considers the wrong side. As a federal prosecutor sending Mexican-American s to jail, he was unpopular with old buddies. “Can you believe what he’s doing now? Putting his own people in jail!” Sell-out.

And Latinos know well the concept of selling out, reserving for it in our collective hearts a special place. A dark, ugly place. The Latino left considers a sell-out someone who succeeds at the expense of his or her own cultural integrity. In Spanish, the word for such a person is an insult of particularly vicious bite. Even the angriest of Chicano activists use it sparingly. We say it with scorn: vendido.

There are more euphemisms: Un Tio Taco , a variation of the character of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic; Una Mosca En Leche, referring to a (brown) fly in (white) milk, trying to blend in. A coconut --literally, brown on the outside--where it is seen, but white on the inside--where it counts. What it means to be “white on the inside” is sorted out by those who toss terms like hand grenades.

When the grenades miss, there is more direct action. A Latino administrator at UCLA relays to me with glee the reaction of a group of Chicano undergraduates to a conservative Latina in the Reagan Administration. Someone was incensed enough by her remarks to break into her car and defecate on the front seat.

I saw the same official address a group of Latino students at Harvard University. She opened the floor to questions. In the Ivy League, our intra-racial destruction is more subtle. A Latino graduate student fired away. “Isn’t your reconciliatory tone influenced by the fact that your husband is white?” With that, the discourse digressed into a David Duke rally against miscegenation.

Harsh personal attacks between Mexican-Americans are old and tired remnants of an earlier, darker age. We accuse those fellow Chicanos with whom we disagree on political issues of somehow betraying us on a personal level.

There is yet another obstacle for Latinos to overcome before they may claim that elusive entity called unity. We direct it not at those who have “sold out,” but rather at those with whom we would like to trade places. Those of whom we are jealous. We admit its cancer among ourselves in whispered, frustrated voices. We acknowledge it with a squinted eye and a shake of our head-- envidia.

In English, the term means “envy,” the green-eyed desire to have what another has. With Mexican-Americans, the term assumes a special significance. It is an emotion directed most often at those who are considered too close to positions of wealth, prestige, influence or power.

It is there in the heart of the teen-age girl who resents her girlfriend for being more popular. It is there in the minds of Chicano students at Stanford who wish each other well in securing that summer internship, while hoping theirs will be the juiciest plum of all. And it is there, among family (entre familia) who accuse the Harvard Man in their ranks of thinking himself “better than the rest of us” and secretly hope that he will not accomplish the goals he has set for himself.

Perhaps it is there any time that a member of a disadvantaged community strives to crawl out of the bucket and is rewarded for the effort with snide remarks from those left behind. Too intelligent. Too ambitious. Too good for the lives that others live.

Strangely, the one individual whom I have seen generate the greatest amount of envidia among some Latinos has also enjoyed the most support from others. In the 1980s, Henry G. Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio, became the most prominent of Latino political figures.

During a chat with a Chicano Studies professor from Berkeley, I cited Cisneros as my choice for a speaker for a Harvard forum. He made a snide remark about what was then the mayor’s admission of marital indiscretion. Just recently, at the opening of the Republican Convention, there was another such remark following a Cisneros pledge to rally Latino support for Bill Clinton--and it was traced to U.S. Treasurer Catalina Vasquez Villalpando. To appease her party’s thirst for infidelity blood, this Latina on the Bush Administration offered up one of her own.

In my lifetime, I may see a Latino mayor of Los Angeles or governor of California. What I have not seen, perhaps will not see, are Latino professionals holding raised hands in unity. “You be the candidate this time, I’ll go next.” Ethnic solidarity, a successful economic and political tool for American Jews and other ethnic groups, eludes Latinos.

I had hoped my generation could stop playing these hurtful games and, finally, respect each other’s personal and ideological differences. For 50 years, the Old Guard has attributed the stagnation of the Latino population to external forces like white racism and discrimination. Yet, there are internal forces at work as well.

For Latinos, there has been little cooperation or camaraderie. And so little progress. Petty competition, personal intolerance and a refusal to let any of our own progress ahead of us make it unlikely that the children of the sun , however numerous, will ever inherit the earth.