‘The Poem’ Is Just One Symptom of an Epidemic

The atmosphere inside El Mercado de Los Angeles grew very quiet when I asked some lunch patrons if they knew about The Poem. You know about The Poem.

It’s that ode to America that freshman Republican Assemblyman William J. (Pete) Knight of Palmdale passed out to his GOP colleagues in Sacramento last week. It said Mexicans are lazy welfare recipients and cunning schemers who laugh at U.S. taxpayers.

I know what I think of it. But I wanted to know what others of Mexican descent thought, so I wandered into the mercado on 1st Street, looking for reactions.

Several middle-age men standing near Sergio Martinez fixed their eyes at me as I approached them and explained my mission. Martinez, whose weathered features told of many years of working outdoors, said without hesitation:

“I am an American citizen and I still get called a mojado . A wetback. What kind of people do that kind of thing, writing poems, calling people names? Making fun of them? They think it is funny? I get angry when I hear such things. To me, it is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Let them be called wetbacks and see if they like it. I have worked all my life, tried to be a good citizen, even went into the Navy.

“For what? To be laughed at by our highest officials?”

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I suppose it’s a sign of the times.

We’re citizens of a troubled city, trying to find comfort and reassurance in a town we thought we knew. Places and things we used to cherish are now cheapened and devalued. I drove up to Santa Barbara recently to give a speech and was taken by surprise that graffiti-covered road signs disappeared once I crossed the county line. I’d become used to them.

But beneath the tension and disappointment in the city is a racism that is bubbling up with alarming frequency.

There are people in our society who are sick and mean. They blame all of society’s troubles on somebody else. And they use profanity and obscenity-laced humor to get their point across.

The sickness, this racism, is on the rise.

It coincides with the public discussion of who’s to blame for our city’s decline. It coincides with plans to prohibit street gangs from city parks. It coincides with the bills introduced in Sacramento aimed at slashing public assistance for illegal immigrants. It coincides with the grief many Chicanos feel over the death of Cesar Chavez, probably the greatest Latino born in this country in this century.

It even coincides with the dispute at UCLA over whether the Chicano studies program should be elevated into a department.

Early last week, Art Torres, the Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who took up the UCLA students’ demand for a separate department, got a letter from the San Fernando Valley that called him a “stinky Nazi-fascist bully” and a “primitive monkey.”

“You will get a bullet in your mentally sick head” because of his position, the letter told him.

A spokesman for Torres said it was the worst piece of hate mail the lawmaker has received in 20 years of public service.

This brings into sharper focus the hurt and the anger Martinez and hundreds of thousands of law-biding residents of Mexican descent felt about Knight’s racist attempt at humor.

At El Mercado, Martinez got angrier the more he talked. “I fought for this country,” he said. “I am not one who invites his relatives to come from Mexico. I obey the laws.”

Eventually, he started to cry.

The pain was equally evident in the voice of a fellow freshman colleague of Knight’s, Assemblywoman Martha M. Escutia (D-Huntington Park). She likened the hurt caused by The Poem to the time when--as an 11-year-old girl growing up in East L.A.--she was called a wetback by a classmate.

“I slapped the girl,” Escutia recalled on the phone from Sacramento. “That’s the only time I’ve ever resorted to violence. I went nuts over Knight’s poem. I was thinking, ‘How can I have an impact without going ballistic?’ ”

She hit upon an idea. For each day that she’s in the Assembly, Escutia will read into the record the names of five Latino constituents who have become naturalized U.S. citizens, believers in the American way of government.

She began last Thursday with Antonia Chaidez, Solomon Lopez Coronado, Mercedes Ortiz, Fernando Argudo and Sara Carpio.

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Knight has apologized for passing out The Poem, saying he is not a bigot.

I asked Escutia if she believed him. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”

“No,” I replied. Underneath the veneer of a state legislator lurks someone who doesn’t belong in Sacramento.