Heeding the Sound of Music

The music was unfamiliar and I couldn’t understand the language, but the joy that radiated through the evening was unmistakable. I needed that.

Hardly anyone spoke English at Fina Estampa, a Peruvian restaurant tucked into an unlikely corner of Chatsworth, and, while this may come as a surprise, I don’t speak Spanish.

It didn’t matter. Music has its own way of communicating across cultural barriers, whether it comes from a lute or, in this case, from guitars and bongo drums.

One senses the vitality of a people in Peru’s criollo melodies, a rhythmic blend of the country’s black, native and Hispanic populations.

Peru is the land of the Incas, so there is substance to the elation, adding an almost mystical quality to the heady tempos that filled the place.

More than 200 people, mostly Peruvians, gathered at Fina Estampa. They ate, they drank, they shouted Viva Peru! and danced a dance that seemed halfway between the tango and a two-step.

I’ve always found it difficult to be the cool observer, detached from the events I’m witnessing. I absorb moods. I become a part of the moment, an element of its creation.

So it was on this evening of celebration with immigrants. Not moving from the table I occupied, I danced with a people whose enthusiasm rang past the midnight hour and whose spirit stamps a vivid imprint on the city.

It’s something we need to remember.

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I was there partly because it’s my job to view the components that comprise the sum of Los Angeles beyond its neon streets and trendy clubs.

Peruvians make up only a small part of the county’s 3.3 million Latinos, listed among the 50,000 “others” included in our Hispanic population.

Their culture emerges in quiet corners of L.A., and that corner in Chatsworth is certainly among the quietest.

Carlos and Elena Choy, natives of Lima, opened Fina Estampa about six weeks ago, inheriting a site which at different times has been the locale of a Greek restaurant, an American breakfast place and a Jewish deli.

Whether or not it will survive as a Peruvian dinner house remains to be seen.

Observing the quiet corner was only one of the reasons I was there. The other was to cleanse myself, through the music of America’s “other” people, of the politics of hatred that have seized the day.

I have measured with growing concern the malice fired like spit toward the immigrants of L.A. and the rest of the country.

I cringe at the bombardment of malignity emerging in a political campaign that will do nothing but divide us, no matter who wins. The devil of power inhabits both parties.

Our schizophrenic attitude of beckoning toward the huddled masses yearning to be free then slamming the golden door in their faces has characterized U.S. policy from the beginning.

Though vital elements of our population, “other” peoples and “other” languages are looked upon with suspicion, distrust and outright hatred. We deny the roots of our own origin to target those of the fearsome “others.”

We may regret that.

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I’ve heard all the xenophobic arguments I care to hear, offered in both red-faced rage and in the murky pseudologic of fear, on why immigration is destroying our economic infrastructure.

“Illegals” are the initial targets of the hostility, but make no mistake, anyone with a different look and a different language will do.

Through a political process of power-making, we’ve institutionalized cultural hatred by allowing greedy and stupid people to utilize it for their own gain.

Study the commercials. Listen to the speeches. Tremble to the barely concealed vitriol that has become the hallmark of a campaign aimed at the nation’s heart and soul.

There’s historical familiarity to the sounds of malice. The Indians were the victims once. So were the blacks. So were the Chinese. So were the Italians. So were the Slavs. Now it’s the Latinos. Who’s next?

You get the idea.

So I went to the place of the “others” to listen to a music from a country whose history predates our own. As their rhythms filled my senses, I wondered if we would ever reach the place where the elements that divide us would be the ones that might someday unite us, where our differences would be celebrated rather than scorned.

Buddha warned that there is no shark like hatred and there is no hatred like that which ultimately turns inward. In the end, the shark, if left to feed, could end up destroying us all.

Al Martinez can be reached via the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com