Documenting the Mexican American Experience

For once, the camera is on comedian Paul Rodriguez and he’s not trying to be funny.

He’s just talking. He’s doing a sit-down interview for a television documentary on Mexican Americans. So he gets off the stand-up shtick, turns down the show-biz volume and reveals a real person beneath the comic mask.

He even lets himself shed a tear. Just one. Just enough to convey how much it meant for this ethnic funnyman to rise above his childhood poverty and afford a grand gesture of gratitude for his parents.

Rodriguez tells us his farm-worker family was so poor that his father made up excuses for Santa Claus missing stops on the migrant trail. One example: “You have to have a house for Santa to be able to go there.”

After succeeding as an entertainer, Rodriguez bought his parents a house on 40 acres. It was the same house his mother had cleaned as a maid, on the same land his family had worked picking plums.

“I remember giving the deed to my father and getting emotional like I’m doing now,” he says, pretending to scratch the side of his nose to camouflage that tear. “It was quite a day.”

Rodriguez’s serious side is captured in the one-hour documentary titled simply “The Mexican Americans,” which first airs Wednesday on PBS stations as part of the network’s pledge drive. It was co-produced by WLIW-TV in New York and KOCE-TV in Huntington Beach.

The program features the usual cast of notables, such as actor Ricardo Montalban, playwright Luis Valdez and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. But the Orange County connection puts the spotlight on people who might have otherwise been overlooked in a national production.

They include Bishop Jaime Soto, attorney Jess Araujo and restaurateur Maria Elena Avila. These are folks I’ve known for years in covering Orange County, which is still wrongly portrayed as a white-flight refuge from L.A.’s melting pot. The county is now 30% Latino, and has recently served as ground zero for anti-immigrant movements and the political empowerment of the Latino community.

It’s astounding how many of these prominent--even wealthy--people are just one generation removed from stoop labor. Despite anti-immigrant assumptions, the story of many Mexican Americans is one of rapid assimilation.

“I grew up not in a day-care center but running up and down the groves and the rows of string beans, raspberries and apples,” recounts Gaddi Vasquez, former Orange County supervisor and now PR honcho with Southern California Edison. “We played while [our parents] worked.”

His father had an unusual rule at the dinner table: The children had to be bilingual about their food. “If you couldn’t pronounce its name in Spanish, you couldn’t eat it,” says Vasquez, an affable emcee on the banquet circuit.

The documentary covers well-traveled territory: language, discrimination, religion, civil rights, business, military contributions, music and food.

Nothing new. This is not a production that keeps you riveted with its eye-opening research or its narrative sweep. At times, in fact, it appears somewhat slapped together, like fund-raising filler.

The show’s major flaw is its PSN, its Pretentiously Solemn Narrator. He speaks slow, stilted English with a stereotypical accent. Somebody should have told him that English is the primary language of most Mexican Americans, as illustrated by the show’s easy-talking interview subjects.

Like Santa Ana book dealer Rueben Martinez, who tells of growing up without books in his house, except for a Bible so precious his mother hid it.

And singer Vikki Carr, who tells of her mother turning the saints upside down or putting gum on their mouths to punish them because they didn’t give her father work.

And Texas state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, who tells of her suitors undergoing “the Sunday scrutiny” after any date, a ritual of approval in which “the grandmas kind of had really final say.”

The anecdotes and memories make this documentary worth watching.

“The farmers usually would treat their John Deeres [tractors] and their equipment better than they treated their Mexicans,” remembers Rodriguez, the comedian. “It was hard to believe in God.

“ ‘If there is a God, Momma, why is it that everyone I see out here picking bell peppers, everyone I see, is Mexican and we’re on our knees. And everybody standing up has got a hat and is white?

“ ‘What? Does God love us less? Are we children of a lesser God?’ ”

Rodriguez wasn’t laughing.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com