Re-Imagining America

We might imagine ourselves to be King Midas in the American culture we consume and create, touching outlanders with our satellite fingers and transfixing them with the desire for Cadillacs, ranch houses and Lakers tickets--a desire that can look to us like desperation in the case of our neighbor, Mexico, especially when one considers what risks its citizens sometimes take to cross our border.

But in “Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail,” Ruben Martinez reveals the flip side of American imperialism by demonstrating how Mexican immigrants are “protagonists” and not mere recipients of a “transnational or ‘global’ culture.”

The centerpiece of his book is a tragedy that occurred in Temecula, Calif., on April 6, 1996, when three brothers--Benjamin, Salvador and Jamie Chavez--died after the Border Patrol pursued the truck driven by their “coyote” (a smuggler of immigrants) on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash.

The Chavez brothers hailed from Cheran, an Indian town in the highlands of Michoacan, which supplies a number of seasonal workers to the United States; local authorities estimate that about one-third of Cheran’s population travels to the States each spring, though many return home in the fall.

Martinez, an associate editor at Pacific News Service, interviewed the grieving Chavez family, then began to track their lives as well as those of other Cheran residents before and after they made the hazardous journey north. In his narrative, we find a migrant worker anesthetizing himself to the pain of his poverty with frenzied bacchanals; the mourning mother, Maria Elena Chavez, indemnified for her losses by the Mexican government with gifts of cigarettes and too-fancy soap; a mother and child crossing the border, stifling their cries from the pain of hunger and dehydration.

There’s gut-grinding pathos in these pages, for Martinez is a tenderhearted witness to the travails in Cheran, but these immigrants are not mere suffering aspirants nor antagonists to American dreams. Instead, Martinez shows us also how these Latinos are creative re-fashioners of U.S. culture in their country as well as ours.

For example, he describes the first rock concert given in the village, where one of the three dozen attendees wears that flag of youthful malcontent--the American rock concert T-shirt, but with a twist. In lieu of Limp Bizkit or the Notorious B.I.G., his bears the name of “an anarchist group from Los Angeles called Brujeria (Witchcraft). Brujeria’s emblem includes the visage of Mexico’s most famous non-Indian Indian revolutionary, Subcommander Marcos, spokesman for the indigenous rebels of Chiapas, in his world-famous, ski-masked, pipe-smoking pose.”

In addition, Martinez gives an incisive account of how some Cheran men wear the buzzed hairdos and baggy pants modeled by African American musicians such as Tupac Shakur. This hip-hop pose is used by Purepechas (the moniker for residents of Cheran) as a mask of defiance and protection in a complicated charade that they adopt not only to defend against the vicissitudes of their hard life and out of admiration for black superstars but also in perpetuation of racist myths concerning African American aggression.

These are only examples of the play with American culture in Mexico. Another transmogrification occurs over here. Their pilgrimages do not result in just the “assimilation” of the Mexicans. Martinez also demonstrates how the pilgrims dare American identity out of its safe haven by demonstrating that their work ethic is little different from that of the industrious folks of the heartland.

But integration is not always so smooth. One of the Purepechas shocked some Wisconsinites by slaughtering a pig for a christening, causing a shop owner to protest, “If we let them get away with that, then maybe they’ll bring chickens in and slaughter them. I mean, this is a village and there are rules and regulations.”

Moreover, the presence of brown bodies caused something of a sexual earthquake in Norwalk, Wis.; apparently, local women were more than a little interested in the imported Latin lovers. “We had girls coming in from neighboring towns,” one shopkeeper says, “and I can’t say they were getting paid, but they seemed to be acting like prostitutes, or they were runaways.”

These anxieties reveal that immigrant Latinos challenge American society in the same way that our culture disrupts the traditions of Mexico and other countries. We encroach, they encroach; we are fascinated with and scared by one another. Obviously, the difference between American cultural imperialism and Mexican play with American culture flows from the disparity of power and money: The traumatic accounts of border crossings at the center of the book underscore the imbalance. But through these beautifully written and important stories, Martinez shows us how “America” is being re-imagined by its uninvited, its disrespected, its invisible, and he shows us that they will change us, whether we like it or not.