Laughter, Tears in El Centro

Comedian Paul Rodriguez’s lightning wit is paralyzed. He sips a margarita at Lucy’s El Adobe and ponders the quandary he’s in.

Not in his most farfetched stand-up routine could he have invented a tale in which a city would seize on him as a symbol of equality. Yet in the desert town of El Centro, a group of residents wants to name a street for him. The idea was meant as a gesture of gratitude for Rodriguez’s years of free shows and donations. Then it became much more: It turned out that no street in El Centro, which is 80% Latino, bore a Spanish surname.

Political forces have lined up. The local Spanish-language newspaper endorses Paul Rodriguez Boulevard. The English-language paper opposes it. A thousand people have signed petitions supporting the proposal. (“We don’t exist,” an organizer complains. “We’re the majority but we don’t exist.”) The mayor and chamber of commerce are cool to the idea.

Sometimes a seat at the back of a bus is more than just a seat. In El Centro a street sign is more than just a street sign. And so Paul Rodriguez, one of America’s best-known Latino entertainers, has become a sort of Rosa Parks of the Imperial Valley.

Which is why he is torn. He’s no hero, he says. He’s not Cesar Chavez. The Play-Doh face scrunches. Shouldn’t I be dead for something like a street? Why me, anyway? I’m just a guy who made folks there laugh once or twice.

He knows this is a vast oversimplification. For the last four years, the onetime migrant farm kid and the scrappy rural outpost have had an ongoing love affair. They are mirror images--of barrios, of lettuce and alfalfa, of poverty and possibilities.

“I love El Centro because it’s just like me,” he says. “El Centro is a place that nobody ever thought about or had any expectations for. If I were a city I’d be El Centro.”

His first gig there was for the Police Athletic League. He figured he’d drive the 220 miles, tell a few jokes, collect his paycheck and leave. But he kept coming back, and with each visit, El Centro dug in a little deeper, bringing back memories of a childhood in the fields where his parents had harvested crops before moving to San Pedro, East L.A., Fresno and Compton.

“I’m crying, and my mother has me on her back,” Rodriguez recalled. “I remember my mother ripping open a beautiful, perfect head of lettuce and pulling out its heart. I remember her long black hair and how she sang me a little song and gave me the tender leaves from the inside of that lettuce. Then she threw the rest away, afraid to get caught.”

Up and down the state his parents picked cotton, tomatoes, lettuce and oranges to support five girls and two boys. In a good year, Paul’s father, Pablo, made $8,000.

“One day ... I could hear the sound of a plane coming toward us. My mother grabs me screaming: ‘No respires! No respires!’ and shoves me inside her rebozo (a traditional Mexican shawl). I’m struggling because I couldn’t breathe, and I’m so afraid. I’m thinking that my mother is going to kill me.” His voice trembles. “But the planes were dropping poison--pesticide--on the workers and she was trying to save me.”

When his father died in 1996, an autopsy showed that his aorta had gradually disintegrated, a legacy of his years in the fields, Rodriguez said.

“Those bastards wouldn’t allow migrant farm workers an hour’s warning back then. God only knows how many miscarriages, how many people were disabled, how many lives, were lost--all brown lives--because of that. They’d have the audacity to say these chemicals are harmless. Tell that to my father when his aorta busted. People say, ‘Paul, there’s so much anger in your comedy.’ Well, it didn’t just come out of thin air.”

Today, the man who can pull $100,000 in Las Vegas plays El Centro for free. Rodriguez tells jokes atop hay trailers to an adoring crowd in the Police Athletic League youth center parking lot--now paved with money raised at his local shows. On his dime, the league has taken kids to Disneyland and to Sacramento to meet their local legislators, sent a team to a national boxing tournament and built the 6,000-square-foot multipurpose room called Rodriguez Hall.

The street-renaming effort is a thank-you from the folks in the league, who are spearheading the campaign.

If Rodriguez appears simultaneously grateful and wary of the honor, it is because he’s already carrying La Raza on his back. True, he has nobody but himself to blame; it is his own choice to be the self-appointed standard-bearer for all Latino causes, and to see life through the eyes of the maids and the cooks and the carwash attendants. He rages lovingly against his people’s political apathy and naivete. La Raza is a buried emotional treasure Rodriguez discovered, but it also weighs him down, and if the street proposal goes through, El Centro will be on his back as well.

“See, the problem is, I just don’t want to ever disappoint anybody,” he says. “Even worse, a whole city!”

This is not just idle fretting. Rodriguez has a talent for sabotaging himself. Part of the problem is that he simply will not shut up. Agents and managers flinch, Hollywood recoils; it is constantly suggested that he’d get much farther if he’d only be a little more restrained and a little less Mexican.

In the early 1990s, Rodriguez was the Johnny Carson of Latin television, hosting a bilingual talk show broadcast in 17 countries. Then, against all marketing advice, he featured farm labor rights activist Cesar Chavez. Supermarkets, furious at Chavez’s calls for boycotts, yanked their ads. The show was later canceled.

At a formal White House dinner, Rodriguez recalls, he called Mexico’s then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari a crook. “I can’t understand it. I simply tell the president of Mexico that people are starving because he’s the biggest thief we’ve ever had, and I’m asked to leave?”

On a live Spanish-language television-awards show, Rodriguez, using hand gestures, prophesied that the sheriff’s deputies who had been videotaped beating Mexican immigrants in Riverside would be sexually assaulted by Mexican convicts once they landed in prison. He was fired in mid-show.

He broke into comedy commuting by bus from Compton to the Comedy Store in Hollywood, making $315 a week, often with tasteless ethnic jokes. He would debut a few years later on the “Tonight Show” with: “What are the first words a Mexican baby hears? ‘Attention Kmart Shoppers.’ ” Everyone he loved hated his act; family called from Mexico, his parents were ashamed. The National Council of La Raza took him to task.

“I wish I could take it back, but you know what? We were living in wretched poverty and I would’ve done whatever it took.”

When he got his first network TV advance for a short-lived series called “a.k.a. Pablo,” he moved his parents out of Compton, buying his mother the Fresno ranch where she once worked as a maid. His father lived long enough to see Rodriguez achieve comfortable celebrity but remained disappointed that his son had not become a lawyer. “My father died thinking I had wasted a rational mind.”

He has three movies in post-production now, but he always returns to the Laugh Factory, where he and owner Jamie Masada began Monday “Latino Night” 16 years ago.

On a recent Monday he takes the stage in jeans, a T-shirt and baseball cap and tweaks his outrage into humor. The mostly Latino audience howls with laughter that the city’s majority ethnic group was too pathetic to elect Antonio Villaraigosa mayor. And the black people in the room crack up at their sense of betrayal over the rejected reappointment of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks:

“I was disappointed in my African American friends. They voted for [L.A. Mayor] Jimmy Hahn,” Rodriguez says. “But that’s OK, because then he turned around and [raped] you like a plantation master!”

And what is it with all these Latinos giving their kids Caucasian names? “Where are all the Juanas? Why are they all Jennifers and Britneys? What the hell is a Britney? It’s like self-hatred.”

Upstairs after the show, a reporter wonders why virtually all the comic’s jokes were race-based. Rodriguez uncoils. Because race determines everything, he says heatedly--who you date, how much money you make, where you live. Did he ever wish he was white? “I’m ashamed to say it, but I did. I was 8 years old and I had a crush on a little redhead and she said, ‘My mother says you’re a wetback.’ I went home crying to my mother, ‘I’m a wetback, this girl I like said so.’ ”

He became proud to be Latino in 1967. Caught up in a Chicano street demonstration against police brutality, the 13-year-old Rodriguez was relishing “brown power” and heaving a rock until his furious father yanked him into the house. He’s less angry today. Driving a $100,000 Porsche home to a million-dollar house in the San Fernando Valley will do that, he allows.

He lives alone. Women want a man who is around, he says, and Rodriguez never has been. “I make the same excuses my father made,” he shakes his head. “He had to leave to go make a living.”

They understand these things in El Centro. Folks who favor naming a street for Rodriguez rarely mention his films, television shows or even his performances in town. Instead they talk of his perseverance, his generosity and humility. People who have barely spoken to him describe his journey from poverty to celebrity in deeply personal terms.

Imagine the sacrifices, says Felix Meza, the reporter/photographer/editor/publisher of the local Spanish-language daily. “The years on the road, the time spent far away from his family, the loneliness. We know what it takes for someone to get to where he is so that he’s able to come back here and help El Centro,” Meza says.

“I can tell that he’s figured some things out about life,” says Martha Martinez, the driving force behind the street-naming effort. But more than anything, in a place where unemployment is 22% and the per capita income is barely $14,000 a year, he makes them proud. In his eyes, they believe, they are not just a poor town with migrant workers but people with a rich culture and ancient roots. It is a measure of El Centro’s minimal prospects that some insist that a Paul Rodriguez Boulevard would tell children they too could leave the fields and be somebody.

Rodriguez has changed lives, said Eric Scoville, executive director of the Police Athletic League. “Every time I call Paul he says, ‘Is it for the kids? All right, I’ll be leaving in a couple of hours.’ Now he sponsors a soccer team and donates anything I call him for.”

Rodriguez says he feels as though he is heading home as he drives past San Diego, through the Kumeyaay Indian reservation to where the Golden Acorn Casino is the grandest building around, where desolate bleakness becomes desolate beauty.

El Centro, home to 10,000 families, is placid, but taking a stand on Paul Rodriguez Boulevard is touchy.

“Like walking through a dairy field,” says Mayor Larry Grogan. “Anywhere you step is bad news.”

Grogan has nothing against Rodriguez (“God bless him”) but feels street naming should be a posthumous honor. . Others have suggested the city’s most famous pro athlete, 1940s bantamweight boxing champ Manuel Ortiz. Opinions do not fall neatly along racial lines. There are Anglos who support the Rodriguez honor and Latinos who oppose it.

For some Latinos the issue has reopened a painful memory: A few years ago, the school board turned down a suggestion to name a new school after Cesar Chavez on the grounds that he was a controversial figure. But later, when the state opened an employment center on Main Street, it gave it Chavez’s name.

“We know that it won’t be easy to win,” newspaper editor Meza says.

Martha Martinez hauls out charts and graphs showing that nearby Brawley has 14 streets with Latino names; Calexico has 50.

“How do we make them believe we’re important?” she says.

El Centro’s City Council put off a decision by asking its staff to develop a street-naming policy. Until then, the Paul Rodriguez Boulevard movement continues to simmer.

Back at Lucy’s El Adobe, the margaritas are finished and Rodriguez is still protesting (“I’m not anybody to name a street for. I mean, boulevard.”) Owner Lucy Casado stops to rib him about giving her an autographed picture for her celebrity wall. She’s been after him about it for almost 20 years now.

“Come on, Paul, when are you going to give me one?” she pleads.

“When I make it,” he answers, half-joking. “When I’m somebody.”