Just a Quick Word on the Hot Topic of the Day

As hundreds of thousands of people descended upon City Hall last month, sights and sounds of pride and protest pulsed against my office window. “¡Raza si, migra no!” (People, yes! Border Patrol, no!), went the chants. “Ahora marchamos, manana votamos” (Today we march, tomorrow we vote), read the signs.

But of all the words swirling around the issue of immigration, none has grabbed my attention quite like one in Ruben Martinez’s piece about his fraught encounter with Victor, a Salvadoran who “had hiked about 12 miles into U.S. territory and could not make it any farther” (“The Crossing,” page 20).

“The migrant stumbles through the desert and I after him,” Martinez declares. “Thus I am the literary migra: I will trap the mojado within the distorting borders of representation--a problem no writer has ever resolved.”

Mojado? Although I don’t speak Spanish, my command of the language is decent enough that it leapt right out at me: Martinez was calling Victor “wet,” as in “wetback.”

I hadn’t seen the expression woven so casually into a story before. My mind raced. Was this OK--or too pejorative to publish?

The first thing I tried to determine was whether, if I went with Martinez’s language, I could trot out the “but-we’ve-written-that-before” defense. No way. In the last three years, according to The Times’ database, the paper has printed mojado on a mere half-dozen occasions. And all of those references had to do with one of two things--either food (as in a sauce-drenched burrito mojado) or music (a la singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona’s recent single that goes by the M-word).

Yet more and more, I learned, it’s the spirit of those songs (especially the longtime work of the Mexican norteno band Los Tigres del Norte) that’s being echoed on the street. “We’re at a moment when the term is shifting to mean something of resistance, of pride” says Patricia Zavella, a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at UC Santa Cruz.

In a sense, it’s like “Okie.” That once was a dirty word. But by the 1970s, the stigma had been knocked right out of it. “For the first time it had become acceptable, almost fashionable, to be an Okie,” James Gregory notes in his book “American Exodus.” Suddenly, not only was Merle Haggard crooning about Okies from Muskogee, but the label was being stamped on bumper stickers and trucker’s hats.

At first, Zavella explains, mojado had a quality of resignation, as if to say, “I’m here illegally, but I’m going to make the best of it.”

Increasingly, though, it is being worn with outright honor. “A lot of illegals have overcome incredible discrimination and risk to their lives to get here,” Zavella says. By grabbing an idiom of hate and making it their own, she adds, the message is plain--and should be heeded by both sides of the current debate: “We’re here, and we’re going to stay. And if you kick us out, we’ll return.”