Outrageous, insightful ‘Mexican’ sums it up

LOS ANGELES Police Chief William J. Bratton has promised “retraining” for the elite officers who shot foam bullets and projectiles into a crowd of mostly Latino participants at a May Day immigration rights rally at MacArthur Park. How exactly does one go about retraining officers to remember that Latinos very often speak Spanish (the now-notorious dispersal order was issued only in English) and to avoid beating the holy heck out of such people in the crowd as KTTV camerawoman Patti Ballaz, KPCC-FM reporter Patricia Nazario and Telemundo anchor Pedro Sevcec?

An unlikely set of rehabilitation guidelines can be found in Gustavo Arellano’s hilarious and testy new book, “¡Ask a Mexican!” It’s a compilation of columns he began writing in 2004 after OC Weekly Editor Will Swaim decided that this “recipient of a master’s degree in Latin American studies” and “truthful beaner” could help cure readers’ confusion over such pressing questions as: “Why do Mexicans swim in the ocean with their clothes on?” And “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t Mexicans understand?” It became an instant hit and now has a readership of more than a million. This collection is a sassy mix of Lenny Bruce rant and civil rights manual that might offer some good tips for Bratton while he’s planning his discrimination-detox experiment. Consider, for example, one of the book’s first question-answer exchanges:

“Why is it that when you enroll your non-English-speaking offspring in our school system and they get tested with all the other students, they bring down all the test scores of the school and my kids have to suffer because your kids don’t understand the language? So would you ... beaners PLEASE learn some ... English ... ?”

“Pissed-off White Man in San Clemente

“Dear Gabacho: You’re one of those parents who hate their kids learning to count up to three in espanol, right? And instead of embracing this confluence of cultures, you’d rather call Mexican kids beaners?! ... [R]emember that lower-performing schools tend to get more federal funding and attention. So really, say gracias for the current wave of Mexicans moving to your town -- they’re ensuring [it] won’t become another Detroit.”

This combative dialogue might seem like the last kind of race-rhetoric we need. Arellano’s smirking diatribe mocks Anglos’ fears of African Americans. Moreover, his use of the word “gabacho,” the derogatory term “Mexicans call gringos” (as Arellano tells us in his useful glossary), is only one of the many slurs in his columns. The most popular insult is “wab,” which he calls “the Orange County version of wetback: (“We Mexican-Americans in Orange County created wab to describe our wabby brothers and sisters ... what Mexicans in Mexico call the poorer, rural Mexicans -- what wabs call wabs.”)

But in Arellano’s hands, such trash-talking allows people to have an authentic, if still often toxic, exchange about race, differences and hate:

“Why are Mexicans known as greasers? Is it because they spread rancid lard from their dirty kitchens all over themselves after bathing?”

“Greaser Greg

“Dear Gabacho ... the only grease we put on ourselves is the Three Flowers brilliantine Mexican men use to lacquer up their hair to a shine so [intense that] astronomers frequently mistake the reflection off our heads for the Andromeda Galaxy.... But the reason greaser maintains such staying power as an epithet against Mexicans ... is because it refers to ... our diet.... But the food hate goes both ways, Greg -- bolillos (French rolls) and mayonesa (mayonnaise) are what we call gabachos.”

“¡Ask a Mexican!” engages in a candid public dialogue about racism, yet into almost every grumpy answer he also shoehorns educational tidbits about Mexican dynamics, familial customs and culture. Why, for example, would he answer a hysterical question about “blue-collar, illiterate Mexicans [being] more prone to cheating on their wives than other races” with University of Chicago-compiled statistics proving that “Latino rates of infidelity” are the same as other Americans? It is to educate folks out of their racist assumptions and also to prove that Latinos and Anglos have more in common than might be supposed.

One of the most curious anti-hate messages in “¡Ask a Mexican!” appears when Arellano suggests that Mexicans and Anglos have a shared love of rock en roll:

“I remember going to Metallica concerts and there being as many gabachos as Mexicans. But I thought Mexicans only liked mariachis?

“I am Iron Hombre

“Dear Gabacho: Many gabachos get surprised when Mexicans profess to like a music form that doesn’t involve accordions, tubas, or men on horseback, but one of the few places where Mexicans and gabachos exist in peace is the mosh pit.”

After Bratton’s officers have undergone Arellano’s brand of rage therapy and education, and built bridges over shared culture, maybe they’ll learn to exercise empathy instead of unwarranted force. One suspects that police act badly when they cease to view marchers as fellow sentient creatures whose revelry and exuberant resistance is born of anguish. The Mexican’s answer to a question about fiestas shows a wisdom that may well extend to the scene witnessed on May Day:

“Why is it that when you invite Mexicans to a party, they feel compelled to bring along thirty of their relatives?

“Not Enough Food for Everyone

“Dear Gabacho: Mexicans and parties -- was there ever a coupling more spectacularly grotesque? We drink mucho, we eat mucho, we fight mucho, we love mucho, we mucho mucho. Examining the Mexican propensity to party, Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote, ‘The explosive, dramatic, sometimes even suicidal manner in which we strip ourselves, surrender ourselves, is evidence that something inhibits and suffocates us. Something impedes us from being. And since we cannot or dare not confront our own selves, we resort to the fiesta.’ “Arellano and Paz offer much needed common sense: Latinos are human beings to be dealt with respectfully, not insects to be crushed. What’s required is an honest, peaceable public conversation about the damage prejudice and the suppression of free speech does to our society. Reading the witty and fearless “¡Ask a Mexican!” is a good start.

Yxta Maya Murray is a professor at Loyola Law School and a novelist whose latest work is “The Queen Jade.”

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¡Ask a Mexican!

Gustavo Arellano

Scribner: 240 pp., $20