








conomic and socially turbulent I  mes. Whether these moments are crises of growth or decline will be measured by a host of indicators. Which of I ese indicators are the most salient is, of course, to pose I another question that is often determined by our selec
tive invocation of historical materials and ethnic symbols as guides for contemporary analysis of ethnic and racial factors in political action.
Looking Ahead: Challenge Questions
International events will continue to frequently affect the United States. In what respect do such events have special significance to ethnic populations?
Does the relationship of ethnic Americans to changes and challenges in the world arena provide a strength or a liability for the well-being of American interests? Does conflict between ethnic interests and national interests present real or imaginary fears about our activities in international affairs?
How will increased immigration, technological advances, and a more competitive world market affect the relationships between ethnic groups?
Unlike interethnic conflict within the United States, conflict between Native Americans and the national government is resolved through treaties. Should the claims of ethnic groups in defense of culture, territory, and unique institutions be honored and protected by law and public policy?
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Article 41
M HISPANIC U.S.A.
The Mirror of
The Other
CARLOS FUENTES
Carlos Fuentes is the author o/The Campaign.
he U.S.-Mexico border, some of those who cross it say, is not really a border but a scar. Will it heal? Will it bleed once more? When a Hispanic worker crosses this border, he sometimes asks,  Hasn t this always been our land? Am I not coming back to it? Is it not in some way ours?  He can taste it, hear its language, sing
its songs and pray to its saints. Will this not always be in its bones a Hispanic land?
But first we must remember that ours was once an empty continent. All of us came here from somewhere else, beginning with the nomadic tribes from Asia who became the first Americans. The Spaniards came later, looking for the Seven Cities of Gold, but when they found none in what is today the southwestern United States, they left their language and their religion, and sometimes their blood. The Spanish empire extended as far north as Oregon and filled the coastal region with the sonorous names of its cities: Los Angeles Sac ramento, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Sari Luis Obispo, San Bernardino, Monterey, Santa Cruz. When it achieved independence, the Mexican republic inherited these vast, underpopulated territories, but it lost them in 1848 to the expanding North American republic and its ideology of Mamfest Destiny: the U.S.A., from sea to shining sea
Lav Angeles is now the second-largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, after Mexico City, before Madrid and Barcelona.
So the Hispanic world did not come to the U the United States came to the Hispanic world, an act of poetic justice that now the Hispanic v return, both to the United States and to part of heritage in the Western Hemisphere. The imm coming, not only to the Southwest but up the East to New York and Boston and west to Chicago and where they meet the long-established Chicano Americans of Mexican origin, who have been her than the gringos. They all join to make up the 25 panics in the United States the vast majority of igin, but many from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Centi America. It is the fastest-growing minority in the I
Los Angeles is now the second-largest Span: city in the world, after Mexico City, before Mad celona. You can prosper in southern Florida even only Spanish, as the population is predominantly Antonio, integrated by Mexicans, has been a bilir 150 years. By the middle of the coming century, the population of the United States will be Spam
This third Hispanic development, that of the L is not only an economic and political event; it i cultural event. A whole civilization with a Hispai been created in the United States. A literature h< in this country, one that stresses autobiographynarrative, memories of childhood, the family   way of answering the question, What does it meai cano, a Mexican-American, a Puerto Rican livinj tan, a second-generation Cuban-American livir Miami? For example, consider the varied work Anaya (BlessMe, Ultima), Ron Arias (The Road chale), Ernesto Galarza (Barrio Boy), Alejam (ne Brick People), Arturo Islas (The Rain God vera (YNo Se lo Hugo la Tierra) and Rolando H
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From The Nation, March 30,1992 Dn 40a m ..Tu
1992
of the women writers Sandra Cisneros (Wom Hollering Creek), Dolores Prida (Beautiful SeftoritasA Other Plays) and Judith Ortiz Cofer (The Line of the Sun)- or of the poets Alurista and Alberto Rios. Or consider the definitive statements of Rosario Ferr^ or Luis Rafael Sdnchez, who sim ply decided to write in Spanish from the island of Puerto Rico An art has also been created here; in a violent, even garish way, it joins a tradition going all the way from the caves of Altamira to the graffiti of East Los Angeles. It includes pic tares of memory and dynamic paintings ofclashes, like the car-crash paintings of Carlos Almardz, who was part of the group called Los Four, along with Frank Romero, Beto de la Rocha and Gilbert Lujdn. The beauty and violence of these artists  work not only contribute to the need for contact be tween cultures that must refuse complacency or submission to injustice in order to become alive to one another. They also assert an identity that deserves to be respected and that must be given shape if it is not visible, or a musical beat if it is in audible. And if the other culture, the Angiomainstream de' nies Hispanic culture a past, then artists of Latin origin must invent, if necessary, an origin. And they must remember every single link that binds them to it.	y
For example, can one be a Chicano artist in Los Angeles 8 the memory Of MarHn ^'rez? Born in 1885, Ramirez was a migrant railroad worker from Wholost his speech and for this was condemned three decades in a California madhouse, until his death in
Tte majority of Mexican immigrants are temporary and eventually return to Mexico ^differences between Anglo- ' ^rica and Ibero-America with each other.
and drew hk UdS	So he became
J5tmanifest itself a  f'SpanK' cul,urt of ,hc United States p^yasinas I CCfu"> as ln * ^n painting; as S^lasthanProduction by l.uis Valdez; with a
c v ' 8I'RuNn Bl.d  ind h  r
Webrin'i45 native Hisna  	affirmall n forces newcom-
What * uld Vh'k a'k ,hcmie,v ' do ^country?-hkc 10 retain? What do we want c answers are determined by the fact
-   __^Mirror of the Oth andth^i^~~
SOcial group that inworks, transmitting valuw	811(1 net'
the spectrum are 300 000 Hisnan' h radlllons- At one end in the United States andat^TbuSlnessmenProspering American shooS^^ reason that he  hates mZ?!? the simpk statistic that Hispanic-ownwi k  	 ne prou<Uy sP uts the
^biihonaye^ immigrants are shot at bv An i  k  Proudly, report that
Of their migrant workers in the United States and thatthS
W rkerS down vehicles on back roads near their campsites. And if, finally, one realizes that the majority of Mexican immigrants are temporary and eventually return to Mexico, then one must bear in mind the persisting differences between Anglo-America and Ibero-Amenca, as these continue to oppose, influence and clash with each other.
The two cultures coexist, rubbing shoulders and questioning each other. We have too many common problems, which demand cooperation and understanding in a new world context, to clash as much as we do. We recognize each other more and more in challenges such as dealing with drugs, crime, the homeless and the environment. But as the formerly homogeneous society of the United States faces the immigration of vastly heterogeneous groups, Latin America faces the breakdown of the formerly homogeneous spheres of political, military and religious power through the movement of the urban dispossessed.
In this movement, which is taking place in all directions, we all give something to one another. The United States brings its own culture the influence of its films, its music, its books, its ideas, its journalism, its politics and its language to each and every country in Latin America. We are not frightened by this, because we feel that our own culture is strong enough, and that, in effect, the enchilada can coexist with the hamburger. Cultures only flourish in contact with others; they perish in isolation.
The culture of Spanish America also brings its own gifts. When asked, both new immigrants and long-established Hispanic-Americans speak of religion not only Catholicism
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8. THE ETHNIC FACTOR: CHALLENGES FOR THE 1990s but something more like a deep sense of the sacred, a recognition that the world is holy, which is probably the oldest and deepest certitude in the Amerindian world. This is also a sensuous, tactile religion, a product of the meeting between the Mediterranean civilization and the Indian world of the Americas.
Then there is care and respect for elders, something called respeto respect for experience and continuity, less than awe at change and novelty. This respect is not limited to old age in itself; in a basically oral culture, the old are the ones who remember stories, who have the store of memory. One could almost say that when an old man or an old woman dies in the Hispanic world, a whole library dies with that person.
And of course there is the family family commitment, fighting to keep the family together, perhaps not avoiding poverty but certainly avoiding a lonely poverty. The family is regarded as the hearth, the sustaining warmth. It is almost a political party, the parliament of the social microcosm and the security net in times of trouble. And when have times not been troubled? The ancient stoic philosophy from Roman Iberia is deep indeed in the soul of Hispanics.
What else do Ibero-Americans bring to the United States? What would they like to retain? It is obvious they would like to keep their language, the Spanish language. Some urge them to forget it, to integrate by using the dominant language, English. Others argue that they should use Spanish only to learn English and join the mainstream. More and more often, however, people are starting to understand that speaking more than one language does not harm anyone. There are automobile stickers in Texas that read monolingualism is a curable disease. Is monolingualism unifying and bilingualism disruptive? Or is monolingualism sterile and bilingualism fertile? The California state law decreeing that English is the official language of the state proves only one thing: that English is no longer the official language of California.
Multilingualism, then, appears as the harbinger of a multicultural world, of which Los Angeles is the prime example. A modern Byzantium, the City of the Angels receives each day, willy-nilly, the languages, the food, the mores not only of Spanish-Americans but of Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Japa
