The exchange below took place on April 14, 2013, on the
Spanish-language channel Univision between Mexican-American actor and activist
Edward James Olmos and Mexican immigrant (and now U.S. citizen) journalist
Jorge Ramos, host of the Sunday morning news talk show Al Punto (To the Point).
Leon Kolankiewicz translated it. Check it out for yourself at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7qWwQi_34s.
Jorge Ramos: We [Latinos] are 17 percent of the population, but we have 3
[U.S.] senators, nothing more.
Edward James Olmos: That's right. And that's the problem. And that's going to
change. Everything is going to change. Its going to change...but they're afraid
of us.
Ramos: Why are they afraid of us?
Olmos: Because we have a lot of political strength. We have a lot of strength
in that there are many of us and there will be many more of us. In 25 years,
forget it....
Ramos : If the African Americans, who are less [numerous] than Hispanics, have
already had their first president, do you believe were close to having the
first Hispanic president?
Olmos: Yes. Very close....
Olmos is a well-known actor and activist of long standing. Ramos is arguably
the most visible Latino TV journalist in Spanish-language television, not only
in the United States, but the western hemisphere.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, forcing the evacuation
of hundreds of thousands of residents, then-Mayor Ray Negin took a lot of flak
for expressing dismay that many of the people moving into the city and settling
there during reconstruction were not the same black residents who'd fled. He was
ridiculed and raked over the coals for saying that he wanted to see New Orleans
remain a chocolate city (i.e., majority African American).
Yet here are two famous, rich Mexican Americans gloating, in essence, at what
they see as their own tribe, their team, well on its way to dominating the
United States, and no prominent talking heads take them to task for it. In the
Western hemisphere, demographically and politically, Spanish-speaking Latinos
are dominant in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Paraguay,
Uruguay, and Argentina, 16 countries in all.
But Olmos and Ramos will apparently not be content until Latinos are dominant
in the U.S. as well. Its Manifest Destiny redux, but I thought that kind of
petty ethnic chauvinism belonged to the nineteenth century. This is more than
just la Reconquista (re-conquest) or irredentism, because they hunger to lord
over the entire country, not just those portions of it which once belonged to
Mexico.
Olmos has a chip on his shoulder the size of a log towards those he regards as
the historic and current antagonists and persecutors of Mexicans and Mexican
Americans.
I myself am Polish American, an immigrant group that has historically faced
more than its fair share of bigotry and not all that long ago either. As a kid
growing up in the sixties and seventies, I remember being confused and hurt by
the demeaning Polack jokes that were all the rage then. Poles and Polish
Americans were singled out and belittled as stupid and cheap.
Q: How many Polacks does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three. One to hold the light bulb and two to spin the ladder.
Maybe I was an unduly sensitive, insecure 14-year old who couldn't take a joke
(or five jokes, or ten there were many). Or maybe those fellow Polish Americans
I heard laughing at these jokes or even telling them were self-hating types who
wanted so badly to be accepted by and fit in to mainstream culture that they were
willing to wallow in self-abasement. Hard to say.
In any case, unlike Olmos, I don't recall ever identifying with my own group
above all else, or of feeling greater loyalty to or affinity with my own tribe
than to my own country, warts and all. I didn't rejoice that the Polish-American
percentage of the population, and thus our clout in this society, was
increasing due to immigration from Poland and higher birth rates among this
largely Catholic group.
It doesn't bother me all that much that not only has there never been a
Polish-American president, nor any president whose ancestors hail from any
eastern or southern European country. African Americans beat us to the prize,
and thats fine, especially given their longer, far more tragic history in
America.
What does bother me is to hear two privileged but resentful men crow about
their ethnic groups progress in terms of us versus them.
In addressing overpopulation on all scales national and world of the
greatest obstacles is precisely the burning tribal loyalty expressed by Olmos
and Ramos. In a number of countries and regions, members of a given ethnic or
linguistic group, or clan, religious sect, or race, fervently embrace the
numeric growth of their own group vis-a-visothers as a source of greater
economic, political, and cultural power.
Our ability to stabilize population depends on a more expansive, inclusive vision, trust, and goodwill than displayed by either of these two gentlemen. Many Hispanics have this; they lack it.
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