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Now that the anniversary of 9-11 is around the corner, the recollection of my initial experience comes back to me, when I was in New York on a book tour a day before 9-11. I booked an earlier flight out that evening, 9-10, to Los Angeles. Early the next morning a phone call woke up me in my room at the Hyatt on Sunset Blvd., and I was told by my friend to turn on the TV, and I saw the planes ramming into the Twin Towers.
How close I came to being on one of those planes. When I went downstairs for breakfast, the restaurant was packed with Marshals, decked out in full military weaponry. I hadn’t shaved in a few days and had an Omar Sharif stubble, skin complexion almond honey, eyes brown, and my hair black. Were I walking in the markets of Iraq, India, Pakistan or Afghanistan, I’d have been taken for Muslim. When I sat at my table and ordered orange juice, scrambled eggs and bacon, rye toast, coffee, every uniformed eye in the room glared at me with hatred. And they kept staring, glazed-eyed, stern-lipped, their demeanor radiating so much contempt that I couldn’t eat. I got up and left.
When I went downstairs to go to the airport, the cabbie refused to take me. Eventually, when I arrived at the airport, I was pulled off to the side and strip-searched, missed my plane, had to endure the accusatory stares of passengers watching me with grim condemnation—you are the enemy, it’s your fault America was attacked.
I proved who I was by showing them my license, passport, and a photo on the book jacket. I missed my flight, and after waiting in the lobby for a day, I finally was allowed to fly home late that evening.
Being profiled as a terrorist because of my Chicano looks isn’t new to me. I could pass for an Italian, a Jew, a Mediterranean or North African. But as it happens I was born and grew up in New Mexico and my family traces their roots in this place long before any European was aware this part of the world existed.
But that doesn’t matter to people like Lou Dobbs, the host on CNN. Every afternoon he devotes twenty to thirty minutes to Mexican/Latino bashing. It seems Americans need a scapegoat for what goes wrong in their lives. The Iraq war is now souring on Americans and Dobbs blames us. The economy is not good, gas prices are high, housing is expensive, and for all of this and much more, it’s our fault—Mexicans.
Though I am Chicano, Mexican blood runs through my veins. Before any government drew a border separating me from my cousins and relatives living south of the border, we had lived quite peacefully for five hundred years.
So why does Dobbs insist on demonizing us on a daily basis? The chair he sits in, the desk his papers are scattered over, the building he works in, the car he drives, the food he eats, the streets he drives down, the electricity, plumbing, floors, windows and brick-work are there because of Mexican labor.
We are the poorest. The least represented—we die in the fields making a dollar an hour, we die in trucks from heat suffocation, we are jailed, beaten and exploited and raped and murdered by border vigilantes.
Dobbs calls us illegal aliens and supports rich growers who enslave us; he proudly enshrines the INS who stomped boys and girls to death; he scoffs at the three hundred men, women, and children who died in the desert last month trying to find work in America.
Still, the irony is that the dinner Dobbs had last night was picked in fields and packed in sheds in boxes and driven by truck and sold in the grocery store by Mexican laborers.
You would think by Lou’s nasty attitude that he gorged himself numb on fear and force, healthy as eating a heaping plate of lead-based paint chips. The cumulative effect of his race-baiting has dulled serious discussion to doggerel yappings by racist opportunists, but no where more so than Arizona, who’s Anglo citizenry, over the past few years, have become meaner, greedier, more suspicious, using fear and punishment to control everything.
It’s not new to me. I was in prison there and prison runs on fear and force, every impulse fueled by paranoia. Indeed, the entire secure-setting environment is dependent on people fearing each other and forcing human beings to submit to the will of the strongest brute.
Why are there no Blacks and Indians standing up for us? Where are the Whites denouncing this program? What happened to the people we supported in the streets, factories, prisons, reservations, ghettos? Many of us are forced to work as slaves; where are those who are against slavery? Where are those who are against racism?
Here’s a glimpse into me. I am Chicano, which means my family has been here longer than any European; I am bilingual, half Spanish and Indio, and I have a deep history and culture that includes the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, and others.
Yet, if you listen to Dobbs, I am only a criminal, a vagrant, a drug dealer, with no culture, no history, no songs. But this is not new to me.
He does not talk about how Mexicans have built and are building this country. Look out your window—see them hammering away, roofing, mowing lawns, house-keeping, cooking, picking in the fields. Go into any restaurant and look in the kitchen—we are cooks. Visit any upper-class neighborhood—we nurture the children, clean the rooms, garden; in short, we keep America going.
Nor does he talk about the six hundred women murdered along the border. Or those Mexicans kids shot in the back by vigilantes, or those kids working in sweat factories, locked up each night in cells and fed bowls of water and rice. Nor does he talk about how schools won’t let them come in, how hospitals turn them away.
This is not new to me.
I’ve lived all my life in America, as my father before, under the duress of people treating me like an outsider. Dobbs groups me in with terrorists indiscriminately, and the infection is sinking deeply into my daily life. My children are now being affected by his slander and poisonous tongue.
I’ve noticed that more and more strangers look at us with hang-dog, sullen expressions as if they’re unhappy with me. Going through airports, travelers eye me as if I carry a congenital spiritual corruption—in other words, I am an inferior human being. It’s terrible to feel this. I feel Dobb’s and his millions of viewing cronies have condemned my family.
His misguided intentions aired to millions every day have given him an addiction to power—he instills fear in people and it’s a very addictive power to be able to do this. I’ve watched him over the months become braver and more arrogant with his insults. Now, he doesn’t even try to conceal his hatred of us and it reminds me of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. But now, his fear and force tactics are affecting children who are being turned away from schools and hospitals, jumped by skinhead gangs and killed.
I made a point not to use fear to teach my kids lessons and taught them that force never works to communicate. Now they suddenly find themselves surrounded with people who fear them and want to force them out of this country.
They get fed up with it; it’s tiring to be looked at as an outsider, and they feel sometimes like they want to beat up a few racists. But they also know that my greatest achievement in this life is that I never hit them, not once. I don’t believe in violence in any situation. I never used fear of me to coerce them into obeying me, never once intimidated them with the specter of a beating.
I used words to convey faith, words to allow them hope, words to mend their broken hearts, words to convey my love. Not force, not fear.
A month or so ago my kids and I packed up our suitcases and headed down to Tombstone, Arizona to encounter the Minutemen, the gang of vigilantes monitoring the border. Others I met were going down there to protest them, but I had a different approach in mind. A mixture between a Banaroo concert in Tennessee, a Rainbow gathering in New Mexico, Jersey poetry festival, and sleeping on the river bank in the Pecos.
On the way down I primed my kids on their rights. I told them not to do something stupid. We were not looking for a fight but we did want to get our point across. I finally let them in on my secret—to counter balance Dobbs’ horrible lies, we were going to give them love.
My kids gawked at me, wide-eyed with disbelief, and in startled unison said “Huh?"
I reminded them how powerful kindness is.
That during a time when most people suffer from a medieval state of mind—swigging the joyless elixir of war-industry money, depending more and more on firearms, electronic sensors and surveillance spy cameras to feel safe, we were going to bring them open hearts.
“Open hearts?" my oldest doubted. “Pops, you been hitting that peyote again."
Yes, I said, we were going to act against socializing murder, democratizing killing, against the whole security guard, defense department contractor, bodyguard, killer, mercenary, brute-and-bozo mentality.
Now they were intrigued.
I reminded them about the time I pulled over and cried one day while driving during rush hour. My sons in the back seat asked why. I told them it was the first time in twenty years and that I’d been trying for a long, long time to cry. People like me were taught not to weep or show emotion and those were the kind of people hurting Latinos along the border. They were children who had forgotten how to cry.
We were not going to collude with institutional racism or contribute to the climate of ignorance—remember, I said, in a cannibal society the best cannibals rise to the top—hence, Lou Dobbs.
We got to Tombstone and checked into a hotel and went to sleep. We woke up and as we dressed I told them the plan. They thought I was nuts, but loving their pops they went along with it. We came out of our rooms, walked very solemnly down the long hallway and entered the hotel restaurant.
It was filled with Minutemen and Minutewomen. And sure enough they turned, almost like dominos, one head and then another and another turning to glare at us.
We went into action. Tone grabbed the coffee pot and went table to table filling up cups. GB grabbed a platter of bagels, cheese, and butter and went table to table giving sliced bagels to each person. Esai held a basket of fruit and placed pears, apricots, oranges and bananas before each person. Stace grabbed the juice canisters and filled cups up with orange and cranberry juice.
I sat down at a table and asked if they were happy, did they need anything else? Can we get more coffee? How about scrambled eggs? More juice? Fruit?
They looked at me with enraged eyes that said Get the fuck off our table!
But being a lonely and loveless child myself, I was there to love them and did just that. I went table to table, introducing myself, asking if I could bring around their vehicle, maybe clean their room, how about I just change the sheets, or maybe cook up more food for them?
They went purple in the face and then one stood and yelled he was leaving. Others followed because they said they wouldn’t eat with a spic, or wetback, and they were reporting me. But report me for what?
As they were leaving to go to the border and man it with loaded pistols and rifles, I told them we would be there with water and sandwiches. We were going to make sure that if they needed the attention they never received as kids, by god, we were going to heal that.
Without a doubt they thought we were crazy. But in all the craziness, it was they who left the hotel. And later at the border, I assigned each of my family members to one person, and instructed them not to let up, stay in their face offering water, shade, food, prayers, keep at it until they can’t stand our love and leave.
And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the 9-11 anniversary this year, than going south to give lots of love to those who never got it as children.
Love is the only thing that makes healthy human beings. I’ve made it my life mission to believe in dreams—and here, with me, I am fortunate enough to be living inside the dream, to be part of it, not just watching the dream from outside somewhere. I am inside the dream. Not of money, prestige, power, shopping sprees, new cars, houses, etc., but of love.
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