CSotD: Peeking under the mosaic tiles
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One of the delights of the Internet is its ability to pull back the curtain on some otherwise unseen perspectives in our multi-cultural world. Here's a cartoon that Miami-based Cuban exile Garrincha (Gustavo Rodriguez) posted to Facebook, along with a translated version:
… and this brief explanation:
Many Cubans in Miami hate to be labeled as "Latinos" and many love to mock people from South America and Central America calling them "indios" and "tiraflechas". The mockery is mutual, I must say.
But many of those Cubans don't mind when the L word means support the Republican Party, of course.
The divide between Cubans and Everyone Else Who Speaks Spanish is no secret, of course: Though I've known some rock-solid conservative Latinos out in Colorado, the Latino vote overall is a pretty much a gimme for Democrats everywhere but in South Florida, where it is just that for the Republicans.
And it's not just the Cubans vs. Everyone Else. Regionalism is a big deal throughout the Latino community: Some of the newspapers that ran my serial stories for kids wanted both Spanish and English versions, and I discovered early on that a translation that worked for Mexican-Americans would not necessarily pass muster with Central Americans or Puerto Ricans, because there are dialectical differences that, whether or not they actually make it hard to understand, are fiercely bickered over as a matter of pride.
(There are genuine differences in meaning that call for caution, however: I know of a Chilean professor who, on a blind date with a Bolivian woman, laughingly described himself in their dinner small-talk as an "airhead," whereupon the room grew distinctly chilly. After they sorted out the cause of her sudden, intense silence, it turned out that the same slang term used for "airhead" in Chile is used in Bolivia to describe a man of … um … generous endowment.)
The divide that Garrincha describes is less an issue of accidental misunderstanding, with "tiraflecha" or "arrow thrower" being awfully close to "spear chucker," and a reminder of the '60s, when more militant black activists were (within the group) describing less political brethren as "hankie heads," which, you will note, would no longer make sense, due to fashion changes.
In any case, there was a time when you had to really search to hear the inner conflicts that went on outside the mainstream — which is to say, WASP — community.
Ollie Harrington's "Bootsy" was an icon in the black community but one that was guarded, because the cartoons spoke in ways that were reserved for in-house discussion.
But Harrington's cartoons only appeared in the black press. It was decades before Aaron McGruder's "Boondocks" spread the dirty laundry before a wider readership, and, when that day came, not everyone in the black community was comfortable with it.
The big difference in attitude shown in that strip is not that Jasmine's father is in a biracial relationship, but that he still clings to the notion of the "melting pot" rather than the "cultural mosaic."
In a melting pot, all the differences are supposed to go away, but a large Anglo-Saxon base is assumed. What other cultures are supposed to add to the mix is pretty much limited to things like jazz and tacos, while it is assumed that adding dark metal to light metal will, once they melt, result in a "mix" that is actually the same color you started with. (And, no, I don't mean before Columbus.)
By contrast, in a cultural mosaic, the tiles make a beautiful and intricate picture, but each retains its own shape and color.
There is considerable resistance to this concept, mostly from the right but secretly embraced across the spectrum. Or, at least, the large part of the mainstream spectrum that assumes itself to be the default, and doesn't know that Cubans sometimes feud with Mexicans or South Americans in this country, or that people like Ollie Harrington and Aaron McGruder are even out there.
Or that sometimes, the sniping that goes on isn't entirely internal.
Which brings us to Christoper Titus's riff from "The End of the World Tour," in which he offers an observation to anyone — of any group:
If you're telling a joke and the group of people that you're telling that joke to are all the exact same color as you, you just let that joke fly, no matter what it is, right? But if one person in that group happens to be a photo-negative of the rest of you, you gotta run that joke through some filters, don't you?
…
There are "white people" jokes. And, ladies and gentlemen, these jokes are harsh! I know that, because none of my black friends will tell me any of them. And I've asked, "Come on, just give me one!" "No, man, you don't want to hear it, really. I signed the waiver, legally I can't tell you the joke." And you know why those jokes are so harsh and so funny? 'Cause they had 400 years to write those jokes!
Think of the Internet as a way to defeat the filters and find out what's really going on.
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