Photo by Jack GouldIn a clash of the titans, the Jew-hating, fag-fearing Chicanismo website La Voz de Aztlán (www.aztlan.org) has accused the Barcalounging, lock-the-doors-and-bolt-the-windows immigrant-bashers at The Orange County Register of committing Jayson Blair-big journalistic fraud for running an opinion piece featuring a Latino bashing Latinos.
The Sept. 21 column by self-proclaimed “fairly recent Mexican immigrant” Alex Gomez of San Juan Capistrano railed against Latinos agitating for immigrant rights.
“If the radicals were thinking of our best interest, they would be for controlling our borders to keep the hordes out who are destroying our schools and keeping wages down for us,” seethed the 29-year-old Gomez. “They would be denouncing Mexican gangs, a plague that I, as a Mexican-American, am truly ashamed of. They would be encouraging the kids not to have kids they cannot afford. They would be putting down welfare, not demanding more of it. Welfare is for losers.”
But according to La Voz, Alex Gomez doesn't exist.
“Our friends at U.S. Immigration could not find any records of such a person immigrating to the U.S. from Mexico that fits Alex Gomez's age,” wrote La Voz writer Ernesto Cienfuegos in a Sept. 22 article. Cienfuegos said none of his San Juan Capistrano “contacts” know “anyone with the name of Alex, Alexander or Alejandro Gomez” living in the city.
Cienfuegos followed the article with a Sept. 29 open letter to Registervice president Cathy Taylor demanding that Orange County's largest daily prove the existence of Alex Gomez of San Juan Capistrano. Taylor has yet to answer La Voz.
It's easy to sympathize with the Register—and not just because it's easy to see Cienfuegos as a card-carrying nut. Newspapers receive hundreds of letters daily, and letters editors—while always requiring that a name, address and phone number be provided with each submission—can assure the veracity of the author only up to stepping up to someone's door and buzzing.
But there's a bigger problem here: the Registerand La Voz are both trapped in a stereotype as outdated as spats and monocles.
Like so many minority leftists, La Voz cannot accept that members of a minority group might practice intra-group racism—that Mexicans might actually hate other Mexicans. They're seemingly deaf to the colorful argot of street of Mexican-American malinchismo(that's self-hatred); my favorites include pocho (a whitewashed Latino), chúntaro (the Mexican variant of “hillbilly”) and naco (a slum-dweller).
Such malinchismo is so common you can find it in the Reg all day. Turn to the Letters section, and check out the cornucopia of Hispanic surnames behind the Latino-bashing. One of the Register's most prolific letter writers is Haydee Pavia of Laguna Woods, a Peruvian-by-birth (she says) familiar to most local anti-immigrant activists. Her letters portraying Mexican immigration as the death of America garner ink everywhere from The New York Times to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “Illegal aliens are treated much more benevolently than American citizens,” she wrote the Idaho Statesman on July 28—and then concluded, “By the way, I am Hispanic. I can tell the truth without being called a racist.” Gomez's observations—such as “I have seen where both [political] parties ever-increasingly pander to what I call the great loudmouth Hispanic minority, i.e., the idiot subversives who want to 'take back the Southwest for Mexico'”—are relatively tame by comparison.
The Register's problem is similar. Like many daily papers, the Reg continues to treat dissension within the Latino community as a stop-the-presses exclusive. In 2001, the Registerbreathlessly reported tensions among Central American and Mexican immigrants in Orange County. In addition to the prominent Gomez letter, the Reg devoted its Oct. 3 “Orange Grove” commentary section to an essay titled “A Latino Democrat Breaks Ranks.” That one, by La Habra attorney Chuck Cardenas, was a forgive-me-father confession that trumpeted his political independence as Big News: “I am disloyal for not wanting Gray [Davis] to keep his job and disrespectful to a 'brother' for not supporting Cruz Bustamante.”
It ain't just the Reg. A 2,284-word front-page story in the Oct. 1 Los Angeles Times titled “Latino Voters Can't be Treated as a Bloc” marveled that Latinos trash other Latinos and don't necessarily vote Democrat. Imagine! The piece included such insights as this gem: “The Latino population itself is highly diverse and is in flux. There are foreign-born Latinos who arrived in the last decade, and those whose great-grandparents were born here.” And this one: “Their U.S. experiences, rather than their [Latin American] roots, seem to define how [Latinos] vote, or whether they vote at all.”
News flash to the Register, Times, La Voz and the entire fucking world: Latinos hate Latinos just like everyone else. Maybe more. The mixing and murder of the races is the modus operandi of Latin America, with lighter-skinned folks viciously subjugating their darker, indigenous compatriots from the time of Cortés. Most Latinos take this mindset with them to the United States—and then adopt with glee that hallowed American tradition of ridiculing their more-recently arrived countrymen and battling with other immigrant groups for precious government services.
Latinos hating other Latinos? It's everywhere. Even La Voz—that purported champion of the Mexican-American community—hates other Latinos. In a Sept. 25 column, editor Héctor Carreón attacked the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión after one of its editors told the Washington Poston Sept. 23 that La Voz exhibits a “Nazi character.”
“It is difficult to admit,” Carreón wrote, “but it looks like La Opinión has been turned . . . into a mere tool of the very enemies that the founder struggled against.”
The Jews.
