¡Ask a Mexican!

IIt's the Law in Palm Springs CA: It is illegal to walk a camel down Palm Canyon Drive between the hours of four and six pm

¡Ask a Mexican!

By Gustavo Arellano

Thursday, May 27, 2010

SPECIAL ETHNIC STUDIES EDITION

Dear Mexican: My sister and I were talking about all the hatred against Mexicans in our state and she asked, “Why do they hate Mexicans so much in Arizona?” -Encabronada en Tucson

Dear Pissed-Off in Tucson: Mexican-hating has long been a characteristic of the American Southwest due to its proximity to Mexico and forgotten pasts we are condemned to repeat. Everyone now knows your home state’s war against Mexicans, especially given that Governor Bruja – I mean, Jan Brewer – signed another Know Nothing bill in addition to the racial profiling-loving SB1070: HB 2281, which bans ethnic studies classes in Arizona public schools. The law’s proponents claim such a discipline teaches racial division, but what they don’t like is that what’s taught is the unvarnished, ugly truth of its home state.

Did you know that in 1904, a group of Mexicans in the Arizona mining towns of Clifton and Morenci tried to adopt 40 Irish orphans only to see their new wards kidnapped by furious gabachos that Mexicans dared raise them? And that the gabachos weren’t prosecuted for their terror? True story, and one Know Nothings Copper Staters desperately try to keep out of classrooms lest children connect the dots between past injustices and present-day stupidities.

If the American psyche has always possessed a synapse of xenophobia, then the Arizonan mind’s chunk of hate is a pinche cerebral cortex – sorry that you must live among such a bola de pendejos.

The Texas Board of Education voted to remove Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union and well-known Xingona, because they didn’t like her politics. How long will this Manifest Destiny crap last? -Michicano in Texas

Dear Wab: FOREVER. You refer to the people in charge of textbook standards for the Lone Star State’s public schools, people so ahistorical they banned Huerta’s legacy from being taught because of her socialist politics but approved of another committed socialist (Hellen Keller) since state-sanctioned historians have reduced her to some blind broad.