Outgrowing the Myth

                                                                           

After the war, outgrowing the myth

                           

     In the opening of Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit, the narrator, “El Pachuco,” says, in a near invocation of the pachuco spirit, “It was the secret fantasy of every vato to put on the zoot suit and play the myth.”

     The words might be nothing more than dramatic hyperbole meant to capture a feeling or exaggerate the spirit to help the audience understand a past era. The narrator does use the past tense “was,” so is he talking about “vatos” in the early 1940s, the time the play was set?

     However, in 1979, the year of the play’s release, if you were a young Chicano sitting in the audience, listening to the powerful lines fill the theater, might you have felt he was talking to you, and the word “vato” meant any young American male of Mexican descent?

     Maybe, the narrator had no particular time in mind, spatial ambiguity. Perhaps, the lines were an observation on Mexican culture in the U.S., and how, young “vatos,” even today, have that mythic fantasy, except, in California, it’s no longer the old-fashioned zoot suit but baggy Dickies or Ben Davis pants, white t-shirts, gleaming sneakers, and bald heads, or the retro, short hair combed straight back?

     Perhaps, we should take the words literally. El Pachuco was talking about “vatos” during the WWII, zoot suit era, but is that possible? Art is a funny thing. As George Orwell said, “All art is propaganda.” So, even if the words were meant to describe young Mexican men in the 1940s, once art is released to the “world,” it is there for the taking, regardless of the artists’ intent, kind of like the Bible, one book breathing life into a myriad of “Christian” religions and interpretations. 

     Then there is the word “vato” or as some might pronounce it “bato.” In Castellano, the letter “v” is supposed to be pronounced “b,” so it should be pronounced, “bato,” which confuses things, like the song La Bamba. Ritchie Valens, a California Chicano, pronounced it La [V]amba,” where Mexicans, south of the border, who sang it originally, pronounced it La [B]amba. Just saying. Maybe there is a Spanish teacher out there who knows, for sure. I taught English, even though I lived in Spain almost a year.

     What is a “vato,” anyway? I figured it meant, “guy,” as in “guy” versus “gal”, but when I looked up “guy” in the Diccionario Conciso Internacional, I didn’t find “vato as the Spanish translation.” Instead, I found words like sujeto, tipo, tio, adefesio, mamarracho but no “vato.” So, I turned to the dictionary’s Spanish section to look under “vato.” No go, nothing, zip. Ah, I’ll try “bato,” which I found, and the definition, “A Simpleton” or “Shepherds in Nativity scenes.”

     Dr. Google tells us “Bato” is from the word “Chivato” used mainly by people from Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua. I don’t’ know about you, but I never heard any vato call another vato “chivato,” but it could be, right? Many of the early settlers in Alta California travelled north from those states, but the derivation from Sinaloa to the streets of L.A., and other U.S. cities, still seems a bit of a stretch to me.

     I know what you’re thinking. Of course, I won’t find the word “vato” in a dictionary since it’s slang, or calo, something of a Chicanismo. I’m sure Chicano Studies’ professors know all this, probably even the correct origins of the word. Unless it’s like the word “orale” and scholars are still debating its origins.

     However, what I want to get back to is the validity of Luis Valdez’ idea about every “vato’s fantasy to put on the zoot suit and play the myth.” Valdez may be right, except, if a guy used the word “vato” to refer to himself or his friends, wouldn’t he already be wearing the zoot suit, or some type of gang attire, depending on the decade? I know when I grew up on L.A.’s westside, the word carried over into the fifties and sixties, but, of course, only to pachucos and cholos. I think it lost its luster in the seventies forward, except, maybe as comic relief, a sort of sarcasm or irony picked up by Chicano college grads, toying with each other.

     In my day, the 60’s and 70’s, nobody in the wider circle of kids descended from Mexican ancestors would be caught dead using the word “vato.” We didn’t even use “guy,” “dude,” “cuz,” or “bro’.” We called each other by our name, which means, no one I knew had the fantasy of putting on the zoot suit, or the pressed, baggie khakis, Pendleton, Sir Guy shirt, and French toes, and play the myth, which, to us, represented something of a joke, but. needlessly, dangerous, sometimes deadly.

     To me, my friends, and the majority of Mexicans across the vast swath they call L.A.’s Westside, there was no myth to play. We were basically kids growing up, too busy struggling with school, part-time jobs, and carving out our free time. The small group of friends and family members who got caught up in the pachuco-cholo lifestyle, ended up isolated on a street or corner of a park, fighting with guys from other towns, drunk, high, dodging the cops, or in jail. My friends and I could walk or drive, freely, from one Westside neighborhood to another and never hear the war-like challenge, “Where you from?” Besides that, I had relatives and friends who lived in Venice, Culver City, and Santa Monica. Boundaries meant nothing to us.

     Even my cousins and friends who lived in L.A.’s Eastside didn’t refer to each other as “vato” or “play the myth.” Most of them said, like kids everywhere, they went about their everyday lives, going to school, playing sports or music, working, and eventually graduating, finding jobs, marrying, and starting families. So, was the myth more media hype meant to demean Mexicans by showing them as either criminal, or budding criminals, like a few of my relatives and friends who chose to play the myth and, ultimately, ended up in prison, forever labeled ex-cons, on drugs, and ended up dying younger than those who saw nothing in the myth but pain and suffering, especially for their families?

     It is strange to me, still, how the pachuco mythic culture, though small, has crept into the culture of Mexicans raised in the United States, like in California. Much of our art perpetuates the myth, coopting images of low riders, pachucos, and cholos, as if conferring a certain sainthood on them, an iconography as represented by images of the Virgin, Adelita, or Zapata tattooed on prisoners' backs. 

     In the 1950’s, while visiting the United States, Mexican writer Octavio Paz made an observation on the pachuco, which he published in his 1961 book of essays, the Labrinth of Solitude. In the essay, “Pachuco and Other Extremes,” he wrote, of the pachuco representation:

     “His deliberate aesthetic clothing, whose significance is too obvious to require discussion, should not be mistaken for the outfit of a special group or sect. Pachuquismo is an open society, and this in a country full of cults and tribal costumes, all intended to satisfy the middle-class North American’s desire to share in something more vital and solid than the abstract morality of the “American Way of Life.” The clothing of the pachuco is not a uniform or a ritual attire. It is simply a fashion, and like all fashions it is based on novelty – the mother of death, as Leopardi (19^th century Italian poet and philosopher) said – and imitation.” (Paz)

     I suppose, then, for true artists, the objective is to avoid creating art that is derivative, a novelty, or imitation, which, according to Paz, is the essence of North American pachuquismo.

     That’s why it was so uplifting, last week, when Los Angeles television stations carried stories about one of the longest, and yes, mythic, athletic spectaculars in L.A. history, Garfield versus Roosevelt football, drawing upwards of 25,000 fans to the famed Memorial Coliseum, a true sports showdown, the protagonists young East L.A. athletes and scholars, the student bodies, their families, and alumni, holding on to a positive tradition, a representation of the best of Mexican-Latino culture in the U.S.

     Often, it’s the negative news the media splashes that reaches American audiences, immigration raids, drug busts, or the influence of a Mexican prison gang on local neighborhoods, minor infractions in a world where much larger, though quiet, strides are being accomplished each day.

    I think it’s Michelle Alexander, in her book the New Jim Crow, who gave examples of drug dealing in the United States. She argued, on any given weekend, more drugs are bought and sold by students on university campuses than in any barrio or ghetto in the country. In his book on the Mexican Mafia, Tony Rafael writes of interviewing one drug dealer who said he sells more cocaine to customers at major movie studios in Burbank than on any neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Yet, look who fills our jails, mostly on drug charges, not college students or movie employees.

     Recently, I don’t know why, maybe because my past jobs, encouraging and counseling Latino high school students about enrolling in college, I was curious about the college-going rates of Latinos. When I worked in the early Affirmative Action programs, back in the 80s, enrollment for Chicanos-Latinos were was under 7%, at most colleges and universities, except, maybe ELAC and Mission College. I was stunned to find that from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, the enrollment of Latino students at many community colleges and universities, today, was upwards of 30%, and as high as 70%.

     At Cal State Los Angeles, both undergrad and graduate Latino enrollment was close to 70%, Long Beach State, 45%, CSU Northridge 50%, Cal State Dominguez Hills 64%, and the very selective UC, like UCLA and UC Irvine, it’s 23% and 34%, respectively.

     Any way you view it, those are encouraging numbers, which means hundreds to thousands of raza students are working hard to create their own myth, one that is rarely mentioned in the media or represented in Chicano art, in any genre. If these kids use the words “vato,” or “ruca,” I’m sure the definitions have little connection to the originals.