With a journalistic career of almost 40 years, five books and a Pulitzer Prize in tow, Héctor Tobar began his new project with a question that might seem simple: What does it mean to be Latino in the United States? It was not the first time that the Los Angeles-born writer explored the identity process in a country as racialized as this one. He first did it in Translation Nation (2005)where he described the territory of spanglishthat intangible nation made up of 35 million Spanish speakers in North America.
Tobar, 64, returns to the topic in Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meaning and Myths of “Latino,” where he exposes decades of thoughts on the subject. He does it from an approach that is as ambitious as it is intimate. The author, also a professor at the University of California Irvine, describes what he calls the “Latino experience.” This began, in his case, with the departure of his father from Guatemala after the 1954 military coup (supported by the United States) against President Jacobo Árbenz. For this book, Tobar retraces that initiation journey in reverse. He visits his family’s village, where he was able to make his family tree for the first time.
“Every time I come back I realize what I lost,” says the writer in front of a sandwich. french dip at the iconic restaurant Phillip The Original, in downtown Los Angeles. It is the site that Tobar, former journalist from Los Angeles Timeschooses to talk about his new book, winner of the Zócalo award from the University of Arizona, which was presented this Thursday.
Ask: Why did you write Our Migrant Souls?
Answer: I was working with a lot of young people in two classes, Literary Journalism and Chicano Studies. For the finals I asked them to tell me a story about the Latino experience in the United States. That’s how I learned many stories about what it’s like to grow up as a Latino here. For me there was nothing that had a literary impact of what this experience is, on the level that James Baldwin or Ida B. Wells did with racial issues. And I wanted to go there. I wanted to write something poetic.
Q. Did you also engage in dialogue with your students?
R. Absolutely. It was a kind of recognition of them. They are living a unique moment. People who have lived the experience of their parents and have a vision of what this country is. That has not reached the media mainstream. It’s not in the Netflix series. What we are presented with are extremely romanticized or extremely violent visions of the Latino experience. So I felt the need to honor his vision and show how powerful it is. I tell my students that they are standing on enormous cultural capital.
Q. And what is your vision?
R. The United States is a mixed country. He is assimilating the way of being, the idiosyncrasies of the Latin communities that are throughout the country. If you go to South Dakota, Maine, Tennessee or Oregon you can find Latino communities. Almost all of them have a Latino co-worker or their children married someone from those countries. So that Latinidad is seeping into the way of being of the American, which is the history of this country. Much of xenophobia is a response to this, to this supposed threat to the racial order of this country.
Q. Why do you use quotes when referring to “Latin”?
R. The ethnic and racial terms of this country are myths, they are inventions. Latin, and it’s something I learned recently, comes from an idea of Latin America tied to the mythology of French imperialism in Mexico. This idea of “we are not invading you because we are Latin brothers, we have a common cause against Anglo Americans.” Our idea of Latin America has its origins in the Napoleonic wars, which is absurd. And not only that. Latino implies that the essence of our collective identity is European. That completely erases our indigenous roots and African influences.
Q. He writes that it is a term that replaced others such as chicano, bracero, etc. Is it a hollow definition?
R. Those terms have always been very fluid in history. In my life I have seen almost the death of the term Chicano. At the same time I have seen the ethnogenesis of Latino. Ethnic terms can be born from nothing. Here in California for a time “Californio” was used to describe mulattoes, Indians and Creoles. They are empty terms. That’s why it’s ridiculous that people spend time saying who is Latino and who isn’t.
Q. Perhaps white people in America have clearer common ground. Who would be the Latinos?
R. I thought a lot about this. The word Latin means that you have a history of empire in your family, in your past. It’s almost like being Jewish. When you are Jewish you sit down and celebrate Passover, a story of exodus and survival. That’s what being Latino means to me. At some point this relationship with the power of an empire defines you. If you are Cuban, it means that the fight between the United States and the old Russian empire helped you define your relationship with an island. Before that the fight between Spain and Cuba. If you are a Texan of several generations, at some point the border crossed you.
Q. Does it also unite the need to decolonize stories?
R. Racial and ethnic identities are truly masks that hide complex histories. I once interviewed a 90-year-old guy from South Los Angeles for a column. He was white, but had a life of crime in gangs. He was from Macedonia, with roots in the old Ottoman empire. He moved to a part of town where everyone was from somewhere else: Canada, Ireland, Germany. On that street everyone became white. Whiteness, in the United States, meant that you left behind the pain of being a poor European. You are no longer a poor Italian, Polish or a Jew. You are already in a white space where there is only opportunity, there are no obstacles in your way. Not only that. The political and economic system gives you all the advantages. This country made being white almost a property, a very valuable thing. The other races were created as a contrast to white.
Q. Latinos are 20% of the population, but the goal of many here, for example Trumpist Latinos, is to join that white empire.
R. That has always been part of the Latino experience. In the court case that integrated Orange County schools, Mendez v. Westminster, a group of Latino, Puerto Rican and Mexican families, had seen their children separated from the rest. So they sued the school. And one of the arguments was that they should not be segregated because they were not black.
Q. Does it confirm the rite of travel among the melancholic elements?
R. Yes, it is melancholic, but magical at the same time. You have this beautiful place in your past. Here in Lynwood there is a shopping center that gives people a taste of what a town is like. People have this concept that they come from a place more attached to nature or the community. They take pride in being centered and with deeper roots. If you talk to a poor white person from a rural area, they don’t have this idea of belonging to something solid, earthly. That is why Trumpism exists. It offers this identity or explanation of its state.
Q. In fact, he barely mentions Trump in his book. Because?
R. There was no need. To me it’s not as interesting as why people believe in it. If you only think about Trump and the madness of him you stop thinking about the emotional reality that created him. Which is that white, as a project, is dying. For me it is more important to link our history to a 300-year history. What the Latino people are experiencing now is what the oppressed peoples of North America have experienced since the founding of the country. They have treated us like a crisis. It’s the American way of doing business and wealth: lure people to come, exploit them in their work, and then consider them parasites. They did it with the Chinese in 1870 and with the blacks during slavery. It’s an old story. It is important to me that Latinos know that it was not just with us.
