9/16/2013 @ 5:43PM

'Almost White': Your Unofficial Guide To Hispanic Heritage Month

@giorodriguez Rick Najera’s memoir gives us all something different: a laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud, guide to social-empowerment

Last Spring, in the middle of a crash course on African-American studies, I came upon Baratunde Thurston’s recent-but-already-classic How To Be Black. I was in a bookstore on the campus of one of our nation’s leading HBCU’s (historic black colleges and universities), self-consciously scanning the book’s contents, when the irony of the moment struck me. How To Be Black may had found a big audience with African-Americans. But its target audience was people like me — folks who for one reason or another are looking for ways to navigate the black experience and need to believe that a book can actually help them with this task. Thurston — director of digital for The Onion — timed the publication of his book understanding his prey (I mean “audience”). Opening line of the book, in an intro entitled, Thanks for Celebrating Black History Month by Acquiring This Book: “Welcome to How to Be Black, a book I hope will serve as a thrust of blackness in your general direction.”
I thought about Thurston’s book when first hearing about Hollywood comedy writer Rick Najera’s memoir, Almost White. It struck me that the two books might have something in common. First, Najera’s book, like Thurston’s, has been timed to come out during a “heritage month”; Najera’s book launched today, the first business day of National Hispanic Heritage Month (books are business, after all). Second, both Thurston and Najera are comedy writers, so the nature of these heritage books of course falls outside the mainstream (more on that soon). Finally, the purpose of these books is not so much to celebrate the heritage months that bracket their debuts but rather to give people something to do. Najera’s book is different in execution — more, in fact, of a memoir than a mock post-modern manual — but it gets people to reexamine who they are and redirect themselves (if neccessary) through the ancient art of transformative comedy.
Accessible
There are three reasons books like this work. First, and most obvious: they are more accessible than the dusty tomes that get collected and arranged for heritage consumption. Nothing terribly wrong with those books — hey, I buy them — but the truth is that they may never find a big audience. So if you care about a big audience — not just because you need to make the money, but because you care to make a difference — comedy opens a fairly large door. Najera developed his chops as a stage actor, studying here in the Bay Area at the American Conservatory Theater. He then learned improv in LA, where Whoppi Goldberg urged him to write because he was moving in that direction. He was building a sensibility that — like many of the best comics — incorporated time travel. His memoir is replete with many great examples. Rick is funny in the way that standups are funny, underlining absurdity in others and in ourselves. “Mexican spies don’t exist,” he writes in a chapter that looks at culture and history. “We have no James Bond…. A Mexican James Bond in a tuxedo would end up taking drink orders.” There’s rick material to be mined in comedy when cultures, on the surface, do not mix. Or when others don’t want them to mix. There’s a great passage early in the book where a lady that Najera gardens for refuse to call him by his given name “Rick” but instead wants to call him “Ricardo.” Later he notes
People ask, “You’re Rick? It’s not Ricardo? as if I’m trying to hide my Latino identity. My parents named me Rick because they liked the directness of that name. I have met other Latinos with more “ethnic” names, like Guatemoc or some other Aztec name. Puerto Ricans with names like Usnavi, named after ships that their parents had seen in the harbor of Puerto Rico, which actually say “U.S. Navy.”
I am especially fond of the Puerto Rican jokes (“Their diet is rich in fried food and malted drink calories; they need the extra calories to fuel them so they can argue with you longer”). Of course I do. I’m Puerto Rican. But you don’t need to be Puerto Rican or even Latino to grok the humor. It’s the self-knowing-let’s-have-fun-deconstructing-the-stereotypes that made shows like In Living Color (where Najera got his first break) such a hit. Keenan Ivory-Wayans, the show’s founder, was an “equal opportunity offender,” Najera happily observes.
But if that’s all Najera had going for him, there wouldn’t be much to write about. There’s something else. You first get a sense of it with all the time traveling I noted earlier (“Spain? Well, I haven’t been there in like five hundred years.”) Whether it’s in his backyard, in his neighborhood, or at a job interview, the man is constantly assaulted by images of heroes and villains from the past. It’s mostly a Mexican past, so the narrative is filled with the exploits of Pancho Villa, Montezuma, and Malinche, the cunning native bride of Hernan Cortes, the main antagonist in the story of Mexico.
But the way Najera moves in and out of the lives of these historical characters, and mixes them into the lives of current characters … this is where the art is. In the end, it’s the art of comic theater where one of the fundamental rules is that characters are universal. The Mayans, says Najera, had a name for it: La kech, “Another Yourself.” Cortes was a foe in history. But he and other foes come alive on stage and on the page when you get composite characters like a border patrol officer, one of the greatest characters in Najera’s Latinologues, a play that toured the country and opened on Broadway in 2005. In the play, Buford walks downstage “in his full green border patrol outfit, wearing aviator glasses and holding a stop sign.”
“Hi. Allow me to introduce myself,” he says with a thick, Texas drawl. “My name is Buford Gomez. I put the panic to Hispanic. The pepper spray to Jose. The baton to Juan. Deportation is my business. And business is good.”
In a review of the Broadway production, we get more Buford. “Having established that ‘not every single Latino is Mexican’, he goes on to define the ethnic differences in pointed barbs aimed at every Latin American cultural group (presumably) sitting in the audience. ‘Puerto Ricans are legal Mexicans… Cubans are Mexicans with rafts… Dominicans are Mexicans who play baseball really well… Venezuelans are Mexicans with oil’. Although Buford chickens out on Colombians (‘Colombians are real nice’), he has a cutting word for any Argentineans in the house: ‘Argentineans, you are not European. I repeat, you are not European’.”
Real
Of course, one reason this kind of comedy works so well — Latinologues was a critical and commercial success — is because it hits so hard. And it would be a mistake to think it is easy. When first meeting Rick, I was reminded of another Hispanic theater artist who got her start in the Bay Area. Wilma Bonet, a Puerto Rican who learned her craft working with great political satirists like The San Francisco Mime Troupe, wrote a one-woman show celebrated the life of a daughter she lost to cystic fibrosis. But Wilma was a comic, from the grand tradition of physical comedy. The Mime Troupe was not “mime” the way most of us think of mime, but part of the improvisational tradition of pantomime, which had its roots in ancient comedy. It found its way to San Francisco through various channels, including Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, the theatrical wing of the farm workers movement in California. So when Wilma sat down to write her play, she took out a toolkit that enabled her to make something that was both comic and tragic. In the 1990′s, I got the opportunity to stage a version of her show in Berkeley. I remember learning something from Wilma: the best path to the tragic may in fact be the comic.
It may also be the best path to what’s real. As Najera writes, “comedy is truth delivered with timing” (and: “funny is only funny if it’s tragic”). And just as Bonet’s play opens the hearts of theatergoers so they can listen to a tale of grief, Najera’s comic hijinks gives readers the release they need to be emotionally ready for a few painful moments. The book — which takes us from humble beginnings to the current day — is propelled forward with intermittent flashbacks to a hospital stay where he recovered from a coma not long ago. Before there was Almost White, Rick was “almost dead.” And much of the narrative in these flashbacks is dark. Perhaps the darkest come in moments when he mourns not his potential loss of his life but rather the temporary loss of control. There’s a moment when a nurse refuses to help him walk to the bathroom. “Go in your bed,” she says. “We’ll clean you up afterward.” More harrowing, however, are scenes in the main narrative. Like a time he catches trouble for standing up for himself. He was a young boy when he fought another for calling him a wetback.
After beating Bradley up, from the corner of my eye, I saw the schoolyard teacher running up to me. “Why did you hit Bradley?” she asked. At this point, Bradley was crying. Arrogance is lost quickly when your nose is bleeding. He was a bad crier, all high-pitched, blowing snot bubbles, face full of tears. “Because he called me a wetback,” I replied. She looked at me strangely, not getting that this light-skinned, brown-eyed child in this very American school on Lemon Avenue in California was a Mexican-American. She asked naturally and almost sweetly, “Are you Mexican?” I said, “Yes.” She looked down at me and said simply, “Well then, you are a wetback, so why’d you hit Bradley?”
I’ll bet that many readers will do a bit of time traveling themselves when they see this, for early encounters with racism tend to fix themselves in memory. But not everyone gets to see evil and cynicism up close and personal as Rick did during a stint in Mexico working for Televisa. He had just advised the company to enter the huge market that was then emerging for English language content for US Latinos. An executive thought he’d do Rick a favor by letting him in on a secret.
“Rick,” he said, “we don’t want Latinos to assimilate or join the United States; we want them to remain separate. We don’t want them to improve. All we want is their money. Our second-largest source of earned income is American dollars sent back to Mexico from Mexicans living and working in the United States. They’re our market, and we don’t need them living here. They are not us. We don’t want them. We don’t even like them. They are the people that could cause us problems if they stayed here.
Empowering
To paraphrase Ricky Ricardo (get that? both Rick and Ricardo), Desi Arnaz’s iconic Cuban lover in I Love Lucy, Televisa’s got a lot of splainin’ to do. Until then, let me add here that Arnaz was a big inspiration to Najera who saw Hollywood’s first Hispanic media mogul as a fearless “radical cultural propagandist.” It makes sense that Najera would feel the kinship in his time-traveling kind of way. For what has made Najera the person he is today is an historical connection to influences wherever they happen to originate. “You need to know your history to understand yourself,” he says. And you need to “choose your tribe,” for Hispanics — like other groups — are not always willing to help one another. Najera writes about times Latinos have failed one another, in and out of Hollywood. But he also talks about the many folks who have supported him — to name a few, Cheech Marin, George Lopez, John Leguizamo, Edward James Olmos, Jimmy Smits, Sofia Vergara, and Lupe Ontiveros, who died last year after a battle with cancer. And, yes, some of the heroes in Almost White are white, and yes, some of them are black, like Keenan Ivory Wayans, Tavis Smiley (his publisher), and Whoopi Goldberg, who gave Najera this bit of advice when he was struggling to make the mental transition from actor to writer. “I remembered Whoopi telling me that if I called myself something, I would become it. But I also needed to proclaim it. That’s what she had done when she said yes to going solo, and her show was born.” I can’t think of a better way to close this review. Because Rick today is not just a writer, but a platform for other writers and performers — Hispanic and non-Hispanic — by letting people understand that they have permission to proclaim who they are. And in the end, that’s what this heritage thing ought to be about. It’s not about just reading about heroes of the past. It’s about becoming them.
La kech!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2013/09/16/almost-white-your-unofficial-guide-to-hispanic-heritage-month/