Accents were a real problem. Second- and third-generation kids came from households that spoke Spanish at home, so even they would pronounce English with an accent. Television, the great teacher of English and leveler of accents, was only barely becoming affordable to most mining families in the 1950s; movies were affordable perhaps once a week, and kids were in school for only a few hours a day. Thus accents, which we did not know we had, were reinforced constantly. It was the persistence of accents that led to some of the most ridiculous exercises in whiteness. One ludicrous idea was teaching kids to speak in “round sounds.” To this day I don’t know if this was a local invention or whether some lame-brained linguist actually developed this method. Open your mouth slightly, then form an “O” with your lips extended outward, then speak while keeping your mouth in that O shape. Try it. It will indeed reduce your accent, but it will also make you sound like a fastidious and pretentious fool. In elementary school it could make you the object of derision and get you a good whuppin’ from the other Mexican kids as an added benefit.
Enforcing accentless English were kids policing other kids. To mispronounce a word, wash for watch, eschool for school for example, would lead to guffaws and mockery. “¡Qué feo lo mascas!” “You chewed that up ugly” was a favorite phrase. Kids recently arrived or kids who came from homes where only Spanish was spoken were ridiculed to the point that they were afraid to speak.
Going to the Mexican movies at the Lyric would signal to the whole town you were a Mexican, and not really a Mexican American or an American of Mexican descent. Just a Mexican, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the kids that being Mexican was not a good thing. The Lyric closed, because the Mexican families who had enjoyed the movies every week had transmogrified into Mexican Americans or better yet Americans of Mexican descent, and in their new identities wouldn’t be caught dead in a Mexican theater. Taking bean burros or tacos de papa for lunch at school was an open admission that you were a Mexican, as was humming or singing any ranchera or corrido. “Cielito Lindo” was acceptable to the white teachers, and at least once a year they trotted a bunch of Mexican kids to the auditorium to sing it for them. I still hate “Cielito Lindo,” and don’t call me Alfred. My mother spoke little English, and my father worked long shifts and was always volunteering for overtime. I would accompany my mother to pay the bills and do the shopping as the translator and cultural guide. It could get a bit embarrassing when inquiring about feminine products and underclothes. It fell to me because my sister, god bless her, was embarrassed by our mother’s Spanish. There was little doubt my mother was a Mexican.
Girls loved Max Factor. Especially the bleaching cream. It would whiten them up. In the late 1950s Rose Escobedo was the first Mexican-American cheerleader at Miami High School. Years later she told me that at the time she attributed her breakthrough to Max Factor. She used it all week before the tryouts. If girls were lighter-skinned, putting henna in their hair could give it a reddish tone and make them look, well, Italian maybe.
I was a problematic student in high school. My older brother was a record-breaking track star, a varsity football player, and a pretty good student. My sister was every teacher’s pet. Given my behavior, I was ordered to the principal’s office routinely, and given a “good talking-to” before being expelled for a day or so. Principal Nick Ragus, whose preferred method of counseling students was the loud, intimidating rant, would remind me each time: “You know why you’re not like your brother and sister? You don’t have red hair! You don’t have freckles! You look like a Mexican! You better straighten out!” My mother suggested henna.
Mexican restaurants started serving Spanish food, especially if they wanted to attract white clientele and the folks who aspired to be white. Amazingly, Spanish food, it turned out, was exactly the same as the tacos and enchiladas they served the week before. La Casita in Globe, famous for its menudo, red chile, enchiladas con huevos, and, of course, always serving its homemade tortillas with a generous slathering of butter, declared its cuisine Spanish-American. The food is just as wonderful today, and the neon sign on the window has long ago been boxed and taken away, consigned to the trash heap like a bad memory. In Miami, the town’s most popular restaurant, El Rey, where I followed both of my brothers scrubbing floors and washing dishes, proclaimed with its own sign that what it called a “regular burro,” red chili and beef with refried beans and longhorn cheese mixed together in a heavenly concoction, was really Spanish-American. And down in Phoenix, the El Rey on South Central was the final defiant restaurant in Arizona refusing to serve blacks. It became the site of continuous protests by the NAACP until the tiny, family-owned storefront relented at last. It never regained its popularity with the white downtown crowd, but it survived in business for years afterward serving pretty good Mexican food, especially its chile colorado with frijoles de la olla. A big hand-lettered sign painted onto the south-side wall of the homely white building reading “Mexican Dishes” survived until El Rey closed in the early seventies, but the neon sign that announced Spanish-American food on the window under a big colorful poster of a sombrero came down soon after its ignorant last stand against integration. Up the street from the infamous El Rey was the Spanish Kitchen. The chief cook was Sra. Duran, whose daughters Rosie and Esther would become icons of the Latino civil rights movement in Arizona. The menu at the Spanish Kitchen was tacos dorados, chile verde, menudo, gorditas, and many other northern Mexican delicacies. There wasn’t a paella or even a Spaniard in the kitchen. Discomfort with calling someone or even something Mexican lingered for many years. As late as 1970 the city of Scottsdale held a downtown fair featuring “Spanish food.” The menu as listed in the advertising section of the Arizona Republic was tacos, tostadas, burritos, and enchiladas with rice and beans.
In February of 1988, Arizona’s Secretary of State Rose Mofford assumed the governorship upon the impeachment of Evan Mecham (who had a habit of calling African Americans “pickaninnies”21). I became part of a hastily assembled team who would lead her transition. Governor Mofford was a native of Globe, six miles from Miami, born in 1922 and clearly a woman of her generation. From time to time, facing a controversial issue that could have an impact on her future electoral plans, she would turn to me and ask, “What do the Spanish think of this, Alfredo?” The appropriate response would have been “How the hell should I know?” but instead I would gently ask in response, “You mean the Mexicans, don’t you?” and she would grumble her agreement.
Nationally, LULAC and the GI Forum preached patriotism and whiteness and embraced Operation Wetback. They were at the forefront of the campaign to Americanize us. LULAC was then, and is still today, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the country. LULAC’s record of struggle is impressive. The GI Forum was formed after World War II in response to blatant discrimination against Latino veterans. In fairness to both organizations, their obsession with whiteness was only to help young people survive and succeed in an exceedingly hostile climate. The concern for “being white,” however, dates back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty that ended the Mexican and American War guaranteed that Mexicans who lived in the territories that would become the United States would do so “with the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens.”22 The assumption of the Mexican negotiators was that those residing in their former territories would simply become US citizens. They were snookered. US citizenship at the time was primarily limited to white persons, and Mexicans, as anyone can plainly see, are a marvelous mess of African, Indian, Spanish, and whatever else happened to land on that shore. They were closer to uniformly mestizo. An international treaty notwithstanding, prior to the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution, each individual state determined the citizenship status of Mexicans.