In Garfield strips that appeared earlier this year,
Garfield is wearing a sombrero and taking siestas. While cute and all,
isn’t this the sort of thing that we have been striving to stop? What
was Jim Davis thinking? Maybe he needs a refresher course in not
making pendejadas.
Odio Odie
Dear Wab: Garfield is still around? Have editors finally
exiled it to the viejitos comic-strip page alongside Gasoline
Alley and Mary Worth? Or is it stuck among ghoulish strips
that’ll never die, like Peanuts and The Family Circus? I
hadn’t read Garfield in years until your prompt, and I gotta
admit—I laughed at the sombrero: cheap, unfulfilling laughs like
only the fat cat can provide, but rizas. Garfield puts salsa on
the sombrero’s brim? ¡Jajaja! Garfield gives a mouse a
sombrero because he makes cheese quesadillas? Hee-hee! And Garfield, if
I remember correctly, does nothing but eat and sleep, so to accuse him
of taking siestas for anti-Mexican purposes no es bueno.
Us Mexicans need to make peace with the sombrero, and need to
realize that, outside of the cornette associated with the Daughters of
Charity and the Green Bay Packers cheesehead, it’s the funniest hat
around, and that its use by gabachos doesn’t always signify
Mexican-bashing. (Combine it with a mustache, and you have a
diferente story.) Eternal vigilance is the price of a conscious
Mexican in this country, Odie Hater, but don’t make out Davis to be
another Joe Wilson.
Oh, and one final piece of advice: For your comic-strip needs, the
Mexican recommends to his gentle readers La Cucaracha and 9
Chickweed Lane.
My great-great-granduncle was Lt. Col. William Barret Travis, the
one who commanded the defense of American settlers at the
Alamo—and one of the first casualties. I’ve been told by a
Mexican friend of mine that I should be ashamed of this, but all my
life, I’ve been proud of it. What do you think?
Descendant of a 1635 Immigrant
Dear Gabacho: What do I know? I’m just an unassimilated Mexican who
still doesn’t get why millions of Americans continue to celebrate their
traitorous Confederate ancestors. Similarly, I don’t understand why
you’d be proud of a slave owner in your family tree—you don’t see
many Mexicans boasting of the conquistador blood in their
raíces, after all.
And that whole Alamo deal? Don’t get it. Maybe it’s just a Texas
thing, but what was that whole cosa about? Gabachos came
to Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government, promising to
become Mexicans, then reneged on their vow and were surprised when
their rulers tried to crush the resulting secession movement. Sure,
Gen. Santa Anna was a tyrannical pendejo, and there’s always
something to admire about last stands (see the Battle of Puebla), but
the Texas War for Independence was the opening volley in Manifest
Destiny. Why, this whole Alamo episode and its resulting discontents
sounds just like the 1830s version of the present-day Mexican invasion
to me!
CONGRATS TO
Astronauts Danny Olivas and José Hernández, for
recently eating burritos in space, and especially to Hernández,
who spoke out in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants. From the
deserts of Sonora to the Bering Sea, and now to outer space, the
Reconquista not only is real; it’s COSMIC. To quote that other famous
illegal alien, the Borg: Resistance is futile, Know Nothings!
Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net,
myspace.com/ocwab or facebook.com/garellano; find him on Twitter;
or write via snail mail at Gustavo Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA
92815-1433!
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2009.