Ask a Mexican!

Dear Mexican: You once asked why Mexican bands don’t hit it big
in the good old U.S. of A. I think the simple answer is that there are
no Mexican Mouseketeers. You don’t get to be Justin Timberlake by
picking a guitarrón. Slater from Saved by the Bell
doesn’t count. The real question is: Why does Disney—a company
that started with its first big park in Anaheim and introduced us
melanin-deficient peoples to topiary and churros—deny its Mexican
heritage?

Paddy O’Furniture

Dear Mick: Disney and Mexican heritage? What
herencia—Donald Duck in the enjoyable World War II
propaganda piece The Three Caballeros? Those old Tijuana bibles
showing Minnie Mouse walking into a room and finding Mickey sodomizing
a grinning Donald? The thousands of piratería statues,
piggy banks and piñatas sold by enterprising Mexicans,
everywhere from tourist spots in Mexico to stateside swap meets?
Exploitative working conditions that inspired a memorable protest
outside Disneyland last summer featuring cops arresting hotel employees
dressed as Disney characters? That cantina scene in A Bug’s Life during which the Kevin Spacey-voiced grasshopper gave a thinly veiled
screed warning against the Mexican invasion of America?

Surely, you don’t mean to reference Walt Disney’s supposed Mexican
heritage? The Mexican once heard a Chicano studies teacher state
proudly, with a straight cara, that gabacho parents
adopted the Mexico-born Disney, and that the history books hid this
fact so Mexican students couldn’t claim him as part of la raza.
(And we wonder why public schools fail brownies so.) Actually, the myth
is that Disney was born Jose Luis Girao, the illegitimate child of
Spaniards who was put up for adoption in the United States. The most
thorough Disney-as-Spaniard examination appeared in a Nov. 30, 2001,
article in the Guardian British newspaper, but no concrete proof
exists. That doesn’t stop some Mexicans from trying to claim him (along
with Thomas Alva Edison, Jimi Hendrix and Chewbacca) as one of their
own, including people who should know better—the Library of
Congress included Disney in a display at the hallowed institution
honoring Latinos a couple of years back.

Do Mexicans really think A Day Without a Mexican is a good
movie, and that California would completely and instantly collapse if
Mexicans suddenly disappeared? Isn’t that what psychologists and
psychiatrists call “delusions of grandeur”? Do Mexicans think
non-Latinos cannot operate the sophisticated piece of technology that
is known as the “gas-powered leafblower”? Do they realize that
millionaire musician Beck, one of the most Anglo guys out there, used
to be a landscaper with a leafblower?

Dear Gabacho: Where to empezar … how about disputing your
assertion that Beck is muy gabacho? He named an album
Guero (missing the umlaut over the letter u, it literally means
“light-skinned,” but is slang for a gabacho—and if you’re
learning this for the first time, read this column more closely! If
you’re really paying attention, you’ll know this is the third
time in as many years I’ve answered a Beck/Guero-related
question, although each in different contexts. Why can’t I get more
queries about Luis Perez Meza?). Beck incorporates Mexican rhythms into
his albums due to growing up among wabs in Los Angeles.

Not many Mexicans, gabachos, chinitos or
negritos liked A Day Without a Mexican; the 2004 film
grossed only an estimated $4.1 million at the box office, and it’s yet
to become a cult classic among Mexicans like Born in East L.A. or the Charles Bronson canon. Mexicans do believe this country can’t
exist without cheap immigrant labor—it’s not called “delusions of
grandeur,” but, rather, “knowing American history and how capitalism
operates.”

Finally, of course we know gabachos can operate
leafblowers—that’s why you’ll never see one use it to make a
living unless his/her education is at Guatemalan levels of
stupidity.

Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net or myspace.com/ocwab; at
facebook.com/garellano; on Twitter; or write via snail mail at: Gustavo
Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433!

This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.