The following conversation, between Latino American Experience Editorial Advisor Ilan Stavans and LAE’s Editorial Manager Lisa Pierce, took place May 11, 2007, at Professor Stavans’ office at Amherst College, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture.
LP: Hi. I’m Lisa Pierce, editorial manager of The Latino American Experience, and I’m sitting here with Ilan Stavans. He is the editorial advisor for The Latino American Experience, and this is the first of many conversations that he will be having.
So I’m going to start it off. We’ll talk a little bit about your work as a teacher. You’re familiar to many as a writer and researcher of Latino culture but you’re also a classroom teacher. As a teacher in what ways do you see your students using the Internet to conduct research on the Latino experience?
IS: I believe the classroom not to end anymore in the four walls that become a room where all of us, students and teacher, spend time together. For me the classroom is much larger. It has to do with the world in general and I encourage students to go out and explore that world and bring it back, intellectually, through readings, through discussions, through engagement with the outside community, but also physically to be part of that world, to get involved with it actively, and at the same time I believe that there is all sorts of media out that it’s crucial for the students to be able to make the classroom a more dynamic open space and for the teacher to be able to turn that experience much richer and the internet is a crucial tool, a crucial factor.
I always ask my students to prepare for the class with the readings that they have to do, but also to use the Internet to research everything that we are supposed to be doing in the next class as an assignment to offer some context. Yet I tell them that the Internet, as open, dynamic as a metaphorical classroom that it can become, might also be a dangerous tool, and it is very important that as the young people that they are, they learn to discriminate what is a good site from a bad site, what is good, trustworthy, usable information, data, reflective discourse, and what should be put aside as suspicious or second rate. And thus we spend often at the beginning of the semester some time analyzing what should be done with the Internet.
I believe that Latino students in particular, and every student in general, should use the Internet in a very active and engaging way, and that it can be a mechanism that opens people’s minds, but again it has to be done with care and with knowledge and with responsibility.
LP: Recently, the Pew Foundation released a report that showed Latinos lag behind non-Latino whites and African Americans in Internet use. Why do you think this is and what do you think needs to happen to bridge this gap in the digital divide for Latinos?
IS: There are between 40 and 45 million Latinos in the United States, a very large number, already the largest minority in the United States, a country that has over 300 million people, and where Latinos for that reason represent a very significant percentage of the population. Yet in comparison with other groups, with the large white majority and other ethnic minorities, Latinos are comparatively younger and they are also either themselves recent arrivals to the United States or the children of immigrants. Issues of language can sometimes be a springboard for new ways of learning and new ways of thinking, but they can also become an obstacle and a deterrent for students, for young men and women who are trying to become members of the American society.
Bring in other factors, the economic factor, many Latinos are still at the lower end in the economic scale in the United States, having trouble finishing high school, having trouble completing the four years of college. Dropout rates are very high, higher than with most other ethnic groups, teenage pregnancies, drugs, crime, issues that we can’t avoid when we talk about the Latino community, but issues too that cannot become an excuse for us not to engage actively and passionately in bringing the internet to that community.
My belief is that if Latinos, as I hope, are to become full members of this society and are to enter the middle class the way other immigrant groups have done it in the past, it is only through knowledge, through education, through learning. And the Internet today is a crucial tool to make that happen. It is very important that from the very beginning, from kindergarten even, certainly from elementary school and beyond, that we use the Internet to get them engaged, to get their minds moving. And that we realize that if they have a different language or if they have two languages, or if they speak Spanglish, which can be an in-between language, that should not be an obstacle, but should only be an invitation for them to explore the Internet in multiple ways.
LP: Do you also think there’s a tendency to perhaps not to see themselves reflected back in the Internet and other digital environments.
IS: Absolutely. That is a very important ideological issue, one that I have, as of late, been fighting. It seems to me that in television, in the larger screen and movies, and certainly on the Internet, there are aspects of Latino culture that do not get represented or don’t come across. The Internet is the most democratic and the most open but it can also feel sometimes as leading in one particular direction at the expense of other groups.
But precisely because it is the most open and the most democratic, everybody can jump in, everybody can serve, and everybody can create a blog, can create a web page. You don’t have to have more money or you don’t have to have gone to a better college or have a law degree or have a business degree in order to be able to be there and to benefit from it.
It is very important that, as we open up the media to other ethnic groups in the multicultural America that we are living in today, one that is made of people coming no longer exclusively from Europe, from Russia, from what used to be the Soviet Union, but from Africa, from the French, and Spanish, and Anglo-speaking, Anglophone Caribbean and from Latin America, from Asia, and other parts of the world, it is very important that the classroom become, I’m using here the metaphor of the window but we could also use the metaphor of the mirror or maybe a symphonic concert where all sorts of voices are coming in, a mosaic of images.
I love to think of the Internet as a place where people surf, jump in, to find new things, but the moment they jump out, they have been transformed, they are new, they look at the world differently. And I think it is very important to provide information that is trustworthy and invites reflection, critical analysis, offers some historical context. And in that sense I think we are helping the larger debate of what it means to be an American and what it means to be a citizen in the Twenty-first Century, where Latinos, as any other group, are playing a crucial role.
LP: Before we go much farther, I think many people have certainly asked me why we chose to use the term “Latino” in the title and why the site’s content sometimes in some places differentiates between Latinos and Hispanics, while in other contexts these terms are used interchangeably. And in your own salutation to the site you refer to this question of identification, Latinos or Hispanics, and say that “a minority in search of a name is a minority in search of itself.” In what ways are Latinos exploring identity and in what ways do you the site can be used to aid in that journey?
IS: Identity is never a finished deal. It is always in the process of becoming. We never really know who we are. We always get the sense that we are getting some taste of how others see us and how we see ourselves in the eyes of others, but we never reach that point where we say, “Oh I know who I am and I know what the world is all about and I am in perfect balance.”
And just as that happens with individuals it happens with communities at large as well. Latinos in particular because of our youth because of the multiplicity the diversity that exists within the community, people coming from all sorts of national backgrounds, from different economic, religious, political roots. It is very important to keep in mind that that community is in the process of defining itself for its own sake, the different members of the Latino community trying to explain what it means to be Dominican American vis-à-vis what it means to be Colombian American or Mexican American or Puerto Rican in the mainland, but also in front of the larger country, who are we as Latinos when we interact with other members of the American chess board, the Germans and the Italians and the Irish and African Americans and the Asians and the Jews and so on?
And for a long time we were people without a name. Names often came from the outside and were defining us. There came a moment, maybe two, three decades ago, where there was enough will power for us to begin defining ourselves more consciously, more consistently, more responsibly, but the fact that we still go back and forth and we probably will always go back and forth between two terms – Latino (Latin) and Hispanic (Hispano) or kind of breaking it down by nationality Mexican American, which can also be called a Chicano or a Mex-American or sometimes a Mexican that lives in Texas that can be different from a Mexican that lives in Oregon or in New Jersey, etc. Instead of that being a black hole where we all fall into and get lost, I would suggest that that is what is making us come to terms with our diversity and our own little piece of the larger pie that means the Latino identity.
Now who shapes that Latino identity? I don’t think it’s the intellectuals, I don’t think it’s the artists, I don’t think it’s the politicians, I don’t think it’s the professors. I do think it’s the artists and the politicians and the professors and everybody else. We do it all the time just as we go about our business, taking our kids to school, riding a bicycle, being in the classroom, being a businessperson, a secretary, a pizza delivery person. All of us in being who are in defining ourselves vis-à-vis other Latinos are coming to terms with the different terms – Latino, Hispanic.
Some of those terms are considered too explosive for certain members of the community, others are embraced for a time and then lose the presence and people move away from them. People at times also simply prefer to use their own national background, “I am Cuban American, or I am a Puerto Rican in the United States.” I think that none of these definitions are mutually exclusive. We can be not one thing but many things, as long as we engage in the same dialogue with other that we are engaging in ourselves, the conversation gets wider and gets richer.
I am fully aware of certain attacks that some of these terms – say the term Latino or the term Hispanic – have been the target of, by either members of the community or by people from the outside, that feel that they don’t represent us or that they misrepresent us. But I suggest that it is time to go beyond, that we shouldn’t waste too much energy on the beauties or the handicaps and limitations of a particular term but instead use the discussion as an engine to keep on debating who we are because that kind of concert of voices is where we will find meaning.
LP: In your introductory essay for the database you say that you hope the site will serve as an invitation for future debate and inquiry. Could you give our users some idea of what they can expect in the coming months on your part of the site, the kinds of individuals you hope to interview and invite to write essays and what kinds of topics you expect them to tackle.
IS: I see this project, this endeavor, this experiment as an extraordinary invitation and opportunity to on the one hand bring in a wealth of information about who Latinos have been and are, and are likely to become in the United States, in other words past, present and future. But I see it as door that will allow people to think critically and to think intelligently about all this information.
The past is never dead, the past is never flat, the past exists only when we interpret it, when we chose a scene from a particular story at the expense of another because that particular scene has meaning for us and tells us something about who we are today.
I want this site to be a mosaic of opportunities where different users, different browsers, different readers will come and be able to be exposed and find a scene, a quote, a personality, an idea that will make them think differently about themselves, be them Latinos or anybody else, and the idea is not ghettoize anybody with a site like this. This is an open forum and it is a forum where because of its openness one has to think critically.
I guess the key word here is critical thinking. What do we mean when we say “let’s think critically about something?” We don’t mean let’s think negatively, or let’s think destructively, what we mean is let’s look at a particular phenomenon, at a personality, at an idea from a variety of perspectives, see what is good in it, what is less good, ponder and see how useful that idea might be if we are thinking of implementing it. So critical thinking is about constructive thinking and I would like the site to be exactly that, a tool to be able to make history available, not history in a flat, in a dead way, but history in an active way. And in so doing I would love this to be truly an open and democratic space where thinkers, that is writers and lawyers and artists and politicians, can write and hopefully will write a column describing one particular experience or one argument that they have had on something that is current that also pushes us to look at the past in a different way.
My hope is that I would be able to bring to our site guests that I am looking already to invite that will open the experience as widely as possible, and not monopolize the voice but just the opposite, make it pluralistic. I’m thinking of librarians, of people that have had a direct experience as lawyers with the Young Lords, or the Chicano movement, I’m thinking of a muralist in LA, I’m thinking of a restaurateur, a chef that is working in Seattle, that is exploring the new Latino cuisine, I’m thinking of a performance artist that is putting together something that mixes media and would like to explore some of his thoughts with the people. In other words, I’m thinking of a variety of possibilities that will trigger thought in the users. And I’m thinking also for that reason that response that we’re going to get from people in an open forum of those who are reading is as important as the people that we’re inviting in and will be paid attention to not only by us on the creative side but by other readers that will follow and engage in a way that is useful and productive and is responsible.
LP: So it will be a little bit of taking the site a little broader than just the academy.
IS: The academy when it works is not in an isolating, kind of solipsistic way, doing self-referential talk, thinking you have made it to the classroom or you made it to your office or you have made it to the ivory tower and you don’t have to talk to the rest of society. That is the most absurd way of looking at academia or of looking at knowledge in a book or at a conference in general. It’s just the opposite. Using the classroom, using the site, using the books that we have, to open them up to everybody that can come close to academia in that way.
LP: You and I have talked since we started doing this project together. One word that kept coming up was “ecuentro,” to encounter, and you stated in your introductory essay that an encounter is never passive. Could you elaborate on that idea, particularly in light of some of the unsettling events surrounding last week’s immigration demonstrations in LA?
IS: The word ecuentro is a beautiful word, not only because of the way it sounds, encounter in English, but also because of what it means. A true encounter is not when one individual looks for another or looks for something else but when the second individual – when we’re talking about two – is also looking, and the act of looking on both side results in some sort of new light, thus a kind of enlightenment takes place. We are as of now, the very beginning of the twenty-first century, the year 2007, going through a very difficult time in the United States, particularly when it comes to individuals who are dreaming of coming to this country for a number of reasons, mostly I would say economic. They simply want a better life for themselves the way many immigrants in the past have wanted a better life for themselves, and they are also ready to have a better future for their children, again the same way others in the past have done it.
But because of September 11, because of the heightened sense of danger and tension that exists newcomers are not seen in the same way that they were in the past. And also there is obviously the issue of coming to the U.S. through legal, accepted, recognized means and channels, and coming illegally because those channels have been closed and are no longer available.
Sometimes the issue of immigration is moved away from the humane side of it to the legal side of it, turning an immigrant into a sheer number, “this amount of immigrants are crossing the border every day, and they are taking our jobs, and they are taking this amount of jobs,” and so on, and “the economy is X and Y,” and everything seems today as if it could be resolved by numbers. But it is crucial to remember that behind those numbers there are people, people that are looking to eat every day, three meals, the way every body wants to eat three meals, have a good bed to go sleep, have a shower, have time to rest, contemplate life, go to church, or go to synagogue, or go to mosque, and have friends, and simply better their lives as they go on.
The word encuentro is not always about looking for what we already know, but looking for something different that might surprise us. I would love for the site to be able, for Latinos to offer a new way of looking at our history, and for those many, many non-Latinos that will come to it, to realize that beyond the numbers that we hear on the news, that beyond the easy manipulations that politicians often make of who is crossing the border and for what illegal reason, there are human stories and those human stories are very important, they are as important as each of our individual stories.
LP: So far, the presidential candidates have not been addressing immigration, the candidates for either party. Have you been disappointed by this?
IS: I have been disappointed but I’m not worried. The issue of immigration is a crucial, it’s an urgent one, and we are still quite early in the presidential race. By the year 2008 I am convinced the issue of immigration is going to come back rather powerfully and might end up being the one that decides the election one way or another. But I want to repeat, very often what we hear from political candidates and from politicians in general is just the buzz words or one-line statement because that is what the media often affords them and affords us, reducing our intelligence to just sound bites. Beyond what we hear in the words of those politicians and beyond the images that we see on television, the issue of immigration doesn’t disappear; it’s still there, it’s a very urgent one.
We might want to build a wall, we might want to close our borders, we might want to change the numbers this way or that way, but America will still be a magnet for people to try come in, insofar as people in Africa, in the Caribbean and Latin America don’t have enough jobs, don’t have the means to simply support themselves. When we start recognizing that we are not a country that lives alone, but a country that lives with other countries, and that in order to held ourselves it might be a good idea to help others, then I think, not until then will we be able to fully and responsibly address the issue of immigration.
LP: That past week has actually been interesting on the issue of immigration. Two separate religious groups have seemed to push forward the idea in a way that might demand some answer from politicians. A group of New York churches is pushing the sanctuary issue for some immigrants that have been immigrants that have been targeted for deportation, and the Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, a group of mostly evangelical churches, launched a campaign this week to push immigration reform as an agenda item for politicians. Do you think that might be the checkmate or the move that forces the presidential candidates to start addressing it?
IS: I don’t know if it’s the checkmate, Lisa, but certainly a move on the chessboard that is going to change the way the whole strategy on both ends is established. What we’re seeing here is religion saying, “We are dissatisfied with the way this has been handled so far. And we don’t want to leave it to the government, we don’t want to leave it to the political institutions, to resolve an issue that affects us all in ways that go far beyond what we’re often hearing in the media.” This has happened in the past, in the sixties, in the fifties, in the thirties, where churches and other religious institutions stepped in to say “here beyond the numbers here we’re talking about children and we’re talking about adults and old people.” I like the humane side of it. I applaud it enthusiastically. I believe that it is a beginning that will set a different kind of pattern to the conservation.
LP: Right. You were talking about how the debate so far has been focused on numbers and regulations and this seems to be pushing it a little more into the direction of a human rights issues.
IS: Yet again, at the same time, it suggests that we are the owners of our own country, and even though we elect leaders and those leaders come to represent us, in our country we are the ones that are in command. And the church can be a sanctuary where people can look for, can become refugees that don’t find that type of shelter in other habitats within our own society. That’s very important. We might turn people away from hospitals because we’re saying we don’t have enough money to pay for all these illegal immigrants that are arriving like insects. But not everybody thinks that way.
There are other individuals that are saying, “if these people are already in this country it is for some reason and it is very important that we act as human beings because we ourselves could have been in that position.”
LP: In your book The Hispanic Condition you describe Latinos as “twice American.” For those who aren’t familiar with Latino history, and even as a Latino myself, before I worked on this project, there was so much about my own history as a Puerto Rican American that I didn’t know about and I know, growing up in American public schools, there was so much about Mexican American history and Latino history and how it impacts American history overall that I didn’t know. Could you explain what you mean by “twice American” and how resources like The Latino American Experience can help students and the public understand our current immigration situation and the current state of things in our society, how Mexican American and other Latino American histories impact our current condition.
IS: I see the world often through language, through semantics, and here we are yet again starting from that point, which to me is very important. The word America is a contested one. The United States is part of a larger constellation of countries that exists on this side of the Atlantic or on this side of the Pacific. The whole, from Alaska to the Argentine pampa, the whole place is called America, the American continent. It is a misnomer because first came the Vikings at one point Columbus in 1492 arrived to the Bahamas and eventually to the mainland and after that Amerigo Vespucci, another navigator, came to this new land - and the word new is always used to describe this continent vis-à-vis the old continent was new as is the trees were new, the animals were new, the sense of life and possibility, all of them were new –
LP: And no one else was here.
IS: And no one else was here, which is very important when of course we know that that is not the case.
The fact that the word “American” means that an Argentine is an American and a person in Canada is an American, but that we in the United States have also appropriated that word to describe the citizenship, the nationality that we have. We’re Americans because we’re from Texas or we’re from New York or we are from Michigan or from Florida, means that in some ways we are talking about two levels. And I think that when a Hispanic or a Latino comes to this country that person has already been an American, the way that anybody from the other parts of what is the northern or southern hemispheres, from the entire two continents, is a person that shares the experience of newness, of inheriting from the Old World, from Europe, be that Spain or Portugal or France or England, a sense of colonialism and having started anew with a mix of aboriginal culture and the infusion of African slaves that came during the colonial period. So I think it’s very important to remember that all of us have been here before. That this sense of territoriality that we have, that we own the place, that we are superior to others, has to be taken with a grain of salt. That there have been other new experiments on this side of the Atlantic in Chile, in Venezuela, in Panama, in Honduras. And history is such that at one point in one century, people move north, in another part in another century people move east or maybe people move west.
Right now we are witnessing the devotion and the desire of people from the south to move north, not only in this part of the world, from Mexico to the United States, but from Morocco to Spain and from Turkey to England and so on. It might happen differently, there might come a time when Americans from the United States, including Latinos that have been living here for quite a while will have to look for jobs somewhere else, will have to maybe go to Mexico and apply for citizenship because the reality has all of sudden changed.
So what is important is to keep in mind that this sense of uniqueness and propriety and ownership that we have is circumstantial, is temporal, and that it is like the little kid on the sandbox that thinks all of a sudden that the sandbox is his and only his and that nobody else can come in. The sandbox is not his, he might think it’s his, but sharing with others is much more fun than playing alone.
LP: To switch tracks slightly, on a related topic, you’ve done a lot of work on the language of Spanglish, the meeting of English and Spanish, and you’ve called Spanglish the verbal encounter – back to that encuentro – between Anglo and Hispano civilization. For those who aren’t familiar with your work in this area, what are your thoughts about the English-only movement and some of the political reactions we’re seeing to the growing number of Spanish speakers in the United States, and Spanglish also as a language.
IS: I see language as a fluid, elastic way of communication. The words that we use today, whatever databank we have at our disposal, be that English or French or Spanish or Portuguese, is never at a state of closedness and of immobility. It is just the opposite. We are always bringing in new words to define and describe the world in which we live and getting rid of other words because they no longer are useful, they no longer apply.
Think of the Internet. The whole variety of terms that has come to the fore in the last twenty years to describe what happens when we pass one document from one server to another, the word window has been transformed radically in the last twenty years, the word mouse, it’s very important because many of those words, say should Shakespeare come back from the grave, he would not quite understand what we mean by a window, the term has changed.
And it’s because the world keeps on moving and language has to adapt to that situation and just as each individual language has new terms and loses other, the syntax is transformed, grammar is shaped by young people in a way that defies the way grammar is used by the adults and eventually they settle into some sort of agreement between the two and there comes another young generation saying “let’s look at it this way,” through rap, through hip hop, through the language of the Internet, of MTV and so on.
Just as it happens internally within a language the fact that in a world like today people for all sorts of reasons people are always moving. Within the same country because you go away to college, because you go on vacation, because you got tired of where you were living, but worldwide because you are an immigrant, because you found a new job again, because you want to explore new realities, that means that languages are in contact in this encuentro, in this encounter, and particularly with immigrants there is often the emergence of a new language or in the borders, in the border between France and Spain there’s Portinol, or in Brazil, in Venezuela, the mixing of Portuguese and Spanish, there is Frangle, the mix of French and English. And Spanglish is a border language even though Latinos live all over and not necessarily close to the border. In that sense it is a language that is nurtured or is a form of communication that is nurtured from English and Spanish but kind of mixes and intertwines and juxtaposes and destroys and renews and creates and renovates on a regular basis.
I love the creativity and the beauty and rhythms of Spanglish. The purists believe that it represents the destruction of English or the destruction of Spanish. To me it represents the birth of something new. Something that is a bit English and a bit Spanish, but it is neither one nor the other. And I think the key operating word here is mestizaje. The word mestizo in Spanish was used during the colonial period in Mexico in particular, Central America as well, to describe somebody who was born of a mixed marriage between a Spaniard and an aboriginal person, an indigenous person, and it could also be with a Creole, or Criollo, and that Mexican and Central American cultures today are mestizo cultures, meaning mixed, hybridized cultures. And I think if that was an ethnic experiment in the colonial period, I think we’re experiencing a linguistic experiment today, a mestizaje that has to do with words.
For me Spanglish represents a new culture that is emerging that is in the encounter, in the encuentro of the United States and Latin America. Obviously this results in all sorts of tensions and all sorts of polemics and the English-only movement is a movement that wants to fight other languages in the United States, particularly this kind of second-rate illegitimate form of communication.
What do I think about it? I think that this dialectical tension between those that embrace it – Spanglish – and those that reject it is useful and I don’t think that we will ever resolve the issue. But in the end the tension is what makes this another representation of what it means to be an American. And if Spanglish disappears in the future that’s fine. It will give birth to something different.
If it stays, that fine with me too. I’m not worried. I think that as a nation, as a culture, as a civilization, when we discuss all these issues we make them conscious and we are acknowledging that they are part of who we are and I think Spanglish is already part of what we are. Even if we’re not Latinos, it is so much in salsa and in merengue and in the movies, certain movies, not as many as one would wish, and television, not as many as one would wish. But it’s already there, it’s on the street, it’s in the classroom, it’s in the kitchen, and that it is in the United States and I find that to be a very important acknowledgement.
LP: I think we can end on that. Thank you very much Dr. Stavans.
IS: My pleasure
LP: And we look forward to more of these conversations in the future.
IS: It would be lovely and thank you for coming here.