Héctor Tobar Debunks the Myth of Latino Passivity

GOLODRYGA, HOST: Really interesting conversation there. Well, next, breaking racial stereotypes in the United States. As the son of Guatemalan immigrants, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Hector Tobar, is drawing from his own experiences to shine a light on what he describes as the pain, confusion, and pride of being Latino. He details these complexities in his new book, “Our Migrant Souls.” And here he is talking to Michel Martin about it.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Hector Tobar, thank you so much for talking with us.

HECTOR TOBAR, AUTHOR, “OUR MIGRANT SOULS”: Thanks so much for having me.

MARTIN: You know, I read a lot of books. It won’t surprise you. I had a hard time describing this one. How do you describe it?

TOBAR: You know, it’s my attempt to make sense of what people call me. You know, I’m called Latino. And the more I think about that term, the more I just see a whole bunch of stories, I see a whole bunch of history, and a whole bunch of thinking that we as Latino people have to do to understand who we are and why we’ve been given this name, Latino or Hispanic, for Latinx.

So, it’s a little bit of a memoir. It has a lot of storytelling in it, a lot of reporting. People that I talked to and met along the road of driving through the United States and going back to Guatemala, my parents’ home country. So, it’s a little bit of everything. It’s meant to be a journey into this idea of what Latino is.

MARTIN: And it’s also, I think, kind of a beautiful love letter to the many students whom you’ve taught and encountered over the years. And I just wondered if I could ask you to read a little bit, maybe just the beginning of it. It’s the prologue to the book. Would you mind?

TOBAR: No, absolutely, thank you for asking. You write words for me to read, a string of memories that place me inside the eyes of the child you were. A daughter of Honduras, of Mexico and of Puerto Rico, and of the Central Valley of California, with its flat, dry plains covered with crops and cows, and filled with paisas and their chickens. You sit in my office and begin to weep as you tell me the story of your undocumented boyfriend and the demons that haunted him, and it is clear to me that you should break up with him, even though I cannot say this. You tell me about your best friend, a white girl and about the African American family who lived next door. In your stories, I see a suburb of rectangular lawns and a rancho in the rural United States, where the neighbors heard your mother and father yelling at each other and where you took solace in the natural beauty of your surroundings in the crisp desert wind and the muddy yellow outline of mountain ranges.

You write, I am having a nervous breakdown. But your prose belies this, controlled and precise, it tells the story of a violation and of a survival you endured when you were a kindergartener.

MARTIN: And it goes on in that beautiful poetic vein. Did you have someone in mind when you wrote this book?

TOBAR: Well, I had somebody standing over my shoulder, and that was James Baldwin. You know, during the pandemic, I read “The Fire Next Time,” and I watched that really beautiful documentary about Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro,” and I had James Baldwin’s voice in my head, and I thought about, who would I write to? And I heard the voices of my students. And, you know, just having this wonderful experience of being at a public university where there are students from all over the State of California, many of them Latino students, many of them of Mexican immigrant heritage or Guatemalan or South American heritage, and just their pain and their confusion and their pride in who they are. So many different emotions.

MARTIN: But I’m still curious about why now? Because there have been so many inflection points along the way where the experience of being Latino, as we put it, and we’re going to talk more about that, like what does that actually really mean, but the experience has been so fraught. And I’m just curious, was there some particular inflection point? Was there some particular episode, incident or event or person that led you to want to say this right now?

TOBAR: Well, you know, I started writing also, you know, the George — during the George Floyd spring. This moment of reflection. The entire country is reflecting on racism, on the history of race hatred, discrimination in this country.

And so, that moment of reflection, however, didn’t really extend to our relationship with people of Latin American descent, right? There hasn’t been a national reckoning, right? We don’t have that presence in the media, right? So, you — instead, you have these images of chaos on the border, the image in the media, the most common image if Latino people in the media is of the maid or of the cartel member. And besides that, there’s this erasure from a lot of intellectual discussion from, you know, media punditry and everything. We’re just not seen and we’re not heard.

MARTIN: Well, the subtitle of the book is “A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and the Myths of Latino.” And here’s one phrase in the book that really brought me up short where you said, truth be told, those of us who can call ourselves Latino feel ridiculous. Half the time, we use the term. Why is that?

TOBAR: Well, because if you ask your average person, what are you? Your average brown person who is of Hispanic descent, they will say something like, I’m Mexican or I’m Mexican American, or I’m from South Central Los Angeles or my father’s Ecuadorian and my mother is Puerto Rican. Latino isn’t the first term that comes to our minds, right?

Latino, in many ways, feels like a marketing category. Hispanic, the other term that’s often used, you know, to talk about us is a term invented by the census bureau. It’s what you mark on the form. Latino isn’t that you mark on the form. So, there’s this whole aspect of marketing, right, in which we’re all grouped together as this supposedly one people, when in fact, you know, we might be Afro-Latino, we might be Jewish and Latino, we might be Asian and be Latino. Or very light skinned, you know, and be white passing. So, Latino is such a huge term, and it has this veneer of marketing to it. And so, it can feel a little bit ridiculous. Although, it’s also a term of solidarity, right? My kids are Guatemalan, Mexican, Angeleno Americans, but it’s much easier for them to say, oh, I’m Latino.

MARTIN: Part of your work as a professor is helping students view their family histories in the context of empire. Why do you think that that’s so important?

TOBAR: I think that a lot of Latino kids have this idea that their families are messed up. And that they are somehow flawed. Because they have these stories of somebody fleeing a town or running, you know, away from home, starting a family at 18 or 19 in Los Angeles or 20. And when you start a family when you’re 20, it’s really hard for it to be a stable family. So, they have all these ideas of how messed up they are. And part of the message of my classes is that we aren’t messed up. We are the products of a system that is messed up, right? It’s imperialism that’s messed up, right? Our people suffer from a lack of power. You look at our histories, there are deliberate policies in Central American, Guatemala especially, to make us dumb.

You know, there are democratic governments that were overthrown, reformist, forward-looking, governments overthrown by lackeys of the United States, you know, and deliver policies to make us dumb and to make us powerless. And so, we have to understand this as part of the equation of what makes us, right? That’s my message. That’s — you know, we have to study the United States as an empire to understand our own histories.

MARTIN: You write about the American tradition of giving nonwhite people legal categories. Certainly, where, you know, people of African descent are concerned, it has had specific legal consequences. I think indigenous people for sure, right, has had specific legal consequences. But would you just talk a little bit about that whole — that reality of needing these categories to differentiate people from white and what has that meant.

TOBAR: Yes. First of all, no human being is white. No human being is completely black. I mean, we’re all sort of different shades of brown. So, white and black are social constructs, right? They describe a relationship or a state of mind, right? So, white and black are invented when black slaves are brought in to keep the colonial economy going, right? And so, this describes a relationship, you’re either white or you’re black.

The same with Asian and, you know, Chinese. The Chinese are brought over to construct the railroads and do other work in the West, and then a few years later, we decide there’s too many of them, they’re affecting the look of the United States. We passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Eventually, we brought over so many Italians and Jews and, you know, Germans that we decided we didn’t want any more people from those countries. So, in the 1920s, they created the, you know, new immigration law that limited, restricted immigration from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe especially, right?

And so, now we live in this time when Latino people do this work. You know, we are synonymous with service labor of this country. Most of the crops in this country are picked by Latino laborers. And so, the country is dependent on these immigrant workers, on people who have a border crossing in their past.

So, we, as a country, have invented this idea that they are a race of people, that they share these qualities in common that make them want to work in the fields or make them want to work in service jobs. And we’ve created these legal categories, different immigrant status. There’s literally dozens of immigration statuses that you can have if you are a person of Latino descent, right? This idea of Latino identity being equivalent to like an alien status, and that, in fact, is a legal term, right, to be an alien is a legal category that exists, you know, in American society.

MARTIN: You know, there are people of Latino descent who — can I just say this, present as white and can if they want to?

TOBAR: Absolutely.

MARTIN: I mean, some of our like famous actors and actresses were of Latino descent and who change their names and you wouldn’t know unless they told you or wanted to tell you —

TOBAR: Right.

MARTIN: — you know, later on. And I’m just wondering, does that feel like a shared experience?

TOBAR: Yes. For a lot of people, Latino is like a suit of clothes. You can put it on or you can take it off. You know, there is definitely this colorism in our community, many of us are white passing. 40 percent of Latino people marked themselves down as white for race on the census. We have a very strange, very long relationship with whiteness. Absolutely. Right.

MARTIN: Tell me why it’s strange.

TOBAR: Traditionally, the very old mindset, is to think that lighter is prettier, right? Lighter is smarter. There’s that. A lot of our relatives do things to lose their accents, change the color of their hair, changed the way they speak to embrace this idea of whiteness. I say in my book that our relationship to whiteness is the comedy and tragedy of us, right? At the same time, I think there is increasingly now this sense of that we should embrace our Africanness (ph), to embrace our indigeneity, which is the biggest erasure.

You know, I have Mayan — I know that I have my Mayan ancestors but my grandparents never told me exactly who they were, right, because there was this shame in Guatemala associated with being indigenous.

MARTIN: I just can’t — I’m thinking about — for example, I’m thinking about like George Zimmerman, right, who killed Trayvon Martin. When he was trying to sort of justify his conduct, he and his family were, you know, their argument was, well, he can’t be racist because his mom’s Peruvian, you know. And I just — how do you understand something like that?

TOBAR: Well, I think that every Latino family is big enough has at least one racist relative, you know. So, being Latino doesn’t automatically make you a non-racist.

MARTIN: But how do you understand these guys who were, for example, people who identifies Latino or at least who are identified as Latino, who are then part of the Proud Boys, for example? How do you understand it when so many of these extremist groups are tied up explicitly in anti-immigration ideologies and white supremacist ideologies?

TOBAR: I just think it’s sort of a liberal naivete to think that, because you are a member of a group called people of color, means that you can’t have diverse views or that you’re all born with this saintly manner and you’re all enlightened, you know. That just isn’t the way life works, you know. There are people who have shed any idea of pride in this immigrant story and instead, embraced the idea of erasure. That’s what white is. Latinos were always supposed to become the next white group, right? We were supposed to be like the next Italians or the next to Jews, and that hasn’t happened because of what immigration represents in this country. It represents to many people this threat, right, to our culture. This threat to our government, to our prosperity. And so, Latino, as an idea, has been racialized.

MARTIN: Is that one of the myths that you set out to explode in this book?

TOBAR: Absolutely.

MARTIN: This myth that there’s organic solidarity that just somehow happens?

TOBAR: Well, more than that. Just — I mean, for me, it’s just the simplification of Latino life. You know, we’re either these, you know, barbarous criminals or we’re just, you know, victims and we’re the — you know, the dominant image in the American media, in the American liberal media even of the immigrant is of this poor person, you know, in a caravan, you know, not very educated, very passive. And so, to me, the dominant myth in the United States is one of Latino passivity.

MARTIN: That bothers you more than the sort of myth of criminality that was so much a part of, for example, like the 2016 election?

TOBAR: They both bother me. They are both awful. I mean, the idea that the number one job that a Latino male actor is going to get is as a cartel operative, that bothers me. That’s the terrible message we send to millions of young Latino people about who you can become and who you are, how you are seen. That’s terrible.

But, yes, the myth of passivity is one that we have in our brains. We have in our brains this sense that we’re faded to suffer. We’re faded to be the victims of this hatred. People migrate because their lives are complicated. There is some family dysfunction involved, and all of that is erased. We’re made out to be this simple people with very simple motives, and to me, that is — that’s maddening.

MARTIN: Well, what’s your dream?

TOBAR: My dream is of a generation that begins to create these works of art that start to flourish on the airwaves. You know, we have a Latino Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, waiting to be born. You know, we have our own, you know, grapes of wrath waiting to be told. And have that history be part of the American knowledge of itself.

The United States is in part a Latino country. So many people have married into Latino families, worked alongside Latino people, right? They’ve begun to sort of do things that they might not have done before. I think the pinata is almost universal, right, in American birthdays now.

I think that when the United States wakes up to the fact that we’re part of the family and we deserve to be seen and understood as much as anybody else in this country, which I don’t think is the truth right now. That’s my dream.

MARTIN: For people who do not identify as Latino, who do not see that this as part of their heritage, can you offer an invitation to people who were not of this heritage —

TOBAR: yes.

MARTIN: — about what it — how this include them? Does it include them?

TOBAR: Yes. I would say, first of all, that the story of being Latino in this country has so many parallels with the stories of being black or Asian or being Italian, being white, right? All these different identities that we construct. I think that these labels are constructed to make us think that we are all different, and it’s true. We have differences. But in fact, the things that we share in common, this incredible story called the United States history, is such a powerful thing. It makes into a family.

So, what my book is trying to do is to tell a story of a member of your family who you might not have listened to as much before. You know, the quiet guy in the back, you know, who — the cousin you kind of sort of know. I’m trying to tell one more story of the American family, and that story is an important one because it really teaches us a lot about what it means to be an American.

MARTIN: Hector Tobar, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for talking with us.

TOBAR: Thank you for having me.

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