The city of Los Angeles, the world’s most famous zócalo, and the word “Latino” are connected by a shared history—a history of people and cultures and languages colliding, explained journalist and novelist Héctor Tobar. Tobar is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” and he was speaking at an event honoring his book and the themes of the prize: community, human connectedness, and social cohesion.

The event at the ASU California Center at the historic Herald Examiner building, titled “What Is a ‘Latino’?”, opened with a recorded reading by the 2024 Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Melanie Almeder, and then the presentation of the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize by Tim Disney, who generously sponsored both awards. “This book drove deeply into the dissonance, the paradox, between our very human compulsion to categorize, separate, and other-ize on the one hand, and our equally human capacity for decency, love, and connection on the other,” said Disney, before turning the microphone over to Tobar.

Tobar then delivered a brief lecture that wove together many threads—much like his book and the history of the word “Latino” itself. “To be Latino,” he said, “is to be a product of the sometimes violent, sometimes amorous mixing of cultures.” The people who built the town known today as Los Angeles, in 1781, didn’t think of themselves as Latino; they were classified according to race and caste labels invented by Spanish authorities. Many of those labels were offensive, Tobar noted, and became even more offensive and granular as the people of the New World mixed more and more—though the process also allowed social mobility that would have been impossible in Europe.

Two centuries later, when Tobar was born in a Los Angeles hospital in 1963, both of his Guatemalan parents were listed as “Caucasian” on his birth certificate, “invited into the safe, privileged ground of American whiteness” in Los Angeles of that time, as other groups had been before them. But decades later, with increased migration from Latin America into California, the ground shifted again—and Tobar, who had always called himself “Guatemalan,” became “Latino,” a word enshrined in the stylebook of the Los Angeles Times, where he was the “Latino columnist.”

“Unfortunately, ‘Latino’ hides our Indigenous and our African heritage, and replaces it with a term whose etymology goes back to Europe and Rome. Like every other ethnic and racial term, ‘Latino’ places a simple, one-dimensional label on relationships that are filled with complexity and nuance,” said Tobar. “Sometimes we wear those terms proudly, and other times they fit us like loose clothes, or like a sign someone stuck on our back. And sometimes, if we don’t fit them, we make up new ones.”

He continued, “To say today that Latino people are a race means only one thing. It means we have a relationship to the United States that is racial.” Yet if race is about power and labor, it is also about resistance and community, said Tobar. “We should treat those [race] labels as artifacts of a human journey, as myths made up to explain what a people are, and as a true story people tell about their families and their dreams. ‘Latino’ is a story of empire, of exploitation, and it’s a story of the work and struggles that have made us into a community in our barrios and the gathering places and the zócalos we call home,” he concluded.

American historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina—who writes about interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship—joined Tobar onstage for a moderated conversation and audience Q&A. They talked about their own Latino and Los Angeles stories, the students Tobar teaches at UC Irvine, and where they find hope for the future.

“A central figure in your book is Wong Kim Ark,” said Molina. What role does he play in Our Migrant Souls?

Tobar explained Ark’s story: born in San Francisco in the late 1800s, he was the son of Chinese immigrants during a time when little legal migration was allowed. After a trip to China, he returned home and was put in immigration detention for months. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in Ark’s favor—that anyone born in the U.S. was an American citizen. Ark’s story resonated with Tobar on many levels, including the fact that his parents were in the U.S. on tourist visas when he was born. Later, Tobar learned about the Chinese community in eastern Guatemala, where his father is from. “Everywhere you look in American and Latin American history, you see this braiding” of peoples and histories, he said.

That braiding is part of the lives of his Latino students, who helped inspire the book—which Molina called “a love letter” to them. She asked Tobar, “What changes have you seen across the years in your students?”

“People have a way of processing traumas and processing things that embarrass them and turning them into something powerful,” said Tobar. For example, the terms “Chicano” and “Cholo” were an insult and a race term, respectively, that eventually took on new meanings. Young Latino people have taken embarrassment or self-consciousness around how they speak Spanish and claimed it for themselves: They are “No Sabo” kids. They have also turned the bureaucratic term DACA on its head, with unDACAmented and DACAmented.

On a more sobering note, Tobar thinks his students “are living in an age with less opportunity than we grew up in. And of more difficult choices.” But they also have an “incredible ease with multiculturalism,” he said, recounting how many of them write about their interracial relationships and families.

“They want to learn more,” said Molina. “They expect those stories to be out there.”

“They’re less tolerant of the erasures, I hope,” said Tobar.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

That hopeful note is central to Our Migrant Souls, which chronicles the pain of Latino history but also the celebration. “What do we need to do to keep that hope alive, to keep the story of Latinos as one of hope?” asked Molina.

“It’s personally never allowing my curiosity to be totally satisfied,” said Tobar, who has found inspiration in queer history. It’s about “embracing the idea that somebody’s going to surprise you in as many positive ways as negative ways,” he said. He added, “There’s lots of accusation, there’s lots of name-calling. But let’s go beyond that and let’s imagine the future we want to create and what that might look like. That to me is the lesson behind this journey of exploration.”

In the audience Q&A, Tobar dug deeper into the multitudinous meanings of “Latino,” and offered more hopeful visions of the future.

“There’s going to be another term later, right?” asked one audience member, echoing Tobar’s argument that “Latino” denies African and Indigenous roots. “What’s going to be next [and] how can we influence the development of that next term?”

“My own personal project now is to understand the roots of Los Angeles and its Indigeneity,” said Tobar. It’s a difficult project—he hasn’t been able to pin down the roots of his own Indigenous heritage—but he believes “Indigeneity has shaped our way of being in Los Angeles. I think that’s one of the ways we can think about what Latino means. It’s absorbed so much indigenous and African culture. It’s our job not to treat it as something exotic but as something that’s as much of our being as the Pilgrims.”

After the Q&A, speakers and audience members gathered for Guatemalan food from Casa Chapina and signature cocktails and mocktails from Vucacious. It was the evening’s second opportunity to mingle and talk. Before the program’s official start, a smaller group of audience members gathered at The Hoxton, across the street, for Zócalo’s inaugural “reading hour,” Zócalo Reads.

Tobar read an excerpt from his book, and then audiences sat and read quietly, or had conversations with strangers about what the border means in their lives, why they love/hate the words Latino or Chicano, and more.

The post Héctor Tobar Peers Deep Into ‘Our Migrant Souls’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…” opens Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets, a study devoted to the hue that spurred a Picasso period, the blues of the Deep South, and Yves Klein, the artist who even turned urine blue.

I, too, have fallen in love with a color—it was a bit obsessive. For me, Brown has always been everywhere, is everywhere. But to truly love it, I had to learn to see it anew, to meet it again and again in various forms, own it, and honor it. Only then, in Brown, I found a place to define myself and grow.

What is Brown? We brown-nose, we bake brownies, we live in brownstones, we have brownouts, and to quiet the clamor we listen to brown noise.

For me, Brown was first Queens, New York, aka the World’s Borough. Home to 130 different spoken languages—Spanish, Russian, Korean, Greek, Urdu, and Tagalog, to list just a few—my hometown represents over 120 countries. On 107-17 64th Road, 11375, Brown was everywhere, so like the fish in the sea that doesn’t know water from air, I didn’t know how special it was.

Still I remember being a kid faced with the dilemma of coloring myself on a blank sheet of paper, and I couldn’t color myself in: “None of these colors look like me.” I mean, of course, if I wanted to, I could use the peach crayon indicated for “flesh”—but whose flesh? So instead I opted to make myself green and purple and orange. Like when you go out to get a Band-Aid and it doesn’t match your skin—so you go with the colorful ones, with cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny or the Flintstones on them.

Brown exploded into my life in 2018. I was living in Los Angeles, doing the Hollywood thing, and one night I was invited to see Ta-Nehisi Coates—a person many have called our modern-day James Baldwin—speak at the public library in downtown Los Angeles. I’d never heard of him before. But my friend insisted he was a big deal.

Coates spoke about Black and white, and then he spoke some more about Black and white. Everybody was filled with awe, and the occasional “Yes, yes, brother.” And it was well-earned; it was intellectual church.

When it came time for questions, I hesitated. I really didn’t want to say anything, because at the time, I wasn’t a raise-your-hand kind of person. I didn’t trust I had anything of value to say. But I knew I needed to ask him a question now or I would regret it forever. So, I asked: “Black and white, that’s all I hear, Black and white. As a Brown man, a Dominican, Colombian, Latino in this world, where does that leave me in the conversation?”

Coates took a short breath and responded, “Not in it.”

“Not in it?” I asked.

“Not in it,” he replied.

The moderator snatched back my microphone. They moved on to the next question, and I sat down like a child reprimanded for asking a stupid question with a simple and obvious answer.

I was dumbfounded. I wasn’t in this conversation? What a curse to be told you do not exist in such a vital conversation in America, I thought.

And so my obsessive journey with Brown began. I was a baby learning to walk again, tripping and falling all the way across the room.

After the talk, I was supposed to go to dinner with some friends, but too keyed up, I went home instead. I stared up at the ceiling of my small, Little Armenia studio, wondering: “Not in it? Why am I not in it? Where am I? Where are the Brown bodies? Where are our stories and our voices? Where are my father and mother? Where are the people I love?”

These questions began to consume every inch of my life.

For a while after, I could no longer do anything without the weight of race in it, without seeing or hearing this not-in-it-ness. It was exhausting, I couldn’t watch a movie, or go to the park with all the joggers and dog owners, or read the news, or get a cup of coffee, or go on a date. Even a haircut paralyzed me. If I cut the curls off, am I losing my identity? If I go traditional crew-cut, will that make me more ethnically ambiguous, and is that what is wanted of me by Hollywood, by media, by culture? Will that push me closer to some sort of “success”? To cut or not to cut? 

Then, some six months later, I saw a solo performance by the Salvadoran American playwright Brian Quijada. It was called Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Brian tells the story of a question he once asked a teacher when his class was learning about Rosa Parks during a Black History Month lesson. Looking around his public school room, he saw white kids and Black kids and wondered, first to himself, and then, out loud to the teacher: “What about Brown Hispanic people? Where were ‘we’ when all of this was going on? Where did we sit on the bus?” The teacher told him, “You weren’t there.”

This got at exactly what I’d been feeling—it’s impossible that we weren’t there. On August 28, 1963, when MLK led the march on Washington, out of the 200,000 to 300,000 people who attended, thousands were Latinos—many of them Puerto Ricans from NYC. This is largely because MLK asked Gilberto Gerena Valentín, then president of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, to get the Latino population to turn out. For King, having a Latino presence was necessary. He said to the masses, “There is discrimination not only against Blacks, but also against Puerto Ricans and Hispanics.”

We were there when there were white water fountains and Black water fountains, white bathrooms, and Black bathrooms. We, Latinos, Native, Indigenous, Mixed, Middle Eastern, Asians, and other underrepresented communities were there, facing our own discrimination, somewhere in the middle of Black and white.

America is becoming Browner every day. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in about 25 years, the nation’s population will become “majority-minority.”

Each and every one of us wants to be a part of something. We want to walk into a room and know: I belong here. But there isn’t a sense of cohesive Brown identity.

Being in this middle, fluid space can feel at times like there is no separation between up and down, right and wrong, fail and pass, this and that, his and her.

Because it is such a wide category, so vast, for a time, my own individuality, my own specificity, my own “Christopher Rivas-ness” felt lost.

But since I have become obsessed with Brown, and have started to see it for what it truly is, now I embrace the millions of complex shades it holds. Because to say, “I am Brown,” is to say, in this Black / white world, I am somewhere in the middle—a space beyond dualistic and binary thinking. There are no fixed endpoints. Nothing is ever set in stone. In Brownness we are always becoming.

Looking back to that night in 2018 when I was told I existed outside of the Black/white conversation of race in America, I still feel like Coates wasn’t wrong: there is still a very clear line in the sand, a clear divide in our binary world between Black/white. Though that conversation was shocking and hurtful, it helped me engage with the alchemic power and privilege of my Brownness, and how to best use my privilege of being able to navigate the middle and sometimes play both sides.

Now, when I think about Brown, I think about it as both color and concept. It is the color of roots. So many pigments of Brown come from and indicate dirt—from which everything grows; our sustenance, the trees that give us the air we breathe.

I can now celebrate my cultural, ethnic, and racial identity and bring to light some of the issues and problems we face. In short, I can now put myself in it and carry my Brownness proudly.

The post What Does Brown Mean? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2018, I was interviewed for Univision’s morning talk show ¡Despierta América! (Wake up, America!) to discuss the meaning of the identity label Latinx. I was nervous because I had never discussed gender and sexuality in a “formal” Spanish setting, let alone on national television—I mean, my 92-year-old abuelita was going to be watching! At the end, the reporter asked if I identified with the term Latinx. I knew what he was asking: Are you, personally, gender fluid? I surprised myself when I replied “yes” without pause. It was the first time I had publicly affirmed my non-binary identity.

In the months that followed, I would have several conversations with family and friends about what this meant for me, what pronouns I would now use, and how we would have patience with each other in learning and moving forward. Patience was necessary, given that the debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has gone in dizzying circles. Since the term Latinx gained popularity in 2016, it and its variations (for me, Latine offers more phonetic fluidity)—have become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders, and sexual identities.

But the debates largely miss the point: whether one prefers to use Latinx or Latine, both terms recognize and honor the presence of gender-fluid identities. What is most striking about these “debates” is that they rarely (if ever) center the voices and experiences of those who do identify with the term—namely, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid Latine communities.

The linguistic debate on Latinx, then, serves as a useful example to understand the transphobia prevalent in our community and the importance of adopting language that better reflects our communities writ large.

Critics of the term Latinx often cite linguistic purity and Spanish heritage for their critiques. Some claim that Latinx is an abomination to the Spanish language because it does not follow proper grammar or phonology, noting that the “o” in Latino—or any other identity label such as dominicano, chileno, mexicano, for example—is already inclusive of the collective.

While this argument may be grammatically “correct” according to mainstream Spanish, it does not take into account the invisibilities the “o” creates. Latinx provides a linguistic vehicle to represent gender fluid experiences and to organize these communities under an inclusive umbrella. However, some people use Latinx as a catch-all term since the x can be a stand-in for any of the other identities: -a, -e, and -o.

The critiques also ignore the political context. In my research on queer and trans Latine communities, I first noticed the use of the “x” in my fieldwork in 2016 when community organizers were debating more inclusive language in their social media presence. Some have also cited the emergence of Latinx after the tragic Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida, when media outlets faced having to accurately represent the diverse gender identities of the victims.

This expansion and reconsideration of gender, it turns out, is of vital relevance to Latinx communities. In 2018, the GenForward Survey, housed at the University of Chicago, published a study on Millennials’ attitudes surrounding LGBTQ issues. The study found that while approximately 14% of Millennials in the U.S. identify as something other than straight or heterosexual, a greater number of Latinx Millennials identify as LGBTQ (22%) compared to African Americans (14%), whites (13%), and Asian Americans (9%). These numbers are also worth noting considering that Latines make up 19% of the U.S. population and are the youngest of any ethnic group in the country. As of 2019, the average age of a Latine person is 11, while the average age of a Black person is 27, 29 for an Asian person, and 58 for a white person. From this perspective, the future of Latine communities in the U.S. is looking a lot less heterosexual and cisgender.

But this inclusivity is exactly what critics of Latinx dislike. Last year, the Atlantic published an article claiming that staffers encourage Latino legislators to avoid the term because it is “divisive.” But the rationale of avoiding being divisive aims to create the illusion of a politically unified Latine voting bloc, as opposed to choosing to understand the complex experiences that are categorized unilaterally as “Latino.” For decades, both Congresspeople and Hollywood have discussed “struggling” with understanding the vastly diverse group of people that the terms Latina/e/o/x include. Calling attention to this diversity is precisely the point of Latinx.

Negating the term Latinx also contributes to an erasure of trans experiences that perpetuates violence. Currently, the rights of transgender communities across all races and ages in the U.S. are under attack—a forceful effort to erase the experiences of transgender people and deny them protections from discrimination. Trans women already experience greater employment discrimination than any other demographic: According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute “nearly half (48.8%) of transgender employees reported experiencing discrimination (being fired or not hired) based on their LGBT status compared to 27.8% of cisgender LGB employees.” On top of that, there is a growing rate of murders of trans Women of Color in the U.S.—In 2021, the Human Rights Campaign tracked a record 50 fatalities, an overwhelming number of whom were Black and/or Latina. In 2022, at least 38 trans people have been murdered; many additional cases go unreported or misreported.

Latine transgender communities also include a significant undocumented population, who face not only employment discrimination but further marginalization due to their legal status. For instance, in their study on trans Latinx health in California, trans activists and scholars Bamby Salcedo of TransLatin@ Coalition and Jack Caraves found that of the 129 participants they surveyed, 37% were undocumented, 26% were unemployed, and just 20% had full-time employment.

The insistence on rejecting the use of Latinx is a transphobic act because it denies trans Latine and Latinx people a term that represents them. When conservative leaders in our communities are the first to double down on that denial, it shows that they don’t see trans Latines as part of the communities they represent. For instance, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., claims that we should drop the use of the word altogether since so few people like it.

More recently, Republican congressperson María Elvira Salazar of Florida introduced an amendment to the House appropriations bill that would prevent the executive branch from referring to Latinos as Latinxs in official, public-facing documents, and preventing any funds from being allotted for producing documents that use “Latinx” or “Latin-x.” This tactic has also been used by non-Latinx leaders: Last month, on her first day in office as Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee banned the use of the term Latinx in all official state use. And early this month, a group of Hispanic Connecticut Democrats introduced a bill to follow suit.

Untangling fluid social constructs like language and gender can be challenging. But perhaps the point is not to untangle. Linguistic expressions hold so many possibilities in how people affirm themselves, their communities, and more importantly, how they can imagine other ways of identifying, loving, and being in the world. That’s where I see the power and hope in these language practices—the power in recognizing someone else’s beauty and their humanity. Whether the terms Latinx and Latine become widely adopted or not, both resist the urge to fall in line with the collective “o” in Latino and both enforce the idea that trans people do, in fact, exist in our communities. While changes in language may seem “difficult” for some, or unimportant for others, language is constantly shifting and evolving. The move to gender-inclusive language is a reminder and a call to action for all of us to actively engage with and recognize the experiences, struggles, and joy of transgender communities.

The post Why Is the Latinx Debate So Fierce? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But for me, my wife Dañel Malán, and our colleagues at Milagro, establishing our artistic home in Portland, Oregon, has afforded creative and community-building opportunities we might not have had if we’d settled in Texas, California, or some other state with a more pronounced Spanish accent.

In one way, I think the organization’s success may be directly related to not being in the center of a major or a significant Latino population. We have articulated a universal approach to Latino stories, as opposed to just identifying with one country (say Mexico) or one ethnic identity (Chicano, for example). We were able to present a menu of theatrical experiences from all over the world and allowed people to learn and to participate.

I’m from Corpus Christi and Dañel is from San Diego. But I moved to Portland in ’67, when I was 15, and went to high school here, and started my theatrical career at the old Portland Civic Theatre. Even though I returned back to Texas in the late ‘70s, I kept coming back here to visit family and also to work on shows.

Quite prosaically, we founded our theater company to create jobs for ourselves. Dañel and I were graduate students and met at UCLA back in the ‘80s, and then we moved together to Portland in ’84, after I finished graduate school. It was a smaller community then, with just a handful of theaters operating. Most of them, like most theater companies, had their little private families, or groups that they worked with. So it was very hard for us to break in.

At that time, Dañel was a costume designer, I was a scenic designer. We thought that doing a show might be a great way of advertising our abilities and getting work.

We started out with an Alan Ayckbourn comedy, Relatively Speaking. Initially we had a pretty commercial viewpoint, and we were not even thinking of being a nonprofit. Our original company was called ArtPaz; a nice blend between “art” and the Spanish word for “peace.” We were eclectic, and learning the ropes as producers. We’d do a melodrama here, and a play from Eastern Europe there, something from England. Then we connected with the Greek community and produced the Ancient Greek Theatre Festival.

It was around 1987 when I started getting pretty homesick for the Southwest. I tried in vain to convince Dañel that maybe we could move back to Texas, but she was adamant that we wouldn’t.

And then a board member of ours said, “You know José, you should really think about doing Hispanic theater.”

I thought he might be right: “Well, if I couldn’t go back home to Texas, maybe I can bring that here, everything that I’m missing—the flavors, the smells, the voices, the climate—I can bring that here by creating a Hispanic cultural festival.” I thought maybe there are other people that feel like me, that are homesick, or missing that special cultural thing that we can’t find here. Lo and behold, we had something like 130 people, mostly Latino, show up for our first auditions for the festival.

As part of our development, we did a lot of work, making phone calls and visiting folks, to get to know people in the community and build a base of support, contacts and information. The dance director at Portland State University formed an entire dance company to perform in the show. Local poets whom we had known for a few years energetically volunteered to read Latin American poetry in English and in Spanish. Musical groups, solo performers and others all jumped in, for the chance to show people what they could do.

It took us a few years to arrive at the decision to do nothing but Latino theater. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of the encuentro between the European colonizers and the Native Americans, we formally dropped the Greek experience and moved on—and haven’t turned back since.

Dañel Malán and José Eduardo González, founders of the Milagro (Miracle) theater company in Portland, Oregon. Courtesy of Courtesy of Milagro Theatre Group.

We did our first Spanish-language presentation in 1993, through Repertorio Español, which is a Spanish-language theater based in New York. It was on a national tour, and they got in touch with us, and we thought it was a great idea, to test the waters and see what might work in Portland. And so we presented them, and pretty much filled up St. Mary’s High School auditorium with the general public and with a lot of Spanish-language students.

One major development came in ’89 with our first Hispanic Cultural Festival, when Dañel produced an original children’s bilingual play called Perez y Martina. That launched the idea of bilingual theater, where we carefully created bilingual scripts that would be fully understood by native and non-native speakers. Teatro Milagro, the company’s national touring program, continues to this day, traveling the country with original bilingual productions

In 2002, we returned to Spanish-language theater again, with a play called “Te llevo en la sangre” by Monica Silver of Argentina. We decided to stage a reading of it, and rounded up enough Spanish-speaking Latino artists and actors to pull it off. We were just amazed: If the fire marshal had shown up we would’ve been shut down.

We knew we needed to focus on Spanish-language, but we took our time. We spent about four years putting on workshops, developing talent, and doing small one-acts and short plays, often in studio settings, so that we could build our capacity and audience. In 2006, we were ready to do something big. The first fully mounted production was Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience), about the last days in the life of Pablo Neruda, based on the novel by Antonio Skármeta. We’ve produced it twice in English and twice in Spanish.

Since we started the theatre, Portland’s Latino population has roughly doubled. Now we have good representation from Mexico but also from the Caribbean, Central America, and even South America.

Our Día de los Muertos festival also played a big role in community building. It was the first program that we produced when we moved into our facility in the central eastside industrial district here in Portland. And we included a Day of the Dead altar tour—connecting with Portland businesses to build altars in their space and publishing published a map of the altars so people could come and tour them.

For our mainstage programs, about 30 percent of our audience is now Latino. Our touring program tends to have a much higher percentage of Latino attendees, both in schools, universities and in public forums—70 percent and above.

One of the mantras around here is that we’re not a Latino-only club. That’s helped our relationships with non-Latinos; it’s also helped that we don’t advocate for particular political positions. Instead, we let the work speak for itself.

We strive for authenticity, culturally and otherwise. If we water it down, then it really becomes something else, and we’re not really being true. What drives us is to be true and honest with our audience—not to berate them or stand on soapbox.

Our goal is to present a story that is believable, that is seen in a different way, so that hopefully the audience will return, and enjoy us in yet another artistic experience.

The post How We Brought a Pan-Latin Flavor to Portland Theater appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re scholars—Ariella is a UCLA Anderson professor of operations management, while Lance is a medical doctor with an MBA—who are deeply interested in what works, and doesn’t work, when it comes to health education.

One of our focuses has been raising awareness about causes and recognition of melanoma and other types of skin cancers. More than 3.5 million such cancers occur annually in the U.S., and one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetimes. Even more concerning is that melanoma is the second most common form of cancer in adolescents and young adults.

The prevailing misconception that only people with light skin get skin cancer, and the fact that ethnic minorities are often left out of skin cancer studies, have left young Latinos and African Americans particularly at risk. Ignorance of the risk has consequences: prognosis and survival rates among Latino and African-American populations who develop melanoma are far worse than in the population in general.

So we sought to figure out why messages about skin cancer and the need to wear sunscreen weren’t reaching everyone—and how to deliver information that would change behavior and the statistics.

With a grant from Neutrogena (which is owned by Johnson & Johnson), we developed materials for parents that explained the risks of skin cancer, the value of sunscreen to protect against skin damage from the sun, and how to apply sunscreen. First, Professor Herman piloted this health education material with Head Start agencies around the country. There, she found that parents who had received training and educational materials were more likely to use sunscreen and put protective clothing on their children when they were in the sun. We also found that because sunscreen is expensive, we achieved better results when we provided parents with complimentary sunscreen product.

Then we decided to try to reach older, middle-school-age children who could apply sunscreen themselves.

Before becoming a doctor, Lance had worked in South L.A as a teacher. He arranged to give surveys in South L.A. middle schools with predominantly African-American or Latino students. These pre-intervention surveys were administered in science classrooms, and the results confirmed there was a problem. Just 8 percent of African-American students and 24 percent of Latino students reported everyday use of sunscreen. And around 39 percent of African American students and 75 percent of Latino students reported a recent sunburn—a risk factor for skin cancer.

Lance refined the education materials that had produced results in Head Start to adapt them for middle school kids. We kept the language simple and focused on a few core messages about skin cancer, especially among ethnic minorities, and about the value and uses of sunscreen.

After we finalized the educational pamphlets, Lance arranged to visit three schools for a “Skin Teaching Day.” He spent a full day at each school offering education on skin disease and the importance of sun protection. At the end of Skin Teaching Day, he gave a 30-SPF sunblock to each student, with instructions to apply daily at home when spending time outdoors.

Three months later, we followed up with students to assess compliance with using the sun protection products and to figure out whether kids intended to continue using them as directed.

At the follow-up, 94 percent of students said they intended to wear sunscreen in the future, and confirmed greater awareness of the risks of skin damage and skin cancer than before the educational intervention. Use of sunscreen lagged behind awareness and intention, but was higher than before the education pamphlets and the visits. We found that the younger the kids were when we introduced the material, the more impact we had in changing attitudes and behavior.

We also learned that finances constitute a real barrier: 54 percent of students said sunscreen was too expensive for daily use. Public schools hand out many things—from books to parent forms and report cards—to all their students. Sunscreen, and instructions about its uses, should be among the things they offer to protect all children.

The post Targeted Education Can Help Dispel the Deadly Myth That Only Light-Skinned People Need Sunscreen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

South L.A. is both a remaining stronghold of African Americans in Los Angeles and a place where a new narrative of immigrant integration is unfolding. There, a process of building on the past—or ethnic sedimentation—has taken hold. As a result, South L.A. is now seeing the emergence of complex new identities rooted as much in a pride of place as they are in a sense of race. The area has become home to a new sort of Latino identity and a new sort of immigrant integration, both inflected by blackness.

Understanding these changes is important not just for South L.A. but for the country as a whole. Many other urban areas have been ravaged by unemployment, riven by immigration, and riddled by the rise of gangs and the hyper-criminalization of African Americans, especially, and Latinos. The kind of positive social innovation that’s happening in South L.A. as community organizations forge a Black-Latino unity could be instructive, with the lessons stretching beyond our majority-minority region and time, and touching on the future of the nation.

These conclusions come from research done by a team of colleagues and students at USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration in South L.A. over the past few years. We’ve observed public spaces, done detailed research in and on neighborhoods, and conducted interviews with 100 Latino residents and nearly 20 local civic leaders of all backgrounds. Our research team members are publishing the results in a new report, Roots|Raíces: Latino Engagement, Place Identities, and Shared Futures in South Los Angeles, combining our analysis with specific recommendations for South L.A.’s future.
 
 
Shifting Spaces: Demographic Change in South L.A.

If there is a constant in South L.A., it is change. Once farmland, the area became the paradigm for white industrial suburbs in the 1920s through the post-war period. Black L.A., always a presence, grew dramatically in the war years, particularly along Central Avenue. After racially restrictive housing covenants fell, the black community moved south and west. By 1970, South L.A.—stretching from Interstate 10 to the north, the Alameda Corridor to the east, Imperial Highway to the south, and Baldwin Hills to the west—was 80 percent African American.

But time—and demographics—didn’t stand still. In the 1980s, job loss from deindustrialization and a toxic combination of high crime and excess policing forced many African Americans to reconsider their futures in the area. The 1992 civil unrest gave another push and as the exodus stepped up, Latinos moved into the neighborhood. Many were immigrants driven from Latin America by economic crises and civil wars, lured to the U.S. by changing labor demands, and unable to secure housing in densely packed traditional entry neighborhoods like Pico-Union. With the immigration flow also becoming more female and family-based, the search was on for affordable housing, and the single-family homes of South L.A. made for a good fit.

Non-Hispanic Black population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

Latino population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

The ethnic inflows and outflows were not balanced: More Latinos moved in than blacks moved out, and South L.A. became more crowded. Single-family homes frequently became multi-generational affairs, and Latino homeownership rates rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 33 percent in 2009-2013, nearly closing the gap with black homeownership. Now the area that has long been the beating heart of Black Los Angeles—South L.A.—is nearly two-thirds Latino.

The uptick in home ownership—as well as a steady increase in the share of South L.A. immigrants with more than 20 years in the country—signals the process of sinking roots. By contrast, other measures of “integration” or rootedness have remained low, including English-language acquisition and civic engagement. Here is evidence of a rooted but disconnected population: In 2013, while 47 percent of immigrants in Los Angeles County were naturalized citizens, just 26 percent of immigrants in South L.A. had that status.
 
 
Latinos in South L.A.: Generational Experiences

The first generation of immigrants in the neighborhood has complex attitudes towards their neighbors. In our interviews, older Latinos sometimes spoke of racial suspicion or, more commonly, simply noted relationships with African Americans that were polite but not close. But the very same individuals would later wax poetic about the African-American neighbor who guided them through the homeownership process, the black cop who set their errant hijo on the right course, and co-workers with whom they have shared struggles and triumphs.

What is clearer is that younger Latinos who grew up in South L.A.—the children of the elders—had very different experiences. The second generation has shared their lives with African-American neighbors—as classmates, teammates, and first loves. Said one Latino interviewee about interaction with African Americans, “You know, we grew up in each other’s homes, and we grew up together. So to us, it’s a similarity. They’re our people.” Another interviewee put it this way: “You are more in tune with the African-American community, you’re more mixed in.”

Strikingly, both generations are especially proud of being from South L.A.; they celebrate the neighborhood’s resilience in the face of challenges and injustice. Both older and younger Latino residents express a high degree of satisfaction with their community, seeing it as a place where they can realize their own version of the American Dream. Residents do not ignore the difficulties of life in South L.A., including household incomes for both blacks and Latinos that are far below the overall county average, but the struggle to overcome creates a tie that binds.

While the younger generation may indeed be “mixed in,” that has not necessarily translated to the public square. Latinos are dramatically underrepresented in political, non-profit, and other civic leadership roles. This is partly a consequence of the ways in which a more immigrant and younger population limits voting power; while South L.A. is nearly two-thirds Latino, Latinos comprised only 28 percent of the area’s voters in during the 2014 general election.
 
 
Bridging Race: Interdependence and Institutions

Moving forward, our analysis suggests that South L.A. needs strategies of both independence and interdependence. Independence includes leadership training for Latinos and the encouragement of naturalization and voter registration to coincide with the fight for the broader immigration reform.
Interdependence means avoiding “Latino triumphalism,” in which changing demographics yields a sort of “winner takes all, it’s our turn” kind of politics. While it may be easier for Latinos in communities where nearly everyone is Latino to pay less heed to coalition politics, such an approach is problematic in mixed South L.A., where effectively challenging racism (and, in particular, pervasive anti-blackness) and economic disparities requires the support of the whole neighborhood.

Bringing together groups while navigating differences is hard work, but some civic institutions in South L.A. are succeeding. One common thread among those doing black-brown unity work is a commitment to community organizing that is intentionally multi-racial in spirit and approach.

Organizers and civic leaders alike are especially sensitive to the palpable sense that Black Los Angeles is slipping away. To counter this, some organizations deliberately structure themselves so that blacks and Latinos have equal weight (even though the underlying populations may be more one group than another); for example, parent groups tend to be overwhelmingly Latino unless organizers make deliberate efforts to involve black parents.

Understanding personal histories, sharing stories of migration, and celebrating the struggle for civil rights in South L.A. can be key first steps. Organizers believe that such patient work pays off; for example, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) started a successful campaign for green jobs by first hosting a frank and far-reaching discussion on the evolution of black and brown communities in South L.A. Many organizations also find it critical to point explicitly to how pervasive racism is in our nation—how it is woven into the ways our institutions and policies are expressed in everyday life, and how this helps explain the exclusion of communities like South L.A.

Fortunately, there is much on which to build: organizations like Community Coalition (CoCo), CADRE, SCOPE, Community Development Technologies (CD Tech), and other multi-racial organizing institutions are turning out leaders who are imbued in this type of transformational civic leadership. CoCo is a particularly interesting example of leadership development and promotion: It was founded by Karen Bass and Sylvia Castillo—black-brown from the start—and recently President and CEO Marqueece Harris-Dawson, an African American who is now councilmember for District 8, has been succeeded by longtime organizer, Alberto Retana.
 
 
Facing Forward: Toward a Shared Future

There is more to do. South L.A. needs to step up civic engagement in general and Latino civic engagement in particular. This will require creating on-ramps to civic life for people with little history of participation, through activities like beautifying parks and staging community concerts. It also will require an emphasis on leadership: deepening Latino leadership for multi-racial coalitions, while strengthening black-Latino alliances, and enhancing capacity for existing black-led and other South L.A. organizations.

The public narrative also needs to change. South L.A. may be an area with many needs, but it is also a place with tremendous assets. New transit lines are bringing both greater mobility and needed economic development. New organizations are building ties between communities and ethnic groups long portrayed as at odds. New and creative strategies to realize the promise of South L.A. are emerging, with the most recent example being the successful multi-year, multi-sector, and multi-racial effort to secure the Promise Zone designation that will bring more federal resources to a large swath of South L.A.

Civic engagement of Latinos as a share of the total population in South L.A. and L.A. County. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

There are threats ahead. Nearly all the civic leaders we spoke with are worried about gentrification, particularly as downtown development spills south. Fears of displacement are not just economic; Blacks and Latinos alike worry that the community and neighborhoods they have fought so hard to build will be erased. Resisting—or, more accurately, taking advantage of rather than being taken advantage by new economic investments—will be an opportunity for new cross-community engagement.

In the last few years, knocking around the Twittersphere has been an inspiring hashtag, #WeAreSouthLA. It is meant to evoke a sense of pride in a place of struggle; it is frequently connected to people fighting for living wages and better schools, and against police abuse and racial discrimination. And if you peruse the tag, you will notice a myriad of faces, ethnicities, and genders all sharing joy about being from an area others have written off.
It is this more nuanced and dynamic picture of South L.A.’s past, present, and future that we have sought to capture—one in which organizing and civic engagement allow residents to achieve not only their of their own piece of the American Dream, but also their shared goal of economically vibrant, socially inclusive, and environmentally healthy communities.

The post The South Los Angeles Future Will Be Shared appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I miss how the smell of churros—cinnamon, brown sugar, and baked dough—used to make my mouth water as we passed by the lady who sold them three for a dollar. I loved how the Spanish music mixed with the booming sounds of voices speaking more Spanish deep in my eardrums. My eyes were often captivated by colorful piñatas hanging from the ceiling, and by the rows and rows of Mexican candy—Masapan (marzipan), Duvalin (candy creams), Bubu Lubus (chocolate covered marshmallows). These candies were at the level of my head when I was a little kid.

And when we would go to the area where my father bought ingredients for the tamales he made and sold, I appreciated the smell of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the look of stands filled with greens from nopales, green peppers, cilantro.

El Swapmeet is less than two miles from downtown L.A., but it feels like a piece of Mexico. During the weekend, it fills with people from the afternoon to the evening. Street vendors sell food outside, and vendors sell more food inside to locals and to people of all backgrounds who come from different parts of Los Angeles.

Bandas play rancheras, baladas, and cumbias onstage outside in the sun, and crowds form to listen and dance. On one side of the building, goats, mules, and other farm animals are on display for kids to pet; you can even ride the mule for a price. Inside, vendors yell to sell clothes, electronics, and jewelry. In el Swapmeet, you can pretty much buy anything, from a quinceañera dress to traditional Mexican ornaments, and also get a tattoo, a haircut, or your ear pierced.

For my undocumented family, el Swapmeet was our neighborhood store, a five-minute walk from our house. It also was a way to stay rooted to our motherland. Status limited us from going back to Mexico, but el Swapmeet was our gateway to the culture and identity that sometimes felt lost to us. We were there two or three times a week for years, with my mother doing the shopping for the food she made at home.

I never knew how precious this was until I had to leave South Los Angeles in 2015.

I moved to Portage, Indiana, of all places. I was following my parents, who had moved away four years previously, and I thought it was time to be close to them and finish my education. My parents had had to move because a gang in South Los Angeles threatened to kill my father when my dad filed a report with police about members who had demanded money from him as a condition of selling tamales on the street.

Such gang activity has long been a hazard for people who sell food and other items on the street, including for the street vendors who work outside el Swapmeet. Street vendors, who are often undocumented, are easy targets for exploitation. For el Swapmeet and the community around it to grow and become an even bigger part of South L.A.’s economy (I believe it could be a smaller version of Olvera Street in the public imagination, given all it has to offer), protecting vendors is vital.

Today, to get Mexican products, I have to drive to Chicago, a 45-minute trip by car from here in Indiana. And I miss el Swapmeet, which I last visited just before my departure last year. But I still keep in touch with friends and family who live nearby. And I still have the photos of el Swapmeet that accompany this essay (I took them for a journalism project before moving).

The photos remind me of an important South L.A. place that has a vital past, and deserves an even brighter future.

The post Why I Long for El Swapmeet de la Alameda appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.