Propositional Culture: A View from the Margins -- Part III

Me, My Marginal Self, and I

[I]dentity is shaped by the communities to which we belong.¹

Depending upon when — and where — you grew up, what kind of music you enjoy (the soundtrack of your bildungsroman, as it were), the following words may have some meaning for you:

Living on the road my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath as hard as kerosene

If so, you can probably name that tune in one note. I can. And I can take you to the exact spot on a Texas farm road, give or take about 20 feet, where I was when I heard it for the first time.

Or perhaps, for you, it is more likely this:

Though his mind is not for rent
Don't put him down as arrogant
His reserve, a quiet defense
Riding out the day's events

One note for you, too, I bet. I am certain you and I share some favorite songs in common. But, unless you are hispanic and lived the majority of your formative years among mexican-americans, I have some favorite songs that you never even heard of. One of those is “La Ley del Monte” (and is the theme song of the movie of the same name, starring Vicente Fernández and Patricia Aspíllaga). That song moves me as much at 60 as it did at 13, when I saw the movie and heard the song for the first time, and when I decided that if I ever had children, one of my sons would named Maclovio, and one of my daughters would be named Soledad.

But never mind that.

The following words are not just lyrics to a song in a foreign language that I just happen to understand. They are a fraction of an entire life, a culture, a community, a people — a set of cultural distinctives virtually essential to my understanding of who I am.

Grabé en la penca de un maguey tu nombre
Unido al mío
Entrelazados
Como una prueba ante la ley del monte
Que ahí estuvimos
Enamorados

Tú misma fuiste quien buscó la penca
La más bonita
La más esbelta
Y hasta dijiste que también grabara
Dos corazones
Con una flecha

Ahora dices que ya no te acuerdas
Que nada es cierto
Que son palabras
Yo estoy tranquilo, porque al fin de cuentas
En nuestro idilio
Las pencas hablan

La misma noche que mi amor cambiaste
También cortaste
Aquella penca
Te imaginaste que si la veía
Pa' ti sería
Como una afrenta

Se te olvidaba que el maguey sabía
Lo que juraste
En nuestra noche
Y que a su modo él también podría
Recriminarte
Con un reproche

No sé si creas las extrañas cosas
Que ven mis ojos
Tal vez te asombres
Las pencas nuevas que al maguey le brotan
Vienen marcadas
Con nuestros nombres

When I hear that song it’s 1977 again, and I am in a movie theater, the only one in town that shows exclusively movies made south of the border. I remember a local band, Los Marineros, who would cover that song (and also did the best cover of “Eres tú” that I have ever heard).

There is a line in the third stanza of “La Ley del Monte” that has long fascinated me, even since I was a child, and long before I made any forays into philosophy:

…nada es cierto que son palabras

A literal translation would be nothing is certain that are words. If we were to translate the same idea into english, however, we would likely express the thought as nothing comprised solely of words is true (or real). This fits together well with the theme of the song, made clear if I translate it for you:

I engraved your name on the stalk of an agave
Joined to mine
Intertwined
As a test before the law of the mountain
that we were there
and so in love

You yourself were the one who sought that stalk
The most beautiful,
and the slimmest
And you also told me to draw
two little hearts
with an arrow through them

But now you say you don't remember,
and nothing is real,
that is [merely] words
But I'm at peace, because I know that in the end,
in our private paradise
that stalk still speaks

The very night, my love, you turned on me,
you also cut
that little stalk
You must have imagined that if I saw it
For you it would be
like an affront

You forgot the agave knew
What you promised
in the night we shared
And that in its own way it could also
Incriminate you
with a reproach
I don't know if you believe the strange things
That my eyes clearly see

You may be surprised
The new leaves that sprout from the agave
Have come in, marked
with our names

Long story short: his lover, for reasons borne out in the movie, denies the reality of their love. When he tells her about their initials on the stalk of the agave cactus, she claims not to remember, adding that mere words prove nothing.

Nada es cierto que son palabras.

Nothing comprised solely of words is real, something which bears on the issue I have been discussing in my last two articles, the idea of a propositional culture and, by extension, a propositional nation. A proposition can do many things; but one thing it cannot do is call things into existence. It can neither enculturate nor acculterate.² It cannot call a culture into existence. It cannot create affinity. It cannot create family bonds. A people are not formed by virtue of affirming propositions. Groups may form on that basis, but not a family, not a tribe, not a people. Families, tribes, and peoples may affirm sets of propositions; but those affirmations do not create those families, tribes or peoples — any more than two names carved into a cactus testifies to love.

The purpose of the extended discussion above is to cast in stark relief the way I was occasionally treated by people I regarded as mine, but who in many respects did not share that sentiment with me. I will mention one because it is rather recent.

Just a few years ago I got into a verbal scrap on my Facebook timeline. In the opinion of a latina who forms part of my extended family, I had made the mistake of referring to myself as hispanic (not latino, not mexican-american). This latina belongs to what I called, in youth, The Brown Skinned Mafia³ or El Club Moreno⁴: the self-appointed arbiters of who gets to be hispanic, latino, mexican-american and so forth. Ironically, given their complaints about being marginalized on the basis of skin color, that important decision was based solely on my skin color. In some other cases the decision could be based on parentage: if both of your parents were not brown then you were not in the club, more especially if you were a brown-skinned Valley Girl. I always thought of that as a spicy take on the “one drop rule”: not even a single drop gets you into El Club Moreno. And think: Unlike them I actually lived in Mexico — Baja, to be precise. But I digress.

This latina’s objection was: “You are as white as the day is long, and you always will be.” It took some days off-and-on but she did eventually concede that I have as much right to refer to myself as hispanic as she did to refer to herself as mexican: we grew up in the community, shared the lived experience of that community.⁵

Of course, in those kids’ defense, it could be argued that I did not speak the same language. The fact is, the other thing the Club Moreno didn’t like about me was that I sounded like a snob when I spoke spanish. When they were not laughing at me for it, they wanted to beat me up for appearing to make fun of the way they spoke, which I wasn’t: I was, after all, trying to fit in. But I literally could not understand them. Tired of being mistreated because of the way I spoke spanish, I quit, sometime in junior high school; and I didn’t speak another lick of it until my army days, and even then only sparingly, usually at nightclubs where I could either speak spanish, sit alone at a table, or leave.

This brings up Dr Chavez’s article again. In the following passage, Chavez describes the experience of the marginal man’s attempts to fit in with either the dominant ethnic group or his own:

Studies have suggested that a bicultural existence produces an identity neurosis in which marginal man suffers from emotional conflicts engendered by the impact of dual-cultural membership, especially by factors related to culture conflict. The neurosis is intensified when the marginal person attempts to assimilate to the dominant group and meets with rejection, and the condition reaches its apex when the marginal individual is also rejected by the subordinate group. The latter rejection often occurs when the minority group perceives the individual as a sellout, a vendido who has repudiated the values of the subordinate group. Thus, the marginal person lives on the margin of two or more cultural societies without achieving total integration in either of the sociocultural groups.⁶

Despite the difficulties, I struggled with the idea of assimilating into “white” culture for fear (ironically enough) of being thought of as a vendido, by people who didn’t accept me in the first place. (Childhood can be so confusing.) I must say, I had fewer problems with whites, and even fewer with blacks. I will also say that they were much more than merely tolerant of me; nevertheless, I lived on the margins of three different ethno-cultural groups. But much as I got along better with whites and blacks, they just were not my people: they didn’t know my language, my music, my movies, my tv shows. And the people who did — enough said, I think⁷. In those circumstances, I eventually adopted the third option, as Dr Chavez explains:

Another response to the identity neurosis is withdrawal and isolation, or removal from the social situation. This manifestation can be a temporary symptom such as social or an emotional detachment or it can be as severe as a pathological retreat from objective reality. On the other hand, physical removal from the social situation is difficult to achieve, except by escaping to another geographic area.⁸

I withdrew, making few friends, really only acquaintances, even among my band-mates and (basketball) teammates. And so it remained until my last two years of high school, a new high school, in a new city, a majority-white school; and the few other hispanics who attended, being upper middle class, spoke no spanish (even if their grandparents did so). By this time I was speaking no spanish and fit right in, to the extent possible. Just as Chavez says, “Physical removal from the social situation is difficult to achieve, except by escaping to another geographic area.”⁹ I lived for ten years in that first town, and left no friends behind. I spent two years at the high school from which I graduated and still have friends from there, none of whom ever heard me speak a lick of spanish, or ever heard me belting out some Vicente Fernandez at the top of my lungs — or even knew that I could do.

Now, I write all this not as some sort of soul-bearing nonsense. I am 60 years old, and have gotten past all that. But I write because it bothers me, getting back to the issue I took up in the first part, that the only people who pipe up when it comes to what I am calling “cultural realism” are white people — do-gooding, guilt-ridden, virtue-signalling, white-knighting, savior-complex-burdened, cosplaying white people — who only do it when the cultural realist in question is another white person. You can shout “Black Power!” or “¡Viva la raza!” at the top of your lungs, the live-long day. But suggest that who a person is is fundamentally tied to his ethno-cultural group — one’s european ethno-culture — and oh boy here they come, to set you straight. I write because I am bothered by the advertising campaign which would have us all believe that the only people who think their cultures and ethnicities have some sort of ontological reality are euro-ethnic people. I know better, from long experience. It is possible for the “oppressed” to oppress others; it is possible for the “marginalized” to marginalize others — and to be so lacking in self-awareness as not to see it. They decide who is in and who isn't and on what grounds; and it is often as much about skin color as it is for any white kinist. In fact they may do kinism better than white kinists.

I know brown men and women who have been chastised (by their own) for marrying outside “the race”, told in no uncertain words to stick with their own kind. A close friend of mine was dating a brown man and his father told her he wanted brown grandchildren.¹⁰ I knew black men in the army for whom their black children marrying non-blacks would be the worst thing in the world. But why? Because ethno-cultural distinctives are real; and there is something ontological about one's ethno-cultural group. The relation between the individual and his ethno-cultural distinctives is thick. Who a person is is fundamentally tied up in his group identity.¹¹ Unless you are white. Because — Muh white supremacy.

Gringo, please. All the talk these people do about the evils of “oppression” and “marginalization” is just that: words. Palabras. Hence the double standard: Cultural distinctives for them, but not for you. Group identity for them, but not for you. Ethnic pride for them, but not for you. But you have to admit that there is something strange about people who can see the oppression in white people telling black people (and others) to sit in the back of the bus and, at the same time, not see the oppression involved in dragging people to the top of a pyramid and cutting their hearts out. I’m looking at you central and south americans — Aztecs, Mayans, Incas.

¡Viva la raza! And stuff.

My own view is that this double standard (in application of which the relation between the individual and his ethno-cultural distinctives is thick unless that individual is white) is Hebert Marcuse’s doctrine of liberating tolerance, which he distinguishes from repressive tolerance, that is, the sort of tolerance extended by the ruling class, the oppressors and which preserves their power. For the sake of liberty, the oppressors must be robbed of their power, including their power of speech; the oppressors must not be tolerated. The repressive tolerance of the right, must be replaced by liberating tolerance, a tolerance which, for example, would have stopped the Nazis in their tracks before they even got started:

Liberating tolerance…would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.¹²

Intolerance against movements from the right; tolerance of movements from the Left and extended to include action as well as speech, deed as well as of word. Sound familiar? Sure it does.¹³

Once you have identified your oppressor in terms of his ethno-cultural identity, you must destroy that identity in order to rob him of his power to oppress: the political energy behind your oppression develops from, and is part of, your oppressor’s cultural distinctives. If who a person is really is fundamentally tied up in his group identity, then, if that person is an oppressor, he must be robbed of the cultural distinctives that give him his identity. He must especially be taught not only to hate those cultural distinctives, but to hate the very thought that he, or anyone else, has any such distinctives in the first place. He cannot be permitted to believe that his (oppressive!) cultural distinctives make him who he is. In fact he must be taught this is true of everyone: no one’s cultural distinctives makes him who he is. However, he — the oppressor — is the only one who is actually forced both (i) to affirm that doctrine and (ii) to adhere to it. Because liberating tolerance: the oppressed may affirm the doctrine (in words) but then ignore it (in deeds); they are permitted to retain and to be proud of their own cultural distinctives. And why not? They haven’t employed their cultures to oppress anyone.¹⁴

I said above that I am no longer bothered by the treatment I received by what I called el Club Moreno. Those aren’t just words: I learned to understand the issue as they saw it. In Part II I wrote:

[T]he reduction of ethnicity to a “group” is ridiculous and ignorant. Culture and ethnicity…are not things one simply steps into. You don’t join them like you do a bowling league. Consequently, one’s culture actually is rather fundamental to one’s identity….

For those kids, in their experience, until I moved into town — and for decades previously, no doubt — hispanic meant brown skin. It was not enough, in their little corner of the globe to share the language, the arts, the music, and all the things that go under the heading of culture; one also had to have the right shade of melanin. That was their experience.¹⁵ My showing up, claiming to be hispanic, was like a black man showing up to a Scottish clan gathering, claiming Scottish heritage: even if he had the genealogical paperwork, there would be questions.¹⁶ Too, it was not enough to have the brown skin: they had no place in their hearts for brown-on-the-outside-but-white-on-the-inside people either. To be included in their number it required (i) the language, the music — the culture and (ii) the brown skin. To have (i) without (ii) or (ii) without (i) was not acceptable; both conditions must be met. Their resistance to me was intended to preserve their identity as truly hispanic (or latino, chicano, mexican-american).

You don’t join ethno-cultural groups like you do bowling leagues. You become a member of an ethno-cultural group (and at the pleasure of the ethno-cultural group) either by enculturation or by acculturation. No culture or nation is merely a “group” organized around an idea or set of ideas. Ideas are expressed in words, and, well, you know:

Nada es cierto que son palabras.

++++++++++

This is the third part of what I anticipate will be a four part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

1. Carl Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), at 175.

2. Enculteration is process by which people learn the dynamics of their culture and acquire values and norms appropriate or necessary to that culture and its worldviews. Acculteration is the process by which an individual adopts, acquires and adjusts to a new cultural environment as a result of being placed into a new culture.

3. Not a term I have used since, except in reference to this (former) practice.

4. The Brown Club.

5. All it requires is a precise understanding of what the term hispanic means.

6. Eliverio Chavez, “The Relationship between Chicano Literature and Social Science Studies in Identity Disorders,” Céfiro: Enlace Hispano Cultural y Literario, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2003), 5-18. at 6-7 (available, free and in english, here).

7. Perhaps not quite enough said: I need to say that these observations do not extend to my family. That must be clear.

8. Chavez, id.

9. Chavez, id. Emphasis mine.

10. Yes, he actually said, “I want brown grandchildren.”

11. A claim supported by social identity theory.

12. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Beacon Press, 1969), 95-137, at 109. Available here.

13. It must be noted that Marcuse was a Marxist: “white” is code for bourgeoisie, or capitalist.

14. That isn’t exactly true, of course. But liberating tolerance means no one is permitted to say that, because anyone who wanted to say that is clearly of the Right, and therefore not to be tolerated.

15. In many respects it remains the experience of many. About eight years ago I was in a mexican restaurant in Georgetown, Texas. Because I can, I ordered and conversed with the staff in spanish. Our server kept staring at me, and I could tell she and the other staff were talking about me. Eventually, she apologized and said (translating), “I am sorry if I embarrass you, but where we are from [Jalisco] all of the people who speak spanish look like us,” pointing to her skin. I replied: “Soy como un unicornio blanco.” (“I’m like a white unicorn.”) Judging from the laughter, she shared my reply with her friends.

16. Relevant factual observation: black revolutionary Angela Davis is a descendant of William Brewster.