11 Yo no soy ya americano, pero comprendo ingles 11 : I am no longer an American, but I do understand English. This ever-popular ranchero, the 11 Ba11 ad of Joaquin Murretta, 11 is a defiant assertion of the Mexican 1s dignity as well as a justification for blood revenge. The Mexican, the Mexican-American, the Spanish-American, or the Chicano has always been self-assured of his cultural identity. But in American popular literature the Spanish-speaking have not fared well. Fiction and non-fiction written by Anglo-Saxons for Anglo-Saxons has traditionally shut out the Mexican, except as a knife-toting, over-emotional, happygo- lucky thief. In other words, students of American popular culture know the Mexican only as a negative stereotype. Assured of his positive identity as a superior person, the white American is given little reason to question the validity of traditional race and national character types. Such was my case in 1967, when I was employed by the Community Action Agency in a small Colorado town. Typical of that group of rational, fair-minded social workers, I was conscious of the obvious ramifications of abusive race codifications-- Mex, spic, greaser, etc. However, I remained unconscious of just how complete my Anglo-Saxon racist conditioning had been until that day my employer, Mr. Orlando Salazar, spoke out against the then popular Frito-Lay television commercial--The Frito Bandito. I thought the commercial 11 cute, 11 and said as much. Salazar angrily retorted that there was nothing 11 cute11 about dramatizing the Mexican as an inept, comical thief--especially as his children were being "kindly" identified as little Frito Banditos. Salazar was right. Lo, the poor Anglo whose reason dictates one set of values and whose cultural conditioning dictates quite another. This investigation of the historical and literary antecedents of the stereotypical "superior" Anglo-Saxon and the "inferior" Mexican was largely motivated by my desire to comprehend the nature of the stereotypes and to understand how an why they have been preserved to plague the twentieth-century American with paradox and conflict.Englis
