Another year has flown by. Autumn and Hispanic Heritage Month are here again. A couple of weeks ago I went downtown to Las Fiestas Patrias, the now annual celebration of Hispanic presence in Colorado Springs. Hispanic Heritage Month starts on September 15, to commemorate the night in1810 when Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang the bells of his parish church in Dolores and started the Mexican War of Independence. The good padre, known as the George Washington of Mexico, was terribly unlucky. His fate is symbolic of Mexico’s fate. He was captured by the Spanish Royalist Army, tried by the Inquisition, defrocked, turned over to the secular arm, executed by firing squad, then decapitated. His head was put on a pike and displayed to warn would-be insurgents.
Not for nothing is the profound cry from the Mexican soul called “A Cry of Pain.” El Grito is traditionally shouted out by the Mexican president on September 15 in the Zocalo, the main square in Mexico City. It is called el Grito de Dolores, in memory of the village where the cry was first heard. But “dolores” also means pains or sorrows. It is a reminder that Mexico and many of the impoverished narco states and dictator-ruled countries of Latin America are in a permanent state of pain.The cry of pain is a reminder of the hundreds of thousands of desperate asylum seekers who yearn to escape their unfortunate countries and who trek with their little children northward to look for refuge in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
When I heard the cry it was also night. The loud cries of the songs and the accordion music floated around the Pioneers’ Museum. There was the pungent aroma of tamales, tacos and barbacoa. A mostly Mexican crowd, with some Chicanos and Anglo friends, filled Tejon and Vermijo streets.
“Chicano/a,” is the proud name that Americans of Mexican origin, descendants of the Aztecs, the Mexica, whence the word “Meschicano,” shortened to Chicano, call themselves. Chicanos, Anglos and African Americans, mixed in with Mexican, Central American, South American and Caribbean immigrants, spilled into the grounds of the venerable old court house, a monument to the Anglo pioneers who built Colorado Springs. But there’s an irony about this event held in our community’s place of origin. Things are not what they used to be. Las Fiestas Patrias is about new pioneers. It’s a celebration in honor of the new pioneers and one destined to be permanent. The milling crowd is too large, too dense, the loud voices too insistent, too possessive of the terrain, for this celebration to disappear.
The thing can be a bit complicated. “Las Fiestas Patrias” means “Feasts of the Fatherlands,” or “Patriotic Feasts.” We can understand this in different ways but mainly it’s about two countries. The word, “Patrias,” plural, means that all of the stoical brown-faced people melting in and out of the darkness of the night, in and out of the lights of the fiesta, are remembering Mexico, or other Latin American countries. But take my word for it. For not even a moment in their love for ancestral homelands do they forget their love for the United States. The two flags that fly together over the celebration say it. The people love two lands, two countries, or many countries. Some may not understand this, but it is a logical thing for people whose bloodlines and cultures are split two or three or more ways, mainly indigenous but with significant European and African admixtures.
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There are other confusing things, but they can be explained and sometimes corrected. For instance, the designation “Hispanic” for the month dedicated to the largest American minority group, 62 million strong, does not convey its true identity. “Hispanic” is a term invented by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1970 in the bureaucratic attempt to categorize the burgeoning population that was neither White nor Black. To start with, as an unreconstructed English major from my beloved alma mater, Colorado College, I am forever pointing out that “Hispanic” is an adjective, not a noun, and to call someone Hispanic is a gross violation of the King’s English. You cannot label people with an adjective. It has to be a proper noun. In this case it would be “Hispano/a,”(Spanish nouns are gendered, so we must always include the “a” which denotes the feminine). This is the Spanish word we should use. American English has adopted many Spanish words so this shouldn’t be difficult.
But that’s not the end of it. The bigger problem with “Hispanic” is that it erases the nature of the people. We may speak Spanish, or at least some version of it, but we are not Spanish. We are “mestizos,”a mixture. We are not Hispanic, from Hispania, the old Roman name for Spain. Yes, we have Spanish ancestors, but our predominant ancestry is what has always existed in this hemisphere, which is the Indian.
Our culture, our traditions, our physical appearance, our dialects, even our religions, indeed our whole being, are more indigenous than anything else. Our blood flows from the myriad Indian tribes of the Americas. We are very proud of that.
Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.
Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.
