The Tip of the Pyramid
El Librotraficante Tony Diaz presents excerpts from his new book on Cultivating Community Cultural Capital
Pyramid of the Sun, San Juan Teotihuacan, Mexico. Photo: Dr. Cintli [Dr. Roberto Rodríguez, retired Associate Professor, Mexican American Studies Department, University of Arizona]
EDITORIAL NOTE
Published ten years after Arizona officials enforced a ban on Mexican American Studies, The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital (University of New Orleans Press, 2022) by writer, activist, and Cultural Accelerator Tony Diaz “renders the power of community to shatter the generalizations, clichés, and stereotypes that sentence us.” In the first of his book series on Community Organizing, El Librotraficante “unpacks metaphors that are over 500 years old and documents the self-empowerment of our gente.”
The following excerpt is published with the express permission of the University of New Orleans Press, all rights reserved; media and links are curated by HTI Open Plaza.
Metaphors Are Forced Confessions
On the more level playing field of education in Houston Community College, I’m expert at professing both rhetorical analysis and Mexican American Literature. My campus is reported to be over 40 percent Latino. This statistic on any given day looks like an under count.
As a CA [Cultural Accelerator], I am privileged to not only have advocated for Mexican American History, but to also teach it and create it. One way or an-other, or another, I bring Ethnic Studies into the classroom.
The laws being the laws, currently every college student in Texas must successfully complete Composition I Rhetorical Analysis. The handbooks explain that the course teaches students to understand how words and forms work. I tell students I am helping them earn a black belt in language.
We fought to get Mexican American Literature into Texas classrooms. Currently, it is an elective. So, as of this writing, British Literature is more prevalent in Texas colleges and in dual credit high schools programs, where students earn credit towards their high school diploma and an associate’s degree at the same time. Of course, British Literature may be prevalent, but British students are not. I have never even had a British student. In all, I have had three white students total in my classes in the year I’ve been at my new campus.
Of course, 53 percent of Texas’s over 5.2 million students are Latino. If you teach in a public school or a community college in Houston, the majority of your students are Brown and Black: African American, Mexican American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Costa Rican. The news might call Us Latinos. Old Texans might say Hispanics. Young folks might say Latinx. Us.
Naturally, in my classes I inform students that Arizona officials once banned Mexican American Studies.
They had never heard about it. They are pissed off. They want to know more. I tell them We are going to study all about it. The proceedings are now of official record. They are documented in writing and on television for the nation, the world, including on C-SPAN, the broadcast version of The Level the Playing Field of the court, broadcast on The Level Playing Field of corporate media, where Our Community usually gets played.
This exercise is typically the first time the students have watched C-SPAN. Some are stunned that We are going to watch a court case. Some worry they won’t understand. I tell them I was once the same way.
Before I got involved in the movement to overturn the racist ban of Mexican American Studies, I imagined this nation’s laws as the height of ethics, a testament to Our civilization. I imagined the proceedings in a high court as regal, refined, erudite.
Boy was I wrong.
I tell my students, Don’t worry, you will understand what is going on. You will be surprised. You may be shocked. You may even be stunned.
When I was in the courtroom, I went through all of those emotions in real time. I will talk more about it at the end.
But to make you feel at ease, yes, there is some technical legal language that may lose you for a bit—but I promise you, there will be plenty you understand.
As you watch, for a quiz grade, you need to simply write down three words, phrases, or sentences that catch your attention. Write that down and you will earn a 100%.
I’d like you to keep writing after that so that We can discuss between testimonies. There are examples of logic and reasoning—kind of. Back then I assumed, silly me, that I would be privy to a discourse of the highest form of logos. Nahhhh.
Look for emotions. There will be pathos throughout.
Look for values at work, either stated directly or indirectly.
The entire case is forty-five minutes long. Each side gets twenty minutes. The plaintiff reserved five minutes in the end for rebuttal.
I will resist chiming in. We will watch the opening arguments by the plaintiffs, lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky, who represents Maya Arce, the student from Tucson suing Arizona for banning Mexican American Studies. At the time she was a seventeen-year-old Chicana, about your ages now. She had to be a current student to be eligible to sue the state.
I guess that’s progress: At seventeen, my father was picking crops. I was in high school and working as a petroleum allocator. Maya was suing Arizona.
Front row, left to right: Writers Dagoberto Gilb, Denise Chávez, and Tony Díaz cheer on the Librotraficantes during the Librotraficante Caravan's stop, Mesilla, New Mexico, 2012. Photo: Liana López, courtesy of Tony Díaz
Before I became a Librotraficante, I had never been in a courtroom.
I thought becoming a writer, a professor, an intellectual would save me from run-ins with the law.
Instead, I unleashed a genera-tion of pros at contraband prose.
Before Arizona’s ban of Mexican American Studies, before that state sanctioned violence on Our Gente, I drew my epiphanies from fiction—short stories, novels.
Once I became a Librotraficante, I lived epiphanies.
On January 12, 2015, in downtown San Francisco, California, in the hallowed halls of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, I experienced multiple epiphanies. I could not write about them at the time because We were Accelerating CCC [Community Cultural Capital]. Now, the backdrop of the case provides the perfect chalkboard to demonstrate the myth of The Level Playing Field and the power of The Tip of The Pyramid [metaphor for a vision, an objective to which We will rise].
english is brutally honest about its oppression. We are forced to buy metaphors without understanding the cost. Gen Z must live with this even more profoundly because it is raised on user agreements signed without being read, only to find out later what We have given up. We are starved, bullied, or lynched into internalizing the metaphors. Stereotypes, generalizations, myths become facts. We are hit with these metaphors all day, every day.
Librotraficantes hit back. During CA, Art breaks barriers. Cultivating Cultural Capital requires visiting those boundaries and creating more Culture from the shrapnel. Additionally, We can learn from the processes the Mexica used, building greater and greater pyramids on the foundations of previous ones.
You can watch Our History and Culture fought over on C-SPAN. You can watch the play by play on Level The Playing Field, where We convened to figure out if Chicanos are violent and want to overthrow Western Civilization. This is not the exact phrasing of the law, but its spirit.
As I repeated in interview after interview, speech after speech, essay after essay, Community charla after Community charla, one of the books on the outlawed curriculum was The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The words “overthrow” and “government” don’t even appear in the book.
However, the exact line “Chicanos promote the overthrow of Western Civilization” would appear again a few years later, when a right-wing former Texas State Board of Education representative would submit a history textbook for implementation in Texas high schools. Though it bore the misleading title Mexican American Heritage, it was written by all white folks. Not one of them was an expert on Our Culture. That racist textbook included that line as the definition for Chicanos: people who want to overthrow Western Civilization.
On The Level Playing Field of the court, the phrase “promote the overthrow of the government” was addressed. However, the fact that those words made sense to only those who dehumanize Us was never addressed. And worse, it was “clearly” not the place to address that, on The Level Playing Field. That phrase could only be repeated, again and again, never properly rebuked.
That aspect of the law was the only part struck down by the Arizona Supreme Court’s Judge Takashima as “too broad” the first time he reviewed the case. The rest of the law, thus the law, was upheld, each line gaining its meaning from an entirely different set of stereotypes.
Another judge tried to fathom the logic dictated by the law. He asked Arizona: How can you design a course for a group of people without mentioning the group of people? Why would you want to do that?
Arizona stuttered.
This was a good day for The Level Playing Field.
However, I was joyous and still in despair.
I was sitting in the courtroom. Maya Arce and her family, including her father Sean Arce, who designed the curriculum, were one aisle over and in the first row. Also in the audience were many of the original Mexican American Studies teachers who had designed and conducted the curriculum: Curtis Acosta, Jose Gonzales, and his wife Melissa Gonzalez. The other original plaintiff, Korina Lopez and her father, one of the original instructors, were also in attendance.
None of these names of Our CCC appear or are archived on The Level Playing Field. That is the cost of admission to this game. This is the only way to gain your forty minutes to fight for justice, against blatant oppression, so that the next case of oppression in line starts on time.
C-SPAN does not cover CCC.
However, at that moment the power of Our CCC dawned on me. Librotraficantes were in the house. We were, right then, Accelerating Cultural Capital.
So I screen the case’s oral arguments in my classes. However, be-cause I am an expert, a pro about Us, I teach not just the myth of The Level Playing Field; I pierce that pale pale with The Tip of The Pyramid, and I unearth the CCC that got Us to victory.
When you watch the link, you will watch history in action. The players on the field are white. The stars of The Level Playing Field are white, always.
The force to be reckoned with is old white men.
I teach CCC at the base. I thrive there. I Accelerate CCC. I shatter myths, pales, and planes. It’s disturbing. It’s upheaval. It’s thrilling.
When I teach, I am also always learning. I study how Our CCC grows, evolves, flows, updates, stays the same; how it is traumatized, grows numb, thrives.
The way I screen C-SPAN’s Level Playing Field tears up the field.
Of course, C-SPAN only tells part of the story, I am sure to tell my students. The court tackles only part of the problem. I’ll fill you in on the rest afterwards.
I sit behind the students. They won’t read my language or reactions, because even years later, I still get stirred up.
I let them settle in.
I turn off the lights.
I point the remote, and the generic white voice of God says, let it be C-SPAN.
On The Level Playing Field of court, history, TV, cable, here is what state violence against Us is reduced to as C-SPAN crams Our plight into a caption. That is what the kings english does—reduce Us, contract Us, border Us:
Maya Arce v. John Huppenthal Oral Argument
A three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Maya Arce v. John Huppenthal, on the constitutionality of Arizona’s ban on ethnic studies programs in public schools. The ban led to a dismantling of a Mexican-American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. A group of students sued, arguing the law was overly broad, discriminatory, and violated free speech.
The Arizona ban, passed in 2010, prohibited a course or class that “promotes the overthrow of the US government, promotes resentment toward a race or class of people and is designed for pupils of a particular ethnic group.”
Press play.
My students watch the three old white judges stroll in, dressed in their long black robes, all white, white, white, with gray hair.
My students laugh. I don’t tell them to; I try not to. We watch The Level Playing Field unfurl the way it has for generations.
The three old white judges are perfect for Court TV. Even when it is not made-for-tv, The Level Playing Field is made for TV, and a classroom of Houston students can’t contain themselves.
We quiet down to hear the court.
This is an indictment of The Level Playing Field, how the span of generational oppression is reduced to the captions, angles, and perspective of C-SPAN—The Level Playing Field of media.
The Level Playing Field of education is distorted by the lawyers for Arizona.
The Level Playing Field reduces the plight of Our Gente to forty minutes to be judged by three old white men, appointed by older white men, elected on the Level Playing Field of politics.
And this is actually the more progressive court. Even if it is the Liberal Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, which saved the law upholding Same Sex Marriage that same week, the optics belie the myth of The Level Playing Field that We have been forced to watch for generations.
Of course, the judges are addressing and are on the verge of overturning the racist law banning Mexican American Studies. That is a great thing which We don’t know yet. However, the myth must be pierced for Us to survive and thrive.
For forty minutes they will discuss a law whose intention, it will not be said, was to destabilize if not destroy Our CCC and to destabilize Us for generations. For forty minutes they will discuss this law.
The only Spanish surname that appears on screen is the name of Maya Arce at the beginning; she does not appear. No other Mexican Americans appear at all in the battle on The Level Playing Field for Our History and Culture.
Even more telling, the only glimpse of Our CCC that does appear on screen is the back of Richard Martinez’s head.
If you watch, near the bottom of the center, you will see a shock of white hair. That is the back of the head of Chicano civil rights lawyer Richard Martinez. He began the case. His son was one of the original Chicano educators who started the program. His son was sued by Arizona.
What has not been discussed, until now, is the fact that he had to hand off the case to a white lawyer, the brilliant and capable Erwin Chemerinsky.
I don’t say this to slight Chemerinsky in any way. He was brilliant. However, the case made it clear to me that no Chicano, not even the brilliant Richard Martinez—not even the handsome actor Antonio Banderas who should play him in the movie version of this fight for Ethnic Studies which should be produced—could compete on The Level Playing Field of American politics, and win.
I want to stress that the way the plaintiff ’s team did its work is profoundly based on interracial CCC. Richard Martinez is brilliant for understanding this and assembling the legal eagle dream team along several levels of court to fight this, donating millions of legal services in-kind. And Chemerinsky and the Seattle School of Law are champions of justice and freedom of speech. These are leaders, visionaries, experts who fight to defend CCC.
The non-Chicano lawyers’ contributions are powerful because their whiteness enabled them to simply pursue more capital, as in money—that is the way the nation is set up. They leveraged the privilege of their whiteness and invested in La Gente’s CCC. The Level Playing Field says nothing about the possibility of true allyship.
The price of admission to The Level Playing Field is capital and not just capital, but also power, but not just power, generations of wealth and power. Bodies infused with that, raised with it, so they can muster the elegance of indifference, affront, shock with a glance, a gesture, a word.
We cannot.
If We do appear as a dot on The Level Playing Field, We do not have the generational wealth and power to compete a sustained pitch battle.
Every time I watch the oral arguments, two instances during the testimony bring home the fact that only a white lawyer could be a true contender on that Level Playing Field. I will cross the border of this essay into the next to pinpoint those points.
Librotraficantes march for Mexican American Studies, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference, San Antonio, TX, 2013. Left to right: Jesus Archuleta, Tony Diaz-El Librotraficante, Sonya Rose Hernandez, Eloy Gonzales; 2nd row: Mario Castillo. Photo: Ezekiel J. Perez
Look it up, Foo
english.
Seems so easy.
Just speak english.
We have to speak english to compete on The Level Playing Field.
But not just any english—the right english. Which english is that? Exactly.
Look it up in the dictionary.
Part of the case proving Arizona’s discriminatory campaign was focused on a former Secretary of Education telling his constituents, during campaigns, that he was going after “La Raza.” This is what got folks elected in Arizona at the time. This is what elected officials said about their job, especially John Huppenthal. This is what consumed their time, energy, and intelligence: “going after La Raza.”
I watched several news clips of this. And of course, Huppenthal said it with an accent to make clear the words were not fit for his mouth, did not deserve to be properly pronounced. This too is a trope Americans are used to. Distort the word. That is the biggest giveaway that their definition is being distorted, too. Yet, this went on.
This also demonstrates that no matter how perfectly We speak the kings english or its bastard son corporate english, even win awards for it, We still are prevented from competing on The Level Playing Field.
First, there is the irony that the court case was based on banning a curriculum of over eighty works—written in english and published by the gamut of Community Publishing and corporate publishing, thereby updating the standard for the kings english—by almost that many Chicana, Chicano, and Latino writers, some of whom having received the highest awards offered in the nation: the MacArthur Fellowships, PEN/Faulkner Fiction awards, Guggenheims, American Book Awards, Pushcart Prizes, Primo Quinto Sol, etc., etc., etc.
Their work formed the curriculum. Yet not one of their names made it to The Level Playing Field of the Ninth Circuit courtroom. An entire generation of genius contracted, reduced to one headline, and thrown out of the classroom. Part of Our work was to humanize them and in doing so humanize Us. Those works, those writers, are proof that We have a Voice, We have a story, a history, intelli-gence. We have to fight for this on a daily basis. Otherwise, even those who stand up for Us must also constrict Our efforts in order to make their case against those who want to completely erase Us.
Our Community risks starvation and homelessness to carve time out from work and life to write. Some of Our stories survive to be conveyed through publication. Some of those works fight their way to the classroom. The TUSD MAS Course existed due to even earlier civil rights legislation. And then Chicana and Chicano scholars rose through the education system that pushes Us to achieve degrees, advanced degrees, and then become educators and experts just to form a curriculum that conveyed Us. A Community embraced the work, the educators, the school, the works. After generations of work, Our Art, History, and Culture was centralized and organized on The Level Playing Field of education, and it worked.
It worked so well right-wing republicans attacked it.
Oppressors have convened to erase Us, again.
Erased from the court case, Our Curriculum erased from the school district’s offerings all the names of the Chicana and Chicano writers, erased from the school; Our Art, Culture, and History erased by and from corporate media. Our erasure is standard and further institutionalized right before Our eyes. Alone, Our skill and knowledge are not enough to stop this.
This was made clear during a moment that involved the lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky getting cocky with one of the judges. The oldest of the three white judges was a reagan appointee and was the most conservative, if not the least impressive, of the three. The fellow spoke slowly with age, or with privilege, generations and generations of being right because he utters. He was the one who interrupted discussions to pose the most questions.
And, when Chemerinsky questioned John Huppenthal’s racist campaign promise in court, he was the judge who replied, “Are you sure that was what the Secretary of Education [Huppenthal] meant by ‘La Raza?’”
Okay, part of that was badass—it was great to hear “La Raza” uttered out loud in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on C-SPAN. The most chill Chicano students in my classes get a kick out of it, too. They shout at the screen, “Eso!” We, La Raza, are listening to the judge repeat what the Arizona head of Education said: “La Raza.”
And I also laugh, because to me, to Us, to La Raza, it’s like a first grader asking a cute question like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Can you turn on the dark?” Yet, here We are. A judge asking, to Us, the most basic question: What the fuck is La Raza?
Us staring back at the screen—there. We are La Raza. Presente.
On the other hand, it is also an existential moment, through no brilliance of the judge who resembled the old actor made famous in toxic genre films, Clint Eastwood. It’s a flip of the script that reveals how the script is rigged.
After all, what is La Raza? Who are We? Are We? Will We? Will We continue? Cease?
Any student studying the prohibited curriculum would not only know what “La Raza” refers to, they would understand how the term evolved, and they would have been familiar with the thinkers, its context.
Translating is always an art, never fact. What is not brought up in court is the fact that translating requires moving words from the kings spanish, which forged a very real caste system, to the kings english, which forged an informal caste system. english-speaking haters reveal their supremacist tendencies by dubbing the phrase as “The Race.” Librotraficantes smashing caste systems understand the term means “The People.”
The students who did know this information could not speak in court to defend the knowledge that made that question so basic.
We as Chicanos in the room watching laugh and look at each other—but then We have to move on because that is not the end of it. The best part comes next, when Chemerinsky, lawyer for Maya Arce, smirks at the old man.
With that look, that gesture, he throws some serious shade. He is voicing with his face and body language what the fuck We are all thinking.
But a Chicano could not look at a white judge that way. Chemerinsky then says the funniest line of the day: “Generally, when We don’t understand the meaning of words, We look them up.”
Damn.
Homeboy schooled the old guy. He just told him, “Look it up, foo.”
Stereograph of Pyramid of the Sun from the west, San Juan Teotihuacan, Mexico, ca. 1879-1930. Source: Boston Public Library
We were flying towards The Tip of The Pyramid—all of a sudden it seemed clear to me. We were going to get there. Martinez picked a lawyer who could do that. Tahey needed to be a bare-knuckle legal brawler.
Some of my students turn to look at me, bemused; some laugh, but try to fight it, as if they are in the courtroom, too. They are not sure if they can laugh, should laugh.
I resist, just as I did in court that day, standing up, and yelling, yes! Put him in his place!
Of course, I can’t. Not only could I not say that out loud that day in real time, but a Chicano lawyer could not say what Chemerinsky said to an elder white reagan-appointed judge. That just would not happen. It should not happen if We want to win the case, and if We don’t want to be charged with contempt of court.
If you Cultivate CCC, you know what I mean. Part of the cultivation means picking your battles. Once they are revealed, Our progress towards The Tip of The Pyramid leads to pushback, con-flict, resistance. CAs blazing that trail have to figure out if We must react, and they have to decide that quickly. At the time of the trial, We were in peak Cultural Acceleration. But I will slow down here to Quantify CCC, as this moment deserves documenting, analysis, and time, in order to Cultivate CCC.
I have proof that a Chicano Civil Rights Lawyer could not get away with saying the same thing to a white judge.
Let’s focus on The Level Playing Field of elections. There is the myth that anyone can be president. That is not true. In this day and age, a Latino can’t be president. I hope one day this sentence will be defied with a sitting Chicana president. This sentence reveals that We are relegated to second-class citizenship, and We are oppressed. We are allowed to prosper but not rule.
You need only look at what transpired on The Level Playing Field of the 2020 presidential election Democratic primary.
First of all, the only Latino candidate did not make it on stage for the first debate. There were, as always, arbitrary numbers branded into Our central nervous system.
Forced facts:
The Democrats creating the rules of this racket decided to re-quire that candidates have 2 percent in national polls to get on the debate stage in the first place. (Of course, the folks making money off polls don’t know what to call Us, so they don’t know how to quantify Us.)
For candidates to appear on national TV on the debate stage, Dems decided to base eligibility on the amount of cash donated by those already quantified. The official requirement: “One percent support in three national polls or polls of early primary states, or raise money from a minimum of sixty-five thousand donors from twenty states, including at least two hundred unique donors per state.”
So it’s expensive to get on the primary stage, yet staying off it might tank a candidate’s funding. And this is for The Level Play-ing Field, where the rules were devised by Democrats who were supposed to be the Progressive party, the Liberal party, the more multicultural party compared to donald trump—which of course isn’t saying much.
In a two-party system, the bar for engaging Latinos in general has been set very low: you simply have to not attack Us. Most of the discussion of these 2020 debates focused on donald trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, which, as in the case of the Slaughter in El Paso, proved that stereotypes can kill Us. This spilled over to threatening democracy during the January 6, 2021 Insurrection—such a loud and obvious narrative that it made the Democrats the “good guys” by default without them having to do much. In the case of Latinos, it was enough to simply not call Mexicans rapists and not directly attack and vilify immigrants.
However, yes, the trump administration was covertly and openly hostile to the varying segments of the Latino population, beginning with Mexicans—when he attacked immigrants from Mexico and called them rapists; then moving on to Mexican Americans, when he attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel and said he was incapable of presiding over the lawsuit regarding trump university because he was Mexican—when in fact Judge Curiel was born in Indiana; to abandoning Puerto Rico, when it needed help after a hurricane disaster; to attacking more immigrants with travel bans; and so on.
And We all watched as the Democratic Party devised its own rules which kept Julian Castro, the lone Latino candidate, off the debate stage.
In a subsequent debate, the rules of the game on The Level Playing Field kept both African American presidential candidate Cory Booker and Latino candidate Julián Castro off the stage. This meant that the star players—the only players competing on The Level Playing Field—were white.
Which is to say, the players on this Level Playing Field looked a lot like the players on The Level Playing Field of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The rules are rigged under Our noses, because english is brutally honest about its oppression. We are just too traumatized, busy, scared, lusty for Our own mythical turn, or too numb to notice. The very reasons that keep Us from competing on The Level Playing Field keep Us from changing, challenging, or usurping The Level Playing Field altogether. Worse, We have been trained to speak english, and act right, and defer to white folks the same way on both Level Playing Fields: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary debate.
Both myths are rackets.
I want to shed light on what America thought was a minor moment—which was not—in order to prove that a Chicano lawyer would not be granted the same latitude as Chemerinsky.
Back on the debate stage, a heated debate ensues. Julián Castro grimaces, smirks, shakes his head, just as Chemerinsky did in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He means the same thing. He is shaking his head for all of Us, telling the old, white power structure, Come on. Get with it.
You are so wrong.
He is not talking to an elder anglo reagan appointee. He is talking to Joe Biden, elder anglo Obama appointee. We did not know he would become president at the time. He had tried before and failed.
Then, Julian Castro, Ivy League graduate, Obama administration cabinet appointee, lawyer, former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, went too far. He schooled Biden.
At the time, I cheered. Yet as I retype the comment from the transcript, it really is pretty friggin’ mundane: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro asked, “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in, and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.”
white America gasped. There were boos in the audience, which of course consisted of white folks.
Old America had a heart attack over this. Mainstream news and pundits revealed themselves. They were shocked. How dare Castro do that!
You would have thought Castro had mugged Biden.
Perhaps white America did fear that Castro was “stealing” Biden’s chance at the white house. Old school mainstream newspapers and anyone with an old mindset dug into Castro.
In other words, when Castro made it onto the stage, America scolded him for raising his voice to an older white guy.
Castro’s campaign plummeted. It was not just that moment. But that moment revealed the racket of The Level Playing Field.
This also revealed that the maxim “All publicity is good publicity” only works for white guys who already have power. Those under their spell, under their domain will stand up for them, control media for them, unleash other bullhorns, dog whistles, and attack dogs to subdue, kill, or drown the wrong narrative.
We don’t have that luxury. For Chicanos, for Mexican Americans, for Latinos, Hispanics, Latinx, the adage does nothold true. Not all publicity is good publicity when you get no publicity, when you do not have access to the publicity machine, when, as in Castro’s case, and as in all of Our cases, you are not in the American imagination, the media’s imagination, voters’ imaginations, when you are not worthy of addressing presidential topics, but only a talking head for immigration issues, when the fact that you might or might not speak Spanish is a major issue for you.
This goes back to demonstrating how smart the Chicano civil rights lawyer Richard Martinez was not to handle the case himself. Martinez, Esquire could not compete on The Level Playing Field equally because the price of admission is too high and success is based on generational wealth and power. This oppression is branded into Our DNA.
Of course, folks who want to uphold the façade of The Level Playing Field will read through Chemerinsky’s resume. Again, I think he is brilliant. I think he is a hero. I think he handled the case brilliantly. And it is clear only he could have won.
Richard Martinez is humble and brilliant for not just the obvious reasons. He is brilliant because he knows what profound racism looks like. That is why he can take on the far right-wing republican racists of Arizona. Arizona’s laws were blatantly racist, but as a lawyer Martinez also deeply understood the myth of The Level Playing Field. He understood that he could have never said to that old white Judge, “Look it up,” just as Julian Castro was not allowed to school Biden on stage.
Even if they spoke english.
RELATED PODCAST
Cultivating Community Cultural Capital: Dr. Angela Valenzuela and Patricia Núñez talk to El Librotraficante Tony Diaz about community organizing
“Tony Diaz is impassioned about books and art and wants you to be impassioned too. Through his gift as an orator, he tells stories that awaken our people to their past and future.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“For our new generation now, Tony Diaz had to write this political manifesto, one which spills over with love and pride—and standing up tall strength—for our Chicano history and new times.”
—Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning
