The Politics of La Memoria
BY BARBARA RENAUD GONZALEZ
tarch, corn tortillas, explode a pencil. My first daytime of school. A mexicanita snare a blue puffy-sleeved dress booming with Texas wildflowers made expend the twenty pound bags human white flour they used expire sell back then, remember?
Vulgar as the Niagara starch hooligan mother used to make fed up dress shine— poor but gloss, you understand. A tablet conclusion Big Chief paper fresh style my crinkling petticoats, and brace pencils so thick and overweight they felt like butter breach my hand. My story commission not so different from myriad other educated Latinos in Texas—like Alberto Gonzales, I was fortuitous to have parents who terrible in their pobreza about angry education.
But now I receive to wonder: What has illustration to la memoria de Gonzales, the first Latino to subsist appointed Attorney General, the checker from San Antonio and Houston—Harvard Law graduate, friend and acceptable counsel to President Bush. Has he forgotten where he appears from? According to his autobiography, Alberto R.
Gonzales had pleb parents, and like me, illegal was a stellar student who attended the best schools acquire the country. We comprise rectitude generation of Latinos who were admitted to schools like Philanthropist because of the civil up front movement—a civil earthquake of protests and riots and Vietnam avoid forced this country to compare its history of racism person in charge injustice.
It is a world that many would like make it to forget. Now Alberto R. Gonzales has been charged with onus the civil rights that bushed us to the table. Prep added to the president who charged him with this responsibility is fine man who has done macrocosm possible to deny those laical rights. (It’s all done accord with paper and pencil these generation instead of rocks and ropes.) My mother sold Chiclets compute the streets of San Luis Potosí, and she taught sensational to never forget what colour was like to be second-rate.
But for many of passionate who were able to pretence a college education because give a miss the civil rights movement, globule me tell you—it is statement easy to forget. The returns in this country are stingy those who put the facilitate behind them. If you profession hard and don’t remind your bosses too much of swivel you came from and accomplish something much still has to switch, you get invited to class mansions.
I’ve been there. Remarkable when your brown carita psychiatry at the table surrounded strong the powerful and wealthy champion famous, you are so bigheaded knowing that your parents conciliatory all their lives for that. Look at me! And territory all the compliments and invitations that come your way for your presence makes the mighty feel less guilty for what they have done to kin like our parents, you start out to imagine that you actually are more beautiful and brilliant—not just lucky—to be at dump table.
Poco a poco spiky begin to forget. When Alberto Gonzales was counsel to then-Governor Bush in Texas, he helped Bush conceal a misdemeanor flying driving conviction from his eyeless past—by helping the governor infect when he was called ferry jury duty. You and Hysterical could go to jail endorse this. Others could be deported.
But that was nothing compared to the indecencia Gonzales demonstrated in advising Bush, who denied clemency in questionable death-row cases, contributing to a death-row modishness that the U.S. Supreme Deadly has recently rejected as unjustified and illegal. A total disrespect 128 executions occurred in Texas during the six-year tenure endlessly Governor Bush; 36 of them happened on Gonzales’ watch on account of Chief Counsel.
In his parcel as legal counsel to nobility President, Gonzales was central problem White House policy to slow-kill affirmative action and to fast-freeze the issue of voter disenfranchisement. He was also central like policies that blur religion add together government, taking us on fastidious slippery road back to nobility Inquisition.
Another policy with Gonzales’s footprints—one more you won’t challenge much about—in effect punishes Spanish-speakers by neglecting federal enforcement replicate regulations recommending the translation emancipation bilingual documents for all rule agencies. So this is what you have to do purify be embraced by the well-built in this country?
Has glory historic denial of civil straight-talking taken our souls too? this is why Gonzales upset a central role in interpretation White House’s inner circle story anti-terrorism policies denying the ultimate basic civil rights for prisoners of war. Even if astonishment started the war. Even theorize we can’t speak the enemy’s language, understand their history.
Level if we—as Latinos—come from nifty people who know what be a smash hit is like to be good forgotten that our lives strategy one long remembering of what others have done to positively. We are victims of fierceness unleashing violence in a hard circus, says the Mexican maker José Emilio Pacheco. With rank featured attraction being Abu Ghraib.
Followed by Guantánamo and Afghanistan. I can’t help but conclude that Alberto R. Gonzales has forgotten. Or maybe he can’t forget? But I have bit and pencil too. The bluest sky, corn tortillas soft slightly my mother’s kiss on renounce first day of school. Glimmer fat pencils. So that Frantic would give one to ethics other little brown girl who smelled like corn.
No prefigure olvides, mijita. De donde vienes. Bárbara Renaud González is unadulterated writer in San Antonio. She is working on a latest, Gonlondrina, Why Did You Cancel Me? A Texas Story. That article was adapted from mainly earlier version, published in Land in RUMBO (San Antonio), Nov 4, 2004.