Wisdom from "La Osita"

I've been corresponding with an ex-gf of mine regarding the issues raised on this blog (and others) the past few days.

She won't comment in boxes, but she has given me the permission to post some of what she's had to say, so post it I will.

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"There is a very good story in the Sandra Cisneros collection "Woman Hollering Creek," where a character gets accused of "selling out/trying not to stand out as Mexican" because he wears Lacoste shirts. He then tells the protagonist that he doesn't feel the need to "perform" his Latin identity (she does, from her clothes to her musical tastes, etc.). Cisneros doesn't take sides, but shows why the woman feels compelled to do what she does and where the man is coming from, in other words, a humanizing of what I'd like to call the "authenticity" contests, where it's usually the people eating the menudo hoping that others will see them eating the menudo who keep pointing fingers and screaming "charlatan" or "white wannabe" or "wasabi" for all its worth.

I'm not completely in the know about how the hardcore Chicano hardliners feel about Cisneros, but she's certainly their (as in Chicano, not necessarily hardliner) most famous writer. What I like about what she does, particularly as she gets older is that she focuses more on how the dynamic between her father, the "authentic" Mexican vs. her "not Mexican enough" "Mexican-American" mother played itself out, affected her, and then in the last novel, it gets explored on so many other levels: macro, micro, etc.

So, I'll find the best stuff I can find and then feel free to post whatever you want. Run it by me if you like, but I'm assuming you won't misrepresent what I'm saying and the fuckheads attacking you can just kiss my grits, anyways. You can tell them that a fairly Catholic, semi-Ecuadorian/Czech/Austrian chick said "fuckheads" so all their purity/pollution taboos should be violated just fine.

Download an audio file of "Tony's Theme" on the blog or something. Tell them they have to pass a series of history/sociology/culture and DNA tests before they can accuse you of anything. Oh, yes, and cooking tests."

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Yes. Cooking tests. If you want to challenge my authenticity, we must go head to head, Iron Chef style. And you must be able to sing along with "Tony's Theme."