A Geek History of Time - Episode 321 - Gabriel Cruz Wrote a Book Part II

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Okay, so there's there there are two possibilities going on here. One you're bringing up a term that I have never heard before. The other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before, but it involves a language that uses pronunciation That's different from Latin it and so you have no idea how to say it properly. It's an intensely 80s post-apocalyptic Schlock film. Oh and schlong film. You know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers. Oh Okay, so so the resident Catholic thinking about that. We're going for low Earth orbit. There is no rational. Blame it on me after.

And you know I will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. Where I am. I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. No. Which I don't know if that's better. I mean you guys are Catholics. You tell me. I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about

That basically just means that I can show up and get fed This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California at the middle school level. And earlier this evening, we had one of my wife's former neighbors over for dinner. And it was a big deal for me anyway, for two reasons. Number one, because we were having guests over, we decided that this counted as enough of a special occasion that we were actually going to drink, which we have not been doing. But we both had enough of a week that we were both very happy to have a margarita with dinner

tonight. So that was that was nice and then the other thing was I got a hamburger patty maker For my birthday That I finally got to break out and use and it actually worked a lot better than I had feared it might so So yeah, that's all you know probably pretty dull to most people, but that was that was my my evening So how about you well? I'm Damien Harmony. I am a US history teacher up here in Northern, California at the high school level And today I was going to take care of some grocery shopping but then I remembered there are certain stores that I'm boycotting right now and certain services that I'm boycotting and I was like well shit that means I can't go to that one and I don't have enough time to go to the wholesaling one

So then I was just left going to the the local grocery store that I have which is perfectly fine Prices are a little inflated But then I was asking the cashiers there while I was buying But then I was asking the cashiers there while I was buying several kinds of pasta. I was kind of restocking, which would have been nice to go to the other place where shit's cheaper, but boycotting. So I asked them, I said, have you guys been getting more business? And they said, well, I mean, it's been shut down for the last week and they're remodeling. I'm like, do I even get credit for boycotting if my local is... I don't know, because I had the same question

when I was much younger and there was a threesome scheduled. I showed up, the third showed up, but my girlfriend at the time did not. But she said to go ahead and take care of business, phoned ahead as it were. So I'm a union guy. So of course I fulfilled the contract. I did the work of two people.

Right, right. And I was very efficient, Extremely efficient that night. Very quick. Got it all done. But I think I get credit for that. So do I get credit for the boycott? I don't know. People are divided on this. So. But anyway. This is kind of an odd intro because normally

one of us has something to talk about but as a matter of fact we had such a good time with dr. Gabriel Cruz talking about his book it was a masterful storyteller that we ran really really really really long. Yeah. So I edited it. Edited. You've got home name advantage. You can say it. So I pared it down. Yeah. And so I had to cut it into two and they're still insanely long. So this is gonna serve as the introduction for the second one. So just to tee it up for folks who maybe are just now subscribing, first of all go back and listen to the previous episode because that is honestly going to be the best thing for you.

Secondly, Dr. Gabriel Cruz is a communications professor professor of mass media studies out in North Carolina and He wrote a book Latina dad identity formation and mass media landscape and There's a subtitle to it that is a pun which I love and it's Constructing Pacho Villa. And he explains it in the first episode. But anyway, this is the introduction to that book.

That book is available at all the places that you buy books. I would recommend getting it from the website for Lived Places Publishing. Because I think that he would get a bigger bigger cut And if not, there's you know certain people who don't necessarily need your money. So Yeah, also worth noting he is also the the

titular Dr. Cruz in the podcast office hours with dr. Cruz. Yes, which is well worth your time to go check out and listen to if you're you know coming from our podcast to his as opposed to You know people who are following him here to listen to him talk because you know him by the way welcome You know if you want thank you folks, and thank you very much so by the way, welcome, you know, if you're one of those folks. And thank you. And thank you very much. So...

Yeah, and if not, if you're one of our listeners, go onto Patreon and kick him, kick him some scratch. Yes. Show that it can work so that maybe I can do the same. But anyway, this is the second half of the interview. And we really hope you enjoy it. Well, in fairness, like these tropes are unique in their contours, but broadly speaking, we see them pop up in other forms of stereotypes as well, right? You can connect like the harlot or the spitfire to like the Jezebel, right?

Which is a stereotype used against black women, right? So like, yeah, these other things absolutely pop up in different places. The bandit, right? And the inner city thug, all that kind of stuff. And part of that's because whiteness as a concept has this very limited vocabulary for articulating others, right? A lot of Latin American stereotypes also align with,

like what's referred to as the dark continent stereotypes in reference to Africa, right? Things like mysticism, hypersexuality, savagery, nobility, those kinds of things, right? So like yeah. Folk magic of some sort. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, whiteness has a limited repertoire

as it were, right? So yeah, so that's Stereotypes of Threats. Chapter five is articulated Latinx heroes and that's where I wrote about superheroes. And so I talked about them in terms of like how they've been represented, often not great. We may have mentioned this before, I forget, but like, Extraño from DC Comics.

I don't think so. So Extraño was, might have been like the new Guardians or something like that, one of the hero teams from the 1980s. He was Dr. Strange, but Latino and gay. Okay. He was never identified on page as gay, but he wore earrings flamboyant Clothing clearly because of his auntie

And died when he caught HIV from a villain called the hemo goblin Oh Yeah, Wow No is that was 88. Yep, but for one little letter change to Yeah, so he gets scratched by the hemo goblin and then contracts aids and dies almost like immediately So super aides, I guess. Well, you won't you a superhero. So Naturally, yeah, yeah And there's there's all kinds of side characters to get picked up.

Characters that are Latino that have these little runs. I think El Diablo was one of them. He had been a Marvel character. He's in Marvel or DC, because that's the only two that I talk about. Specifically, and I say this in the chapter, I'm only talking about Marvel and DC because of the weight of those industries. Yeah, the other main streets. And I give some examples the chapter. I'm only talking about Marvel and DC because of the weight of those industries

Yeah, I mean give some examples and I give some examples of other non DC non Marvel superheroes that are worth reading and checking out But sure, you know because of their impact and influence I talk about them I think El Diablo was like he was basically daredevil only instead of a gymnast He was a boxer because he was also a lawyer and a public defender Yeah, he was he was like circa the 1970s. There was a woman, I think her name was Lady Firebird, if I'm not mistaken, but she got powers from a comet that she assumed was some sort of divine intervention. And so she could like have fire powers, it was all thing.

The, but one in particular that came up, two in particular that came up, one from DC, one from Marvel, was, Damien, I think you and I talked about this, that was, oh my gosh, Stonewall was the guy's name. Yes, yes. Oh wait, no, no, no, was it Stonewall? Was that his name?

I think so, he threw bricks, right? Magical bricks. He threw bricks, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was so, he threw bricks, right? Magical bricks. He threw bricks, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was gay, he was from Mexico. He, his power was like, basically he was like a Green Lantern, but it was psychic constructs, right? Instead of like alien technology ones.

And so he was, yeah, he was in DC, excuse me, not model, he was in DC. And he threw bricks and made like constructs out of like psychic bricks and they were purple And so yeah And his name was still his code name was a was total. Um, I Think I'm gonna have to double check that that's but something about that's bothering me. But yeah The other one what about it is bothering me

Yeah, yeah Steps forward I think is the phrase. I mean look what the thing about him was what was noticeable about him. Um, oh My gosh, no stonewall is not his name On a second, I'm sorry, this is probably be picked up on the mic I'm sorry. This is probably be picked up on the mic. Jaime Reyes comes up all the time. Blue Beetle comes up all the time. But like in terms of queer characters, because like queerness is treated interestingly. It's going to bother me. I'll have to look it up when I get a chance.

But he was accepted by his home like his hometown in Mexico. Okay. Like he was out, he had a partner, like they very much pushed back against the sort of like, you know, stereotype of being conservative and therefore thrown out of LGBT communities. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm having the hardest time finding anything. Sorry, okay, I apologize. I remember what it was now. His name was his bunker, Miguel Bargan. He, Stonewall came to mind because like, it seems like the Stonewall riots, right? It seems like he's throwing a brick like at Stonewall,

that kind of thing. That's where the confusion was. So Bunker is a DC character. He's like, he's, you know, late teens, early twenties. He's out in his hometown in Mexico. Everyone loves him. He's a community hero. It's not a problem, which is interesting

because the flip side of that is Renee Montoya, who is the second iteration of the question, right? The detective. And she's Latina and is gay, but like there's a weird plot that follows her. It's not weird that it follows her, but it's weird because Two-Face finds out that she's queer. Okay.

And then like exposes that to her parents. He becomes like weirdly obsessed with her in a way that I'm not a hundred percent clear if it was like professional because he's a villain and she's a hero, or if it was because it was a sexual obsession, there is that kind of like, right, undercurrent going on there.

But he finds out that she's gay and then blackmails her. And like her parents kick her out of the house. She, I'm sorry, they don't kick her out, she lives on her own, but they basically disown her. And so the leveraging of that homophobia becomes a big part of her story in that particular run of, I forget what exactly series it is, but it's a DC Comics series.

Well, I mean, if it's the Two-Faces, probably something Batman adjacent at the very least it is it's like Gotham City PD or something along those lines. Okay, because she's a detective for for Gotham so yeah, and She she's One of her at least one of her partners is bat woman, isn't it? Kate Kane? Yeah, she has a fling with with Kane Yeah, yeah, I think it's a fling. It might have Yeah, she has a flame with Kane, yeah. I think it's a flame.

It might have been more substantial than that, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, so yeah. So as far as Marvel superheroes who are, I'm thinking of the ones who are queer, and I'm also thinking of Marvel superheroes who are Hispanic, there's not nearly as much overlap. It seems like DC seems to Queer up their uh

Latinx heroes Yeah, or or latinx up their their queer heroes. Maybe it would be a better way to put it. Yeah, but like uh in marvel Ed help me out. Uh, aioli was his name Um, which one are we talking about? The lizard kid who was queer. I remember him being named after a lizard of sort. I think it's like Ioli or something like that. Yeah, something like that.

But he was white prior to his mutation. Northstar is French-Canadian. mutation. North Star is French Canadian. Yeah. Although his partner is, I want to say, Jamaican Canadian. Yeah. I could be wrong. He's coded, well he's coded as having dreadlocks. Yeah. And I think he's Canadian. I want to say Jamaican Canadian. Yeah. Yeah, and I just, I think I'm probably associating that because North Star is like near Toronto. So I was thinking of larger immigrant groups up there. And then other queer characters, I can't think of a single one of them who's got any connection to Latinidad.

Whereas the Latin X characters that I'm thinking of and there are few and far between on, and most of them seem to be biracial as well. Yeah, so with DC, you do have characters like we mentioned, but also, I'll say about, there's Hiro Cruz, who is gay, that actually becomes an interesting point where he's a DC character and one of his teammates finds out he's gay after she has a crush on him

and becomes kind of weirded out by the fact that he's gay Which was it? I mean DC was willing to have that conversation I guess in the early 2000s so not that they handed it handled it particularly well, but right but so in Marvel there was You have Jaime Reyes obviously, but he's not gay you have Miles Morales who is biracial right? He's black and Latino, but he's not gay. You have Miles Morales, who is biracial, right? He's black and Latino, but he's not gay. Is he, forgive me, I've heard him referred to as Dominican and also Puerto Rican.

Has that changed? No, he's Puerto Rican. He's Puerto Rican, okay. Yeah, yeah. I made a reference to this before we started. And that is that, uh, I'm, I'm always like, I don't know what it is. If I had a nickel for every time Brian Michael Bendis killed off a Latino character, I'd have two nickels, which ain't a lot,

but it's weird that it happened twice. Cause one of them was miles his mother, uh, Rio Rio Morales. Oh, wow. So she gets killed by, in fact both of them were killed by cops. One of them gets, so in ultimate Marvel. It is New York. That's right. In ultimate Marvel, in the ultimate Marvel title, Miles not long after he gets his powers, like the Venom symbiote comes looking for him

because it thinks he's supposed to go after him or whatever, he gets some identity confusion there. Ends up going after Miles' mother and a cop tries to shoot Venom, ends up killing Miles' mom. Wow. Now she comes back when they reboot the Marvel series, when they reboot the mainstream Marvel continuity,

but that was like two or three years down the line. So for a while there, she was just done. And then of course the other one is Hector Ayala in the 2000s when Ryan Michael Bendis had a story for Daredevil where Ayala gets framed for murder of a, I think of a police officer. And then like he gets found guilty, he runs away, and then like cops shoot him and he dies in the street.

And again, Ayala's Puerto Rican. So Ayala's hero name is what? White Tiger, excuse me. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But yeah, so we also have my personal favorite, Rabi Reyes, who is, I'm sorry,

I said Jaime Reyes earlier, Jaime Reyes is DC, excuse me. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's Blue Beetle? That's Blue Beetle. Yeah, okay. My brother loves Blue Beetle, so he has a scarab that is the Blue Beetle colored on his chest. So, okay, so. I was thinking about Spider-Girl, Anya, Anya Corazon. Because some of the research that I've read talks about both of them in the same conversation because there's a lot of overlaps between those two in some interesting ways. But yeah, so probably one of the few Latinas

that we have in Marvel, quite honestly, is Anya Corazon. But also, like, Robbie Reyes is one of the few Latinas that we have in Marvel quite honestly is Anya Corazon. But also like Robbie Reyes is one of the ghost writers. He's one of my favorites. There's I think- America Chavez. America Chavez. America Chavez. Well, that's even a big contention though,

because like the thing with America is that there is a question of whether or not she's human, right? So do space Latinos count? Because her story has been retconned at least once or twice. And so in the original, she is from a parallel universe. She's very much Afro-Latina in her construction, but she's an alien.

And then in the comics, they said, well, no, actually she's from earth, but she was experimented on and that involved her fabricating a reality where she was from another place. Okay. But like, there's also, I think still some possibility that maybe she is from another place.

It's a whole other thing. That's interesting to me. Just that is interesting to me because like you're playing with border ism, too With that with her being from a different place, but like did she? Cross the borders or did the borders cross her kind of thing like there's Okay, yeah Marvel made the borders cosmic now, so yeah black stones happy but And that it's her and that it's her power right is to uh-huh orders right. Oh, oh

Yeah Okay. Yeah, so But certainly she counts and it's interesting also because like in the adaptation of that character So like in the comics, there's a few there's one title in particular. I think it's uh, I think it's america Issue number two her solo series where, they basically do a recreation of a Beyonce album cover, right, with her. And it's really cool. And then, and it's, they clearly like suggest that like the Afro-Latina is a part of her character construction. And then in the movies they have her played by Social Gomez, who did

a good job, but is Mestiza. She she is you know part of that that mixed ancestry of With with no discernible iterations of Africanists so like right so yeah That's that's it's all that and that's also something else that some of the scholarship talks about is like when we see characters pop up Like typically speaking they're on the more European end of things or if they are darker skinned like it's still within a very particular Convention of appearance, right? So if miles kind of breaks that down a bit miles does he was intentionally based on Barack Obama and and Donald Glover. Yes for his character construction. Yeah, so yeah

And that's speaking. Oh, I was speaking of spider-man's spider spiders man spider-man spider spider-man sheep. I don't know So my default is just to say sheep but spider-man 2099 is Miguel worse yeah Forget his last name, but I assume it starts with an M because he's a spider-man so it's got to be alliterative Yep, oh, oh, her never mind So it's got to be alliterative. Yeah, I'm a girl. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Never mind

Well, cuz it's 2099 so we don't need the same letters and then also Irish Mexican. Yep, right And then also and he's very very wealthy and and and he's got like he's well It's very corporatized because it's 29 and but the other one I was thinking of was specifically Sunspot Hmm who is yeah, he's Brazilian. Yeah, he's Brazilian. And also, his dad was in the Hellfire Club, if I recall. There are- I don't remember Roberto da Costa's father, but I was surprised. I think he's Roberto da Costa Sr., basically.

Okay. But yeah, he was in the Hellfire Club, I think Roberto de Casas started as a hellion Hmm, and then I think he ended up in the new mutants. I could be wrong. I didn't really like the Extra mutant stuff beyond the the originals sure but in the most recent cartoon extra-97 he is

much closer to Queer than I would say he is too straight. Well, that's that's that's another thing too like Whenever they depict Latinos, especially Latino men, right and they go for that flamboyance, right? They that often becomes perceived as queer in an American context, right when they go for the extravagance the over-the-top The whole fiery temper thing right which yeah extra that exists in as much as it does in any other, you know demographic Yeah, but like because that's so heavily associated with us like you're either you're either Stone-faced and don't emote or you emote everywhere, right? And your powers are based on fire.

Yeah, right, fire, yeah, absolutely. And so that's a part of it. It becomes very much perceived through this filter of how we code homosexuality, right? Right. Like queer, and so again, that limited repertoire of depiction. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyways, that was an easy chapter to write, quite honestly, because a lot of literature and research I already knew because that's that's my research. The one that I was most hesitant to write, because again, like I said, I knew the least was the chapter six on virtual, I think that and like I came out with some really cool stuff from that. In particular, I have not done my job because I was supposed to talk about two concepts in And like I came out with some really cool stuff from that in particular I Have not done my job because I was supposed to talk about two concepts in particular They are super important throughout the entire book and I guess that was the time to talk about him Too like so there's two important concepts for understanding Latinx identity and one is napalm

Okay, the potluck comes is a Nawa word. It's in Spanish, but it comes from Nawa. That means borders, right? So a napalm is where two borders touch, right? Where two territories touch to create a border. Okay. Gloria Anzal, it's an in-between space is actually, I think the better translation of it.

But Gloria Anzaldua, who was a leading, like super influential scholar, not without a problems, certainly, but like super influential scholar and Latino studies, talks about this thing called called the Napaatla of racial identity for Latinos. And she talks about in terms of geography, like the negotiation of the Mexican-American borderline, but also in terms of like existing in a space between European colonization and indigenous identity, right? My dad, like, so from my birth family,

cause there's a couple of folks I do keep in touch with, like they know they're natives, they know that they're Indian in ancestry, they don't know from where, right? My grandfather... Is that diasporic or is that the colonizing culture came down and just squashed it down? Part of the colonial project for the Spanish was to prevent rebellion

by breaking up tribes and remixing them together so that they couldn't communicate with each other. Okay. And so you have a lot of people who are taken from different parts of the world By breaking up tribes and remixing them together so they couldn't communicate with each other. Okay And so you have a lot of people who were taken from different parts of the of Mexico who were forced because like Bearing in mind the Spanish Technically technically we're not allowed to enslave the natives right the Spanish crown said hey We need peasants not slaves because you can't tax slaves you can tax peasants and generate money that way

right but the boots on the ground were like cool story we're gonna enslave them anyway right so what that looked like was a lot of debt bondage so it was like indentured servitude except that you never got a release right? You worked until you died on a plantation. Right. They didn't own your children, as was the case with the Africans, but they did like, you were still enslaved effectively, for all intents and purposes.

It was channel slavery. And so a part of a way of keeping folks from collaborating was to mix up tribes so that they couldn't talk to each other. And so that's a part of it. Spanish version of like the Gullah corridor. Yeah. Yeah. It was also a matter of like, so the Spanish imposed a racial caste system of five distinct categories but with many different permutations. Right.

Right. I've seen somewhere between like and 22 different status positions based on your ancestry. The five basic categories were peninsulares at the top. These were the people of European descent. People born in Europe, people born in Spain and Portugal who came to the Americas. Beneath them were the Creollos, the Creoles who were European but born in Mexico. Beneath them were the mestizos,

who were the combination of indigenous Mexican ancestry. Beneath them were the indios, the natives themselves, and beneath them were the Africans. Now, sometimes that distinction between African and Indian didn't really mean a whole lot based on where you were, but that was the way it went. And again, like I said, I've seen some depictions of the caste system with as many as 20-some odd

different positions based on like how many of your grandparents were European versus and how many were you know mestizo and that. It was too much and it got boiled down into mestizos as a national project, right? We're not natives, we have Indian ancestry but we're not Indians, right? We're all a part of this, like, for lack of a better term,

master category of mixed people, right? So it was a way of detribalizing people. And Mexico's been bad about this as well, right? That's a part of how they maintained national cohesion to some extent, and also why a lot of indigenous people in Mexico reject Latinidad entirely, right? That's a part of it as well. So like, so my birth father's side of the family,

they know they're, you know, largely Indian, but they don't know from where. Okay. My grandfather was from a place in Chihuahua, Mexico, where there was a lot of Raramuri, sometimes called the Tarahumara, who if anyone's heard about them, they actually have some degree of notoriety

as being long distance runners. He was never part of- That's why I've heard the name before. I've never- There's a video game about them actually. Really? Interestingly enough. But yeah, like people who could like run for hours

and hours and hours, right? Barefoot through like the desert, right? So yeah, we know broadly speaking where the tribes are. My ancestry is from Chihuahua and Durango. That's the Raramuri, the Tepehuan, the Akashay, the Wariishika, the different groups, but no one actually has an affiliation. as an affiliation, right? Okay. With my dad's family, who are also heavily indigenous, they were raised to believe that they were Apache, even though when I've been looking at the maps,

the Apache did not have people near there. But that was part of it. They were probably Zacatecos, who I've saw one historian describe as, um, uh, tall firearms, proficient and quarrelsome. And that is my family. That is like, like that's nothing. I mean, minus the firearms proficient, you just described orcs in the 2024 pools.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I read that to my mom and she's like, well, that is your father's people. So yeah. Well, you know, Rancheros, as you said before,

Rancheros rednecks, like, you know, it's two sides of the same coin. Right. But so like that two sides of the same coin. Right. Um, but so like that's, that's, that's kind of the thing. They, um, they don't, they don't know either, right? Again, they were, they were told in school they're Apache, but that doesn't map up with any sort of things that I can find. Maybe the Southern Nettle Apache who were like, uh,

you know, miles and miles and miles to the East or something like that. Like possibly, but anyway, so yeah. anyway so yeah the where was I where did I start with this so you're in chapter 6 yeah which one thing that Napa right that kind of like yeah yeah so between space Gloria's all do it talks about like this idea of by virtue of being Latino by virtue of our history we exist on of our history, we exist on borders, right? Our lives take place on borders, physical borders, sure, but also metaphysical borders, right?

Okay. Half of my ancestry is older than this country, right? Have been here since before it was colonized. The other half of my ancestry were the impoverished, you know, poor Europeans who were brought along as labor and also as a way of populating. So that's a border that I talk about. There's the border that I carry with me of being first class or first generation college student, but also, you know, working class in academia that's its own border right and so these are not concepts that are unique to like the

idea of the pointless space I encourage people who are not Latino to understand because it is not only unique to us but that is the context in which the idea was developed right can you unpack that a little bit more it sounds it sounds like you're saying that it is a universal Concept but it was born out of the Latinidad experience. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's that's that's that's pretty effectively it like anywhere you anywhere two borders of different cultures systems

Ideologies life experiences meet and there's tension there, there's friction there, that is napalm. That is the space in between. Okay, sure. I mean to put in a modern political context if you are a blue dot in a red ocean, buddy that counts. So yeah, that's why I encourage folks who are not Latino to read this as well because like that that can be useful language for folks right it's a construct that they could use to examine their own experience. The other concept is mestizaje which I talked a little about already but mestizaje is there's there's it's part of its contentious because there was a,

I think his name was Jose Vasconcelos, who was a philosopher or social theorist in like the pre World War II, and that's important to note. I would say like 1930s, I wanna say. Who argued for what he called La Raza Cosmica, the race of people who were transcendent kind of. who argued for what he called La Raza Cosmica, the race of people who were transcendent, kind of, which was Nazi shit. It was Nazi shit, it's always Nazi shit. God damn it.

That sounds kind of poetic. I was ready to make fun of it for being like crystal shit and like, you know, like, emerald tablet bullshit, but then again, both of those lead to Nazi shit and like, you know, like, well, everyone has bullshit, but then again, both of those leads to Nazi shit. Yeah. Okay. We can make fun of it for all those reasons. Yeah. Yeah. True.

So, you know, Vasco Celos's idea, and someone should double check that whatever I'm talking about, but I think it was pre-World War II, but his idea was basically like, Mexicans will be the fifth race. I don't know who the other four were, right his conceptualization because that shit changed from context to context But the idea was borrowing from what's-his-face?

From Blumenbach. Yeah, Blumenbach was he made from him. Blumenbach had five races, right? No, so I'm like, who is he replacing but he's like we will be like we will be from all of them, right? We'll mix them all together and then we'll become this transcendent people, and we'll transcend by emphasizing the European parts. It's like, well, sure. Right? If we, there's a concept in, or there's a phrase in Spanish,

in like Mexico and other places called mejor la raza, which is to better the race. You know how you do that? Oh, fucking white people. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You avoid anyone darker than you.

That's what that, right? There is also a- So amongst white folk, it literally, there are some folk who say, no, you go the other way. Because we cook in the sun. So you want to make sure your children can spend 15 extra minutes outside more than you did, you know, and so You try to get darker

Yeah, and I and both are bad hybrid vigor and right like both are still very objectifying and deeply problematic I'm gonna give this some context. My mom was an immigration advocate for years, right? But like she, and she existed in those community spaces for a very long time. And I say that to say like, she used to make jokes about people would remark on like how, like, cause all of us, all of her children,

at least as children were like really cute kids, right? And people turned and, and some, I grew out of it, but there are other ones that are fine. But, and so she would like have a little fun with like white folks and say things like, well, you know, Mexicans make pretty babies. And make them a little uncomfortable, right? Yeah, well, because this is in North Carolina too.

Yeah, this is North Carolina, she's talking to white people and she's like, you know. And my wife heard that, and so like, uh, you know, um, and, and I, uh, my wife heard that. And so like when our second child was born, um, like the, the nurse was like, she's just, uh, your daughter is just so adorable. And my wife who was still coming down from being viciously over-served with the epidural because the machine was broken and was not accurately reporting. It said, I don't know what the metric is on the epidural, but let's say it was like we're giving you two units.

It was giving her like five. Oh, right. And they figured that out afterwards. Like it makes up its teaspoons and tablespoons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. There was there was a chance she would have to have a C section because she could not feel enough to push. Right. Like, yeah. Thankfully, it worked out OK. But my wife is still drowsy.

She turns to the nurse and from sitting in the wheelchair and goes, my husband's Mexican and they make pretty babies. Tell me she fainted right after that. Because that would make a great story. Just, and out. And the nurse, plus her heart, turned and said, well you know, my babies are white and they just were pitiful looking when they were born I mean I had I've

None of my children came out looking anything Attractive like they they they were one looked like Winston Churchill. I Like they, they, they were one looked like Winston Churchill. I mean, if you're really digging deep, two of them did. And then the other one was my daughter, you know, like, I've seen pictures of your kids. Julia looks like she would invade Soviet Russia after a major conflict. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And not bat an eyelash doing it.

Yeah. So, you know, Robin Williams said that babies, and I think in his context he was talking about our people's babies, look like little old men dipped in 40 weight. Well, okay, so Julie came out with vernix. So she was waxy cheesy Mm-hmm, and and she had a habit of sticking her tongue out which at that point touched her chest Like I don't know if you ever saw V the final battle But but she looked like Elizabeth as a baby not the lizard one that died right away but the

Human one that like his statue instead like Because the trash is strong Had a brother who was born with just like a shock of white hair that I swear to God he looked like The the white infant version of kid and play infant version of kid and play. So, but anyway, so this idea of like Mestizaje is a bit contentious for a variety of reasons. La casa rosa, la casa cosmica, excuse me, was one of the things that sort of like

has messed with it a little bit. And certainly there's that aspect of like mejor la casa that's involved in this as well. But Mestizaje in this context, as some scholars put it, is a way of looking at a way of acknowledging the complexity and the hybridity of Latino identity. Right? Because in the way that we deal with narratives and we understand these narratives are not, they're not born out of reality, but they become shorthand for people to understand them. You have like English people, right?

You have Germans. Now, obviously, as scholars and historians, y'all know, that is not the case. It was tribe after tribe after tribe and that kind of thing that led to the creation of modern nation states. But a part of our cultural myth is the idea of just how messy that ancestry has been, right? And so, Mestizaje, in some contexts, looks at how we can sort of grapple with that complexity. And so, Virtual Latinidad, chapter six,

is all about how that happens in the video game space, right? So for example, the author CGK Gonzales, who I quote quite a bit, because he's one of the few scholars I could find who was writing about this stuff, he wrote a book called Ready Player One, right? J-U-A-N. this stuff. He wrote a book called Ready Player One, right?

J U A N. Oh, okay. Which is a reference to, uh, obviously player one. Yeah. Right. But also a nod to a book by a scholar, she or a chess called ready player two ready play. So, and it goes like this, right? If player one is, so at each player is a composite character Created or envisioned by the video game industry. Okay. Okay player one is a white American male heterosexual cisgendered between the ages of like 18 and 34

Right, okay, whatever happens to me right that main new new come right exactly player two is that but a woman okay sure okay yeah chess's argument is that player two is how the video game industry conceptualize women and it's white heterosexual cisgendered right 18 to 30 whatever it is right right right Right. Right. Player one is how video game industries conceptualize Latinos, right? Okay. Which is to say damn near non-existent.

Right. Right. We like the, there's not much research on the demographics, but what I have been able to find basically indicates like we are, if we're there, we're NPCs. Right. Rarely are we ever like a, a leading character. If we are, it's in a way that kind of like downplays the Latinidad. With the exception of actually Miles Morales in the PlayStation Spider-Man games

that were recently. Like there are some references to Latinidad beyond just his name that are in that game, but that's, he's unique in that way. I think also Life is Strange number two also features Latino characters, right? But they are by far the exception, not the rule. There is a scholar whose name escapes me at the moment, but he basically argues that within video games there are three main categories for Latinos. That is Tomb Raiders, Contras, three main categories for Latinos that is

Tomb Raiders Contras and The last one escapes me. Oh my gosh Well bandidos well, no, those are the contrast those Guys or something. Oh, okay. Okay some sort of mystical thing or something it it's something like that But basically he argues that like these three things are the way in which that we have been conceptualized mostly as ornamentation Mostly as like background characters, right? Right Aside quest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like or like if you think about the Uncharted series, right? I was gonna ask about that. Yeah, the one where you don't poop your pants what the Uncharted series no God okay that one that one

that one caused me physical discomfort oh well you know if you pooped your pants you wouldn't feel all that physical discomfort I've been changing diapers all day today Have you all talked about how as parents your entire day is determined And how good or bad it is based on whether or not another person poops productively Oh, not only that but when when when I was married a 75% of our conversations Were were around around consistency color frequency and quality yeah like there was nothing else interesting in our lives evidently

except for our children's valves yeah yeah yeah I promise it gets better does it yeah it does it genuinely does now my kids talk shit to me Now now remind how old is your oldest right now, he's 15. No, I'm talking to Gabriel Sorry, we've just gotten past the I'm not gonna poop because I don't want to phase like Sorry, bro. We've just gotten past the I'm not gonna poop because I don't want to phase like right Shit, you will yourself to not shit. Okay, so I Identified the scholar his name is Philip Pinnix Tasden. He divides Latinos in video games into three categories contras. That is to say like rebels bandits drug dealers things like that

Tomb Raiders who are like the explorers often this comes up in the form of landscapes, right? Or like background characters who are there to assist the hero, that kind of thing. Think of literally Tomb Raider, who by the way, Laura Croft was supposed to be a Latina. In her original character construction, her name was Laura Cruz, she was a arms dealer from Brazil. Yeah, but they decided they wanted to go with something that was ethnic, but also white, and so they settled on a British person

Because they thought it would play. No Okay, I gotta cut in here British is not ethnic like Like like there's so much there's so much that I understand that there's so much American You know like you could say English and maybe get there, but yeah, British is yeah British Like which category of British are we talking about? They want a non-american white Now in fairness if you have a game called Tomb Raider What group is better to pull from? Yeah English person would be right obviously you, like they have the museum like, oh, yeah.

I was in the National Museum in Cairo, Egypt, and our tour guide said, if you're wondering why there's so many reproductions, go ask the British. But the third category that he had that I was blank on earlier is the Luchadores. Yeah. So and Luchadores in this context that I was blank on earlier is the luchadors. Ooh. Yeah, so, and luchadors in this context doesn't just mean the wrestlers. It also refers to like the sort of like, like spandex heroes would count as that, right?

So like this is not just, he does talk about the wrestlers actually, he talks about some of the video games involving Mexican wrestlers, but also variations of that flamboyant singular persona kind of thing. Would a matador kind of fit within that context? Yeah, that would kind of be within that vein.

Heroism, the bravado, the, yeah. Okay. Tadson talks about all those sort of things CGK Kelly I'm sorry CGK Gonzales talks about this idea of a player one and he argues that like when a player enters into a video game space they are engaging the Pantla they are crossing a border right that is an act of immigration. Right? Okay. Okay. All right. He also argues for what's called digital mestizaje,

excuse me, digital mestizaje, right? And the idea that like, as we are playing these games, especially if we're Latino, we are engaging with other forms of Latinidad, right? So like, in my experience, as someone who's grown up in primarily white environments, like being exposed to Latinidad in video games because it doesn't happen often.

I will say it struck me when in the original Gears of War series, you had Dom, who is Dominic, right? Who is coded as Latino and has one of these saddest stories for no particular reason. And that, God, in that entire franchise, if you don't know, Dominic is like your sidekick throughout the entire first series. And in game number two, he finds his wife

and has to euthanize her with a gun because she's a hollowed, shell-loved woman who's been captured by the enemy. And he's been hunting, searching for her for years and then finds her and she's a husk. And he's like, well, it pans away as he pulls the trigger, that kind of thing. Because again, Latinos have to be associated

with violence and partners and sadness. So yeah, so this idea of like, we are like, the mestizo, the mestizaje, the hybridity of identity comes from a lot of different places. And so like a part of that is engaging Mestizo, the mestizaje, the hybridity of identity comes from a lot of different places. And so like a part of that is engaging with these digital spaces, right? So that's where it goes out with digital mestizaje. Also related to this that I write about somewhat

that I think is interesting and you guys might would find interesting too is as people who play games, is this idea of op of oh geez procedural rhetoric that's right I remember which boring string of words it was because the guy who invented it named Ian Bogost was a computer programmer right okay who decided to get into like culture studies and

procedural rhetoric is when the mechanics of a game Act in a persuasive manner to get the player to conceptualize reality in a particular way Okay, okay. Okay. The easiest way I can explain this is in the context of D&D with the racial attributes Okay, so if I'm gonna be a bard I'm probably gonna be a tiefling That kind of stuff in this case. It's like if you're a dwarf you have increased Constitution, right? Right. Yeah, which is interesting because actual little people who are often referred to as dwarves Have a lot of health risks, right? Yeah, yeah, so like it was the idea of like racial hybridity that happens, right?

So like half elves, half orcs, we have named the thing that isn't white. That is to say the thing that isn't human. Right. Right. Right? Okay. Another example within another scholar used, cause I found an article written by someone

who was talking about a video game where part of the game mechanic was going insane, or part of the game mechanic was becoming monstrous, right? And the more times that you like manifested this monstrous aspect of your identity the more likely you were to have the bad ending Right isn't isn't that kind of like werewolf head? Well vampire vampire. I'm sorry You know the more times you you entered frenzy More difficult it was to hold on to your humanity Yeah, pretty much and so if you have the bad ending it then you find out that while yes

You were tried for the murder of your wife You actually did murder her as opposed to if you don't use that ability much it turns out that you were framed for it Right, but either way And this can't force you dead. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. And this reinforces. She's dead. Yeah. Yeah. But this reinforces the idea of mental illness and violence, right?

Right. By drawing that connection even stronger together. We do not have a good history in America of diagnosing mental illness amongst non-white populations. Nope. Well, yeah. And in fact, of weaponizing them instead against those populations. Oh yeah. And in fact, weaponizing them instead against those populations.

Yeah. And then sterilizing them as a result. Yeah, and specifically talking about, you know, the idea of mental illness or madness. Yeah. In a tabletop context, in Call of Cthulhu, every time you encounter anything alien, from beyond this dimension, you have to make a sand check.

Fail enough sand checks, you become a non-player character and it is actually explicitly stated that, oh yeah, now you are a servant of the old ones. Right, sand being short for sanity, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, sanity. You have to make a sanity check and and when you become permanently insane you become a villain and when we combine that with what we know about Lovecraft's outlook on on Yeah You can read your way to

You to not being white Well, yeah in in in a in a kind of weird psychic spiritual, right? Yeah, and how how like how? How thin is the line how thin is like the gauze between? Like your humanity and your insanity like in in CoC. Yeah, and so can do them. Yeah Usually is a starting character like if you Cuz cuz you know you you have statistics and and you're right your sanity score is a derived stat based on a couple other things And usually when you're creating your your character you're gonna be like well

I want to make sure I'm at least at you know average mental stability unless okay No, I'm trying to really be you know edgy somehow and so you could like live within that liminal space at all You could okay Yeah You could you could you know fiddle with things a little bit and as long as you weren't the member of the party who was? Actively like no I'm going to open the grimoire bound with, you know, really lizard like human skin. Um, you know, you, you didn't usually have to worry about that, but it was, uh, the joke often would get made around tables that like call of Cthulhu is the game where, you know,

you don't have a total party kill, but you do have-thirds of the party wind up in an asylum right but I mean that's where the fun is too is that space yeah yeah if you're if you're if you're playing that game right then that that's essentially a mini game within within the role-playing game is you know playing that so you could you could find a character that was insane in the membrane fucking this is what happens when I stop talking yeah Oh And we're talking about Lovecraft, so of course you you just fish hook me yes

You can just feel those slimy pun tentacles, that's right going around Shadow over Damien's mouth. God damn it That reminds me and if you're a fan of cosmic horror stuff, I have two podcast recommendations. Oh, yeah One is called old gods of Appalachia. Oh Yeah, I think I've heard about that one. Yeah Eldridge horror if the Appalachian Mountains were a cage for a cosmic evil a lot of like, Who says it isn't? Yeah. A lot of commentary on labor rights

and how maybe workers should overthrow bosses. And also fight. Right now I'm hooked. And also fight boogies and monsters and whatnot. Well I mean they're digging down into the earth, this makes sense. Yeah, one of my favorite scenes is there's this fellow named Melvin Blevins

who is a good old boy. He is the patron saint of old boys that have a little bit of sense. One of my favorite scenes is there's this fella named Melvin Blevins who is a good old boy. He is the patron saint of old boys that have a little bit of sense and he rolls up to rescue his daughter who's being sheltered in a brothel and there's this, the daughter is like stolen this like eldritch artifact from a John and like these monsters and nightmare creatures are like writhing out of the ground trying to attack this brothel which is magically protected. And the narrator goes,

Melvin didn't understand what he was seeing, but he knew a boss when he saw one. So when he recognized the man in a suit, he leveled a shotgun and fired away. And it's just amazing. And he shot the right man. Okay, well good. There you go. So, but the other one, the other one is called Malevolent, which is a, it's, it is a Cthulhu mythos story. It is one man who is, who has done like at this point, God, at least gotta be 15, 16 different voices

read very convincingly. But the premise is 1930s, 1930s, a detective wakes up with his partner who is dead, and he can't see, and there is a spirit inhabiting his body that has control of his eyes. So okay. The hell of a premise. Which works really well for a podcast format because it means that the spirit has to describe everything to him as they navigate the world around them.

Wow, alright, cool. Consistent with HP Lovecraft, there is next to no people of color, except for the dead partner who appears to be Asian. And because it's one guy who does everything, he does like one female voice, but there are other women who are just like either insane or the subjects of violence, that kind of thing. So like, it's very well done. It fits within that Cthulhu mythos for great ways and unfortunate ones

But it's it's thoroughly enjoyable. Um, also a lot a lot of uh, uh, uh homoerotic subtext. Um, so okay No All right. Cool. But yeah, I strongly recommend Oh, and if you're a fan of the patriot if you are part of Patreon, you can help them choose what things happen as the decisions get made and whatnot. So I mean, that's kind of, last time I saw that happen, like that, uh, last time I saw that happen, Jason Todd got crowbarred to death. Well, it just proves that people are the same, right? Whether it's 1980s or now like yeah rooting for something tragic to happen

It's more interesting. So that's virtual Latinidad Basically and then like last yeah in in the virtual Latino that I made the dumbass mistake of watching a series that I thought Was over but it's not And I have a policy I do not watch series until they're all the way done that way I can absorb them all not as they were intended to be given to me, but as complete works What's it called the last of us? Mm-hmm Joel. Yeah, okay Pedro Pascal, right? Yep. Has a daughter who is biracial. Has a brother who is very clearly much more Latino coded than Pedro Pascal is in the TV show.

Now my question for you is how faithful was the TV show to the video game? Because I hear the to the to the the video game because I hear that it's okay I was gonna say I hear that it's based on a video game I read the synopsis of the video game is I understand it it's pretty broadly accurate like okay they do take some liberties so for example they change some things between Bill and Frank who are a same-sex couple who they I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story.

I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. I think it's a little bit of a different story. pretty accurate. And actually we talked about on my podcast, I'm sorry, Dr. C, we talked about that. We talked about the

last of us actually. And you talk about that episode specifically. Yeah, we talked about apocalypse narratives. Yeah. Yeah. But okay, so I guess my question, more specifically is, Joel is a Latinx character. In the video game, is he portrayed as such? Or is it kind of he's he's a white guy I think there's an implication that he's Jewish I think okay But as I understand it he like but that might be like an Easter egg or something like that But as I understand it he is he is white American. Okay. Yeah, so not as

Not as depicted in the in the TV show. Okay. All right. Yeah So, yeah, so and then in chapter 7 Oh and actually so I mentioned that I started each of these chapters with a story and I won't walk you through like what I do For chapter 6, but it's basically recounting some snippets from video games that I've played and then I conclude that section by saying like when you play video games you can be A thousand different heroes so long as you agree to be white Right cuz that's mmm. Yeah, the Henry fortification of superheroes yeah yeah yeah so then the last chapter I tie everything together I talk about like

the different theories and concepts that I've used I also I sort of trouble the idea of Latin X because it's a contentious term not everyone uses it a lot of people don't a lot of people are not aware of it in the day-to-day Latino community. I use it in the context of community, but not personally. I'm Latino. I'm Chicano, but I'm not Latinx. But I am a part of a Latinx community.

And I reference Dr. Alan Pellez Lopez, who is a non-binary Afro-Latino scholar, I think from Mexico, who says that the X in Latin X can be understood as a scar from colonization. The four points of the X are the four major wounds of colonization. One was anti-blackness, right? Because there has been historically a lot of anti-blackness in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Interestingly enough, the third president of Mexico

after it gained its independence was Vicente Guerrero, who was Afro-Mexican, right? But like, all of a sudden, he didn't, I think he got killed in office. Like, all the same, there is a lot of anti-blackness, like I mentioned earlier. You have those five categories were very clearly like, yeah, yeah, Benetullari's the Europeans,

and then black people on the very bottom. And so then it was just gradations as you went. So anti-blackness, femicide, right? Violence against women. OK. Because as Anzaldua points out, there was patriarchal systems prior to colonization, right? It's just that the colon, like, dependent, like different tribes had different rules.

Some were matrilineal, some were patriarchal. The myth of the founding of Mexico, which if anyone's seen the Mexican flag, it has the eagle with the snake on it. Like the, as I understand it, the, the Mexica who were the dominant ethnic group of the Aztec empire were patriarchal. Right. And in some, to some extent, like the snake, as she argues, the snake in the beak of the eagle, the snake is feminine, the eagle is masculine. It is the subjugation of Mother Earth by Father Sky. Okay.

Kind of the case that she makes. To the extent of which that is historically accurate, I don't know, but that is the argument that she puts forth. So anti-blackness, femicide, colonization itself. So the actual act of the colonial structure is one of them. And then the last one, which I thought was really interesting, was inarticulation. And that was the taking of language from the indigenous and giving them Spanish. And that is interesting to me as a

comm studies scholar, because there's this concept called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language isn't just a reflection of reality, it also informs perceptions of reality. Absolutely. One way that it was explained to me was that there's a, like in Japan, sexual harassment had been happening forever, but in the 1980s, because of things like, you know, influence from American consultants and the aspects of feminism that are gone international

Like Japan developed a term for sexual harassment and then opened up a national hotline for For reporting sexual harassment and it had to shut down after a day Cuz it because it got too much, right? Yeah so like Was sexual harassment happening already? Yes, but there was not a way to articulate that, right? Right. In a way that folks felt comfortable in their work environment, right?

That was kind of an understood method of operation. So yeah, so that's kind of the thing, right? So in articulation, when language is taken from you and you're given something else, you can no longer conceptualize who you are in the same terms as you did originally right and the terms that you do have are those of those in power yes and therefore you're you go back to Du Bois the dual identity or dual consciousness rather

and and splash in a little bit of Orwell there too you take away the words you cannot describe the problems. Yeah, yeah. And you give them the words to describe their problems and then they're wearing pink blazers. Yeah. Yeah. Or kneeling in Kinte cloth.

Yeah. So that's just it. Like that's the, that is sort of, those problems are at the crux of a lot of issues. Not every issue, but certainly a lot of for for Latin America and Mexico with no exception so so yeah, well, it's also like I Mentioned my dad, you know, they they understand themselves to be Indians of a sort and but You know calling someone an Indian is also like a joke like if if they did something stupid, well it was because they were Indian.

Right? Okay. That kind of thing. Right? So there's self-deprecating humor, but also very much into anti-indigeneity associated with that. Yeah. While also like having lifestyles that were developed from indigenous roots. Right? Sure. As farm workers and people who work the land. indigenous roots, right? Sure. As farm workers and people who work the land. So I tie it all together with a idea from Stuart Hall, who is featured prominently throughout the book. And Stuart Hall was one of those,

like if you've got to pick someone to associate like your tradition with, right? We all have certain scholars that we uphold as like, okay, well this one's really informed my thoughts. Stuart Hall was one of them for me. And for those not familiar, Stuart Hall was a part of the New Left from the 1960s into the 1980s,

founded the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies, which basically fathered cultural studies or birthed cultural studies into the English speaking world. He was a Jamaican man who was operating in Britain and among the New Left and was like, hey, y'all are talking about like class and even gender a little bit. What if we talk about race and making everyone uncomfortable? But like the man had a point.

Well, I'm making everyone uncomfortable in England is really easy to do. It's England. Yes. They're making British people uncomfortable. Yeah. Right. Like they thought they were edgy for being Marxists and he's like, these motherfuckers are racist too. Like I feel like that needs to be racist. You're all bikers. You don't know anything about being edgy.

So he says in one of his other articles that I referenced in the book, he lays out identity in two main ways. He says, you can think about it like this. You can think about it as an identity is an anchor point that gives you access to the past, right? It is an eternal thing, right? That is useful.

And he's talking about the context of diaspora in particular, right? Like for those of us who are members of diaspora, and I would include myself in that position, we are connecting to a past through an identity that we are supposing is the same consistently, that there is a through line there, right? Therefore, I can connect to my Mexican identity

by virtue of being Mexican in a way that almost seems mythologically eternal. He says, that's one way of looking at it. He says, but the other way that he champions that he think is more worthy of attention is the idea that an identity is a suture. Think of it like sewing, a suture point that exists at a moment in time, right?

Within the context of what has happened and also how we foresee the future and the current pressures of the moment, right? This also means that because suture points are so particular, we have to recognize pressures of the moment, right? This also means that because suture points are so particular, we have to recognize that our identities are not going to overlap often, even with people with whom we're in the same community

or in the same group because we're responding to different things. And it's a process of unsuturing and re-suturing identities back together as your moment changes, right? So he's arguing for a more fluid dynamic concept of identity Okay, that makes sense, right? I'm struggling a little with the suture honestly, because I think of a suture is holding two things together and and Repairing. Yes, and the tension point from which

Otherwise things would separate. Yes. So in that vein, think of it like you are suturing on like a patch onto some jeans that ripped, right? Okay. You're sewing it together, right? Yeah. That patch wears out or it gets damaged, you take it off, you put it in another. Okay. So you're not, you're not suturing flesh, you're suturing fabric. Or if you need to replace a skin graft, I suppose. But like the idea is, yeah, you are sewing together two different things to create a whole.

That makes a lot more sense to me now. And you need to be able to change out those things based on the circumstances of the time, right? So identity is constructed by the person putting the patches on. Doing the sewing. Yeah. So may I ask, the availability,

just to extend the metaphor a bit, the availability of which patches are within reach to you can inform the sutures that you use. And this gets to the point that I talk about in here, and that is at the end of the book, and that is that I'm Mexican American. Specifically, the Mexicans that I come from are called Norteños, Northern Mexicans, right?

Always tickles me a little bit when people say I'm too tall to be Mexican. I'm five, 11, six foot somewhere in there depending on the day and the convenience store I'm leaving. And the, and people say like, well, you're too tall to be Mexican. Well, a lot of the Mexicans around here are from the South, right?

A lot of them are shorter, right? Like my dad, my dad's like 5'10". His brothers are all like as tall or taller than him. Yeah, you said your family is from like Durango and Chihuahua. Right. So that's much further North. Yeah, so like they tend to be a bit taller, but like, I am from Norteño Mestizos,

vaguely indigenous, and I am learning Latinidad not just from them, I'm also learning it from Pedro Pascal, I'm learning it from Oscar Isaac, I'm learning it from Jimmy Smits, right? And Antonio Banderas, who's not even Latino, but plays one, right? I'm learning it from all these different figures and I'm conceptualizing Latino women,

not just according to like the women that I grew up with, the women who raised me like my Nina Esther, right? But also like Sofia Vergara, right? Or Sama Hayek, right? These, huh? Yeah, I was agreeing. Yeah, so like these different characters. So like, this kind of gets also to the idea

of the digital mestizaje. Like I am suturing together an identity from different groups of people. I'm a part of an organization called Latinx education, which is about helping Latinos get into college and then figuring out a professional life afterwards. Right? Some of those folks are Peruvian,

some are Honduran, some are Salvadoranian. I'm learning Latinidad ongoing, some are Norteños, like me. I'm learning that as I go along. The words that I have to articulate myself are based in the vocabularies of other Latinos. And that makes sense. the vocabularies of other Latinos, right? Okay, yeah. So there's part of your identity is received.

Yes. And generated by disparate cultures that share the umbrella term of Latinidad. Like you said, it was 30 plus countries. Yeah. And within each country, there's multiple ethnic groups and different tension points and Yeah, and and the thing about Latina that is that like I have I have mixed feelings about the term

I don't I think it is in in an American context. I Hate the phrase the Latino vote Okay. Okay. I can't see why because we all have different relationships with the Latino vote. Okay? Okay. I can see why. Because we all have different relationships with the United States. Yeah. Right? Cubans and Miami, for instance,

are gonna vote very differently than people in Fresno. Yeah. Or folks from Panama or Colombia, where the United States has been directly involved in their politics, right? Like we have different relationships with them, Mexico as well. So like that bothers me,

and especially because it's a blanket term, like we like, okay, we talk about Europe, but also in Western Europe, certainly that's its own like homogeny, right? Sure. But even then you're talking about like groups of people who have had semblances of nation-states for a couple centuries at this point, right? I mean obviously the nation-states have a lot of iteration, but like you've had kingdoms, right?

They had that close proximity of trade. That's a different dynamic. I don't mean to homogenize them by any means, but that's a different like geopolitical dynamic than say, you know, the strings of tribes and cultures and nations throughout Latin America, some of whom were isolated for very long periods of time, thinking about the Indies Mountains and things like that. So it is kind of frustrating. On the other hand, it helps us find each other. We have certain things in common.

We have certain colonial experiences in common. And because of words like Latino, we are able to find each other in the diaspora. Sure. I mean, that reminds me of the Pan-African Congress, I think it was them, who developed the six geographic groups of Africa Northern Africa Western Africa Eastern Africa Central Africa Southern Africa the diaspora sure and There was Africans who had been taken And blown all over the world, you know They claimed them as also no you're still African And so there's that being able to recognize each other. Yeah kind of aspect and yeah, I could see it absolutely being

Bothersome to people who are like no that's erasing my yeah my specific grouping and It's also connected to what it's kind of like if you ever traveled overseas and you met other Americans, right? It's like you're willing to forgive the fact that they're from like Washington State. They're an American, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah But it's also because like the concept of Latinidad is also colonial one, right? So like during which Habsburg was was French trying to put in control of Mexico during that second intervention Maximilian the third Yes, did I just oh look at me reaching back I was gonna say one of them goofy looking ones But they were all kind of unfortunate

Yeah, yeah, oh So why are their eyes closer together than their nostrils? And what the hell is it with that chin? Is fetal alcohol syndrome actually genetic in that family? Listen, the gene pool is easier to clean when it's inflatable. Harder to drown in when it's so shallow. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,

it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,

it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, Civil War and all that fun stuff. Part of the propaganda from France

was that the Mexicans are the Latins of America the way that the French are the Latins of Europe, right? Oh wow. So from that we get what would evolve into Latin American. It's also gone through some other changes. So for example, I have also read, and I haven't made it would confirm it, but I've read that

Leaders of of Latin American countries identify themselves as Latin American to distinguish them from America, right? So like we yes, we are all of the Americas, but we are Latin Americans. We are not you know Americans in terms of the United States Americans. Yeah So, I mean it is a colonial term. But I also subscribe to a perspective of like the meaning of words is constructed and they don't have intrinsic meaning. And so like, yes, it is a colonial. And dynamic too.

Yeah. And dynamic too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Chicano was a slur, right? For people on the south of the border. And so, yeah, it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, it was colonial in origin.

And I'm not saying that everyone has to use it, but I don't think we should necessarily discard it because there is some utility to it in very narrowly defined ways. So well, and and, you know, taking something that was harmful and making it useful. I mean, that that is very often the response to colonialism that you see. The document that Ho Chi Minh used to appeal specifically to Harry Truman was the Declaration of Independence. You know, the book that Vo Nguyen Giap read religiously was the guy from Lawrence, T.S. Lawrence.

Or T.E. Lawrence. Some of the wisdom. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, so use what has been foisted upon you in a way that pushes them back off. It's a very valid response to colonialism. And that's kind of where I end the book by saying like, look, I can't tell you how to feel about these terms

anymore than I can tell you how you're supposed to construct your identity. The question is, I have is like, does it meet your needs? Does it allow you to articulate yourself in a way that is useful to you and fulfilling to you, right? And if you want to get rid of Latinx entirely, that's fine. Look, we had Latin now for like a hot minute, which was Latin with the at symbol at the end. Oh yeah. That was the thing in the nineties.

Okay. Yeah. I vaguely remember seeing that. Yeah. I don't remember that one leg. Yeah. And, and, and no one does, right? Right. For a second. Right. And then it departed. So, um, but yeah, anyway, so I've talked long enough. I basically run through the whole book. I'll end on this point. I mentioned the whole clam thing,

which I think is a positive note to end on. Because I do talk- There's something you don't expect to hear. I do talk about it in chapter two of the book. And that is that like, so for context context my mom was 20 when she had me right so in 1994 and my mom, you know had like struggled as a single mom single mom white woman with a brown baby

in Sadler City, North Carolina, which is where Mayberry actually was inspired from. Although I don't know that Mayberry had an active clan chapter, but Sadler City did. I would love to see Don Knotts trying to lead a clan rally now. Like, well. So, you know Otis was elected while he was sleeping it off too, you know

So so Souther City did right yeah in the 1980s Souther City starts They have like pilgrims pride and other like poultry Plants my mom worked in one for a while and that's where they started shipping in Mexicans, right? Mm-hmm Things are booming and the clan hates it. So my mom got a... My mom managed to get a loan so that she could open up a grocery store. And the grocery store was specifically

for the Mexican community. Now this was circa, this would have been 92. So I was about four years old. The grocery store is like, and she had, she was not a native Spanish speaker. She's a white American woman from the South. She learned Spanish, one through, you know, conversations with my birth father,

but also like she immersed herself in the music. She immersed herself in the culture, things like that. I grew up hearing like Dwight Yoakam and Los Bookies and Marco Antonio Solis and the Dixie Chicks and Los grew up hearing like Dwight Yocum and Los Bookies and Marco Antonio Solis and the Dixie Chicks and Los Tigres del Norte and, you know, that kind of thing. Right. So like those are all, you know, the Mexican bands that are like dad rock at this point.

And so, OK. Right. So like Los Tigres think white snake. Right. But with with an accordion. OK. So, right. So like Los Tigres think white snake, right. But with, with an accordion. And less buildings burning around around them. Yeah. So, so like she, she was able to open up a store. She called it tienda Gabriel. You can find some pictures of it, I think online still. And it was, it was booming. And so in 92, she opened up the store

and it got the attention of the Klan. And by that point, my mom had already been involved in some, I think one of her jobs prior to that was like translation services, right? So like she would go, when police had to talk to a Latino or a Spanish speaker, they're almost always Mexican at that point because the immigration pattern,

she would be brought along as a translator, right? She was a licensed interpreter, excuse me, right? She did almost one time smack a nurse at a health clinic because there was a woman who needed services. She needed like some prenatal vitamins. The nurse at the clinic was like, has she tried holding her legs together? Like, you know, like why is she having so many youngins?

Cause I think it came up with like, she had a couple of kids already. And mom was like, I can't say that to her. I'm not going to translate that. And I'm of a mind to smack you. So one time she interpreted for the police when they were, um, there was a guy who was a local Mexican, who was a drug dealer, who, uh, uh, a drug deal went sideways and she got called into the ER, uh, and she was there to talk to him and he couldn't talk

back cause he didn't have a lower jaw. It had been shot off and he was, they had like, the police had responded and like had dragged him onto the, into the ambulance and were like manhandling him. Like he, even the senators weren't really slowing him down. And so she's like talking to him and he's got his tongue hanging out there with no lower jaw, just like screaming and stuff. And she's trying to tell him, you know,

calm down, calm down. They're trying to save your life. Now that's the kind of shit that she's seen, right? She's, um, and so She is. Wow. And so- Damn. Yeah. And so I was, like I said, when she opened up the store, I was about four years old. And she had started offering like translation services, right? As a licensed interpreter in this place.

She would, it started off with doing things like medical documentation, right? Then legal paperwork and things like that. For perspective, she said at the time lawyers lawyers were charging about $500 per service rendered. She was charging 50, right? Which still earned her the ire of some academics from UNC Chapel Hill who came down to serve to observe that community who said, well, why is this white woman selling these services

to these Mexicans? She should be doing it for free. It's like, well, this white woman also has to pay rent and buy groceries and has a child. So fuck you. I know the names of at least one of those scholars who is still active and not far from where I work. And part of me is like, it's been 30 years,

but do you know? right Wow, it's not like academics are paid particularly much. So what the fuck right? Yeah, my name is Gabriel Cruz You insulted my mother, right? Prepared to write me a grant. Yeah, so so anyway, um There was so one of the things that the clan used to do was, so they had these chicken festivals for the local processing plants, right? So like big things, business come out, they have their things to sell, whatever else happens in the summer.

One of the things the clan used to do was like, they would have these public meetings and they weren't in their robes, but they were in Confederate jackets, iconography, that kind of thing. Everyone knew who they were. Yeah, yeah. And so my mom had already by that point been harassed a little bit.

They had like thrown rocks at the house, did some graffiti, that kind of thing. Actually, hold up, I don't wanna say graffiti. I knew they throw rocks. I knew they did some things to intimidate and thing. Actually, hold up, I don't wanna say graffiti. I knew they throw rocks. I know they did some things to intimidate and she knew who was doing it. And so like on one occasion, like she had me in a stroller

and she just marched through the gathering of Klansmen and Klanswomen, right? And that kind of wildness. Well, she was working one day at the store. And it's worth noting, I'll get to that in a minute actually. This was before the restaurant had opened up. She, because she had turned into a, from a grocery store into a grocery store and restaurant,

before the restaurant had opened up actually. She had been locking up that night, right? And there were some people that were like, they were still there, but she was locking up the back first, and then she was gonna ask, you know, whoever else was there to leave, because it's closing time.

Right. And there's three men, three white men, and their bomber jackets with Confederate patches. Right? And I'm in the back. The Confederacy was famous for its Air Force Yes, yeah, right. Yeah, and they're Navy, right? That one wouldn't somebody

For I again she's 24. I'm for I'm in the back room in my office right playing Sega Genesis. I think She doesn't get a chance to lock the the door yet, right, which is important to the story. These three men tell her that they don't appreciate her having this place where Mexicans can come and, you know, set up shop, basically like buy things from home, right? It was a community space, effectively. She spoke to them in Spanish. She's, you know, catered, you know, to whatever it is they needed pretty much They didn't like what she was doing they didn't like that she was offering translation services They were going to They said and I'm paraphrasing

That they were going to do the kind of things that men do to women before they killed her Right Jesus so that she because they knew she was married to a Mexican one point and and that she needed to know what it Was like to be with a white man before she died Now the level of telling on themselves no with that phrase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Wow. So at this point a middle-aged black gentleman Comes through the front door Right now she couldn't recall his name, but she remembered him vividly. And she said, a solid city, racist town,

this guy got a disability check because he was cognitively impaired, right? Don't know if it was from birth or an accident or what. True. The people, most shop owners would not deal with him because he was black, right? Right. The ones who would deal with him because he was black, right? Right. The ones who would deal with him because he was black

wouldn't deal with him because he was cognitively impaired, he didn't bathe regularly, right? And they didn't want him around because they thought he was dirty. He used to come to her, he used to come to Tina Gabriel every month to cash his check because mom treated him like a human being. Right? So he just happens to walk in Gabrielle every month to cash his check because mom treated him like a human being. Right.

So he just happens to walk in as they are attempting to corner mom and says, Hey, what's going on? Everything. All right. And these three guys spooked, right? They, what they do. They didn't want to mess with this guy. So they left. Okay. If it had, if it had not been for that happens, that's because usually the guy came by and like, you know midday around lunch Right, right just haven't come by closing And because of that I have mom and I'm still alive right Wow

now my mom Obviously was like absolutely. What can I do for you? Right? Right No, my mom Shortly thereafter she was friends with some of the local cops Some of the guys and and she always appreciated that like typically speaking these were these were these were small-town law enforcement Who were like they didn't care about your immigration status. They just wanted you to not drive drunk, right? right, that was kind of their thing and and by and large treated the local community

with some degree of dignity. And so some of them, like she told them about what happened, they, I think a couple of them took her to a gun range to learn how to shoot a gun. She, they helped her buy her gun. She carried a 38 Rossi, five round snub nose revolver. Not fancy, but it won't jam, right? And she carried it on a side strap that was made for her

by one of the officers who was also a gunsmith. And so we actually found the side strap a couple years ago. And so, yeah, so from that point forward, she wore the gun visibly, right? And carried the, you know, and kept it loaded. So we eventually left in, I wanna say I was eight years old, so that would have been 96, right?

And we left for a few reasons. Mom sold the business after about, running it for about four years. No, about three years she ran it. It was making tons of money. Like it had been an important community spot, but it was getting to be too much work. Like she was a single mom working sometimes

like 16 hour days. There's no time to be there for your kid. Making money hand over fist, but honestly, she couldn like have a life. Right. And so like she left, she switched to another line of work doing translation services.

She worked with my godfather Bill for a while, the one. Again, most interesting thing about me is people around me. Bill was in Japan and in parts of Southeast Asia in 1972. And at one point, at least according to him, and I've seen the documents that suggest he was at least where he says he was officially, right? He was teaching English in Japan, went on leave for a while because I interviewed him about this.

And he says, yeah, I went and hiked through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. I said, Bill, that was 72. The war was gonna end in three years. Things were really bad. He goes, yeah, but I wanted to see them before they weren't countries anymore. It's like, Bill, that's some wild shit.

It's not a thing that people do. Bill is as white as the day is long, blue-eyed and from Asheville, North Carolina, right? In Appalachian in Southeast Asia, who apparently crossed the Mekong River at least at one point, right? On his own dime not on Uncle Sam's Also, that's the interesting part there No, the interesting part is that later in life when he had prostate cancer in a heart condition

He only received benefits from a VA hospital in, North Virginia heart condition, he only received benefits from a VA hospital in North Virginia. Yeah. I was going to say hiking through all those places. He was never in the armed services. Yeah. He was never officially enlisted in anything. And that shit, it haunts me.

He's been dead for years. It haunts me still. Okay. I don't know what Bill was up to, but it was, it wasunts me. He's been dead for years. It haunts me still Okay, I don't know what bill was up to but it was it was not hiking Well, it probably involved There was some thing involved to be sure I can name a few names up in New York who might have had contact with bill Bill McFadden was a motherfucker. He also- Import export. He ended his days in Sanford, North Carolina,

up until he was hospitalized, because I think he had a stroke and he passed away from pneumonia. But he spent into his 60s, I think early 70s, still helping people with their immigration paperwork, getting like people like the money that they were owed for like back pay from, from like whatever, like I think he helped like braceros back in the day.

And now he was like helping people with, you know, like the guy was devoted to helping folks, right? So like, wow, motherfucker, right? One time on a full scholarship in Columbia found himself in a gunfight in Medellin between the army and local guerrilla forces And he said I said Bill what was your role in this he goes Oh, I was just like so excited that it was happening that my buddy had to pull me down beneath the Humvee

So I didn't get shot. I was like Bill Bill Sorry for me the most interesting part there is he had a Fulbright. Oh, yeah Like he was like you all that other shit like okay Oh, he's in a gunfight with the medellini went hiking in Lausanne, Cambodia. This all tracks Yeah, Fulbright what Bill Bill died speaking English Spanish English and Spanish fluently Arabic functionally German functionally and Mandarin fluently Okay, Wow. Yeah Yeah German functionally and Mandarin fluently. Okay. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. Anyway, he and mom had worked together at a local resource, it's called the Family Resource Center. They were helping families get services and things like that. They were interpreters, that kind of thing. We left when I was a kid because it got to be too much.

Even after she left the business, she was still a little too famous locally, not even for negative things. Certainly there was still harassment that was ongoing up until we left. But like at one point when I was about six or seven, there was a young woman who was probably like 18, 19, she was a Latina.

She had been kicked out of her home because they found out she was gay. And she didn't know my mom, but she knew her by reputation and she knew where she lived. So she showed up at my mom's doorstep. Like I'm asleep in the house. Mom like wakes up at like two o'clock in the morning and sees this woman.

Like, and she says, I need help. My family's kicked me out because they found out I'm gay. Can you help me throw in your body? And mom's like, come on in. Like she gave her a place to stay, helped her get on her feet and find like some friends that she could stay with the next day. Right? And so like when you've got good and bad visibility,

bring a lot of attention to you and you're trying to raise a kid, right? And some of this shit gets dangerous. Yeah. You know, you have to leave. And actually it's also kind of funny after the incident with the Klan, shit gets dangerous. Yeah. You know, you have to, you have to leave. And then actually it was also kind of funny after the incident with the clan, some of the guys that came up that she knew were

cowboys of a sort who offered to be like on guard protection for when they were on like their days off. So they would come in and hang around and they were people who did not have papers to be in the country, nor did they have licenses for the guns they carried. But some of them had been child soldiers in like El Salvador in like the 1960s. So like, yeah.

You know, anyway, so that's the environment that I was birthed into. And now I study make believe fictional characters. I would too. I mean. That's a real interesting take on was it John Quincy Adams who said I study politics and warfare so that my son can stay engineering and mathematics. Yes. So that his son can study engineering and mathematics. Yes.

So that his son can study poetry and art. Like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. I wonder if there's like a correlative like those extremes led to these extremes. You study comic books, right? Because look what your origin story was, right? So actually I talk about that in my book. My grandfather who died in the wool nerd, read the Lord of the Rings before it was fashionable. And my grandfather was my mom's dad, Arnold Rakes, who was dropped out of high school. My grandfather was my mom's dad, Arnold Rakes,

who dropped out of high school at 16, joined the Navy at 17, discovered what Catholics were for the first time in the Navy, because it's like, what do you mean you have to eat fish on Fridays? Right? And he sailed and went in as a boatswain, came out as a boatswain, because after as a boatswain because after three years, three and a half years or whatever, because he kept getting in fights with other sailors,

spent his last three days in the brig, you know, that kind of thing. And joined the government. He went to college on the GI Bill, got a job for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He spent his best years, his favorite years were in the mountains in Appalachia and like North Georgia where they don't know the war's over and he can just be away from people, right? And so, you know, so my mom grew up in mountain towns, you know, for a lot of, a lot of her youth.

Sure. But he loved fiction. He, you know, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, especially, oh geez, who wrote Tarzan? Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yeah. Yeah. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, all that sort of stuff. My love for those stories for like Tolkien comes from Bob, which came from him. And he, when I was a kid, when I was about 10 years old, we were living in Virginia, in Manassas, Virginia. And I was going to school with the kind of kids

whose parents worked in DC, right? And I certainly, and I was still shopping at the Goodwill. Right? So classism was fun to encounter up there in addition to racism. But he handed me a stack of comics that he said, here, you should check these out. And they were not age appropriate.

Some of them were, most of them were not. Mr. Natural or? Huh? Like Mr. Natural or? No, well, like Grendel, which is a image of Dark Horse comic. Right? Yeah. Holy crap, yeah.

Yeah. And Turok, The Dinosaur Hunter, which was my first exposure to like silhouetted nudity. Okay, yeah. Right. Spider-Man 2099, right? Where the vulture is a cannibal, things like that. He also like turned me on to like Calvin and Hobbes, right?

So like it wasn't all bad, but like he was not good at like raising children. And so he was like, here's a stack of comics you should read. And I did. And that's actually where I encountered like Miguel Miguel Miguel O'Hara was the first spider-man for me Right or at least concur with Parker, right? Right. Yeah, so like and what he was doing was I mean He thought he was just like passing on something cool to me, which I thoroughly enjoyed but also like This was language this was this was a way of articulating the self, especially with otherness,

because so many times heroes are others. There were X-Men comics in there. Oh, Reign of the Superman, right? Yeah, where you've got like the cyborg Superman just torching people and things like that, but also Superman squaring up with Lobo for 20 pages. And so like that was, yeah, that was my intro in the comics. And so like, yeah, it was,

it was a way of conceptualizing the self and the world around me. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, again, I come back to that, that your origin was so, your origin stories, there's so much going on there. And now you're in essentially a safer version

of those dangers in your studies. Well, and you know what's funny about that, kind of going back to the James Madison quote from Ed, I was talking to my mom one day, because my mom has, I don't think she's been diagnosed with it, but it's PTSD. Like she, you know, has, it's rare,

but she will have episodes from time to time. Actually in the parlance of wrestling, she's had a lot of bumps already and got me left, right? Yeah, her bump card is full. Right, right, my dad too, for that matter, right? Like he's, I haven't even shared some of the most traumatizing stuff that he's been through, right? In the near-death experiences.

And you shared the story of his forehead being flapped over his brows. Yeah. I mean like when, when he was, when he was like eight, he was expected to kill a dog that had rabies. Um, there was a, they lived on, they lived with animals. Like there were animals, like on the, it wasn't a, it was a compound, no places where they kept animals for like slaughter and stuff. And like his grandmother was like, look, there's a dog that has rabies. You gotta you gotta like deal with it and

Because he was the only boy at home at right point all his brothers had left and We're not there at the moment. And so like she gave him a lasso And so he had lasted the dog and hanged it at eight years old Wow, yeah, that was a thing that made boomers cry when they saw an old Geller. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

So like, but both of them have been through a lot. And so I was talking to my mom one time, I said, look, you gotta understand something. I said, like, I know your childhood was messed up. Right. Right. For a variety of reasons. I said, and I'm far removed from that. I said, and I know you feel bad about the way that things went in my early life. Right. For a variety of reasons. I said, and I'm far removed from that. I said, and I know you feel bad about the way

that things went in my early life, right? And some of the circumstances. And even since then, things have been kind of rough from time to time. I said, but as far removed as I am from where you came from, my children will be from where I came from. Yeah. Yeah. Like barring any sort of catastrophic disasters,

which could absolutely happen, right? Sure. I mean, it kind of almost did. Asheville, like most of North Carolina to the... Yeah. Yeah. No, that's entirely fair. Yeah, it's like, you know, they have it very good.

Yeah. And my children, there's no point in the foreseeable future where my kids will have to wonder I mean, I think it's a good thing. I mean, I think it's a good thing. I mean, I think it's a good thing. I mean, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing.

I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing.

I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. but for the moment it seems things are pretty good. Yeah, I mean I wept when, fairness I cry at everything, but I wept when I got a raise, thanks to my union,

and I took that raise and instead of like putting it toward the budget or whatnot, I just opened up college accounts for my kids. Yeah. And that was, I we I wept cause that was literally, and this is not shade to my parents at all, but that was something that was never done for me. Yeah. And I was able to do that for him, you know,

and that was back in 2018, something like that. Yeah. Um, you know, it's just like again. Yeah, we you know, I have a friend is a comedian He says that we are not the goal Hmm. Yeah. Oh, no, you know, no. Yeah, so Yeah Well, cool. Um Yeah Ed what have you gleaned?

We need to find every excuse to to get Dr. Cruz on here to to regale us with with stories because holy shit Like first and foremost like maybe I know I just want to hear the rest of this stuff like oh my god I could sit here and listen to it forever But What I what I find Like oh my god, I could sit here and listen to it forever But What I what I find What I'm what I'm what is sticking with me right now about the the book and and what what you've talked about about about that is

You know, there is so much going on around us right now where identity has been, uh, like hyper politicized, not it's, it's not even just, just, you know, identities are of course, always to some extent political. Uh, but like it's, it's actually overtly been turned into something that is being, you know, weaponized against people. And I think, um, I'm, I'm just, I'm, I, I want to, I want to take a look at the book, you know, to, to see that, that development, you know, as, as you, as you talk about it in the way that in a way that worked for you and and the way more broadly I think as a society it would do

us all a lot of good to think about construction of identity from just from the angle of construction of identity if that makes sense You know, I think not just something intrinsic that it's yeah Engage and construct yeah and and and you know earlier talking about you know, some parts of your identity being received You know, I think White folks particularly Need to do some introspection about that because we have been the default for forever in our cultural discourse and I think that being taken whiteness being taken for

granted needs to change. If that makes sense, like the way I'm, the way I'm saying that. And I, and I think, you know, more people being exposed to the fact that many aspects of identity are construct and are constructed I think I think is important. You know, if I may also the whiteness thing, what's interesting about the need for introspection that you're talking about, and I fully agree with that, is that you ask any white person what whiteness is,

and the only answers you can get are typically humorous or surface yeah like it's it's a non thing that people are separated out of but it doesn't like the vocabulary for it does not seem to exist in the same way that it exists for other identities and i think it's because it's, again, all things are constructed, all things are made up, but I think because it is a exclusionary projection, there is no white, you know, it's like that kind of thing.

And yet it is very real and has very deep impacts on everyone else But it's hard to introspect on something that has been so poorly defined Yeah, I the thought that occurs to me is that whiteness is like the concept of zero in terms of identity Yeah, it is it is it is a blankness Mm-hmm like like you said it being exclusionary. Yeah, but then the concept of zero is critical to understanding math Mm-hmm, so like if you want to look at our global systems you have to recognize that whiteness is there right?

But it is itself on its own. It is empty. Yeah. It's like capitalism. What are we gonna say? That's a whole separate. There's a great article that is one of those foundational pieces for critical whiteness studies called Whiteness, a Strategic Rhetoric by Nakayama and Kryzik. You can find it floating around online. But it basically, they lay out like six different points

for what conceptualizes whiteness based on the survey that they administered. And one of the things they talk about is like, it's the absence, right? Is the non-identity, right? And in that same vein, you know, Ed, when you're talking about like the received identity thing, that also gets to like,

when you operate from a white position and you consume media that represents white identity and then there's a aspect to it that is different, it becomes something that can be kind of glommed onto, for people who are seeking to fill that void. And one of the more anti-social representations that I would argue is like Gone With The Wind. Because Gone With The Wind,

there are a lot of reasons to hate that movie and my personal favorite reason to hate it is obviously there's aspects of slavery and that kind of thing, but the fact that it represents Antebellum's Southern identity as associated with the aristocracy, because it sells a dream of who we once were, that is not at all,

like part of the reason that we have vagrancy laws, right, is because of poor whites who didn't have jobs and the aristocracy had to find a way to put them into like chain gangs, right? So that's where a lot of those laws popped up in the South. And so we weren't all, you know, families like the O'Hara's or whatever else.

Most of us were poaching from their land because it was that or starved to death. My mother's people were absolutely not the kind of people who were going to be allowed inside the house except under very specific circumstances. Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll go around the horn Ed. What are you recommending that people read? I'm going to strongly recommend that everybody check out the dying earth by Jack Vance and

I'm recommending that Kind of his homework. Although because of the order in which we do these things, it may not actually wind up working as homework. But it's number one, it's a great fantasy series all on its own. And it also explains a lot about how magic wound up working in Dungeons and Dragons When you read that you'll be like oh, this is where guy acts got it. Okay, cool So that's my recommendation How about you all?

I'm gonna recommend two books here. First one is by Professor Patrick Ettinger. He's a professor at Sac State, actually. And it's called Imaginary Lines, Border Enforcement, and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882 to 1930. Since we talked a lot about borders and we talked a lot about concepts of living in liminal spaces. He did some really good kind of the first round of

really digging into that that kind of research about 20 plus years ago or so. The other one I'm going to recommend is forgive me as the the title is coming up. Let's see. La Tenedad identity formation and the mass media landscape, Constructing Pacho Villa, Latinx studies by Dr. Gabriel Cruz. What a fucking hack, that guy.

Right, and a fraud. But so. Such a dilettante, that guy. Oh God, man. Can't nail him down on anything. No. Just an intellectual fl. No. Yeah. Just an intellectual flanderer.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So but those are the two that I would recommend as not necessarily as companion pieces either, because they're very different disciplines. And Gabriel, what would you recommend for people to read? Well, since you just mentioned my book, I feel like it'd be gauche for me to do the same thing.

So I'm actually going to go with two other books. One is Defectors, The Rise of the Latino Far Right by Paolo Ramos, which is an excellent book and for anyone who's curious as to why Latinos turned out in the numbers that they did for Trump. She boils it down, she explores it in detail, but talks about it in terms of tradition, political trauma, and colonization. So yeah, the other thing that it's an excellent read and I listened to the audiobook of it on Spotify. The other one I would recommend is actually for entertainment and that is Empire of Sand by Tasha Ashoori,

which I just finished actually just a few days ago. A friend recommended it to me. It is high fantasy, but the cultural setting, the motifs are Indian, East Asian, excuse me, East Indian as opposed to Western European. And so it's interesting, they talk about race and class and there's aspects of gender. What's fascinating, like part of the premise for magic

is that there are gods who are sleeping and when they dream it comes across as this thing called dream fire that certain people can manipulate through ritualistic dance. And it's told from the perspective of a young woman who's about 19 years old, give or take. And so it's really good, really compelling.

Can't recommend it enough. It's a part of a duology. I think the other one is called Realm of Ash, which I haven't gotten to yet, but Empire of Sand was just riveting the whole way through so nice Very cool. Well, I have a short request for you before I sign us off Could you please tell me what time of day it is out there and use the word fucking

Well Damien because you schedule this daylight savings time It's three o'clock in the fucking morning I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do this Cut this into two I got my two-year-old will be awake in about an hour and a half Indulgence yeah, I I'm a drink metric fuck time with coffee And hope that I stop right before I start seeing sounds and vibrating on an atomic level. Right?

The saving grace is that we will be shipping off my children to a special sale that they have at the local drop-in where you can have all your Petri dishes mixed together. Your children are guaranteed to be exhausted and come home with a new contagious disease, which is particularly fun for someone who has an autoimmune disorder, where if I catch Your children are guaranteed to be exhausted and come home with a new contagious disease Which is particularly fun for someone who has an autoimmune disorder Where if I catch the cold my brain could go blue screen of death and have a stroke But if that's what it takes for me to get a few hours of sleep, you know what? That's the devil I'm gonna dance with Well for a geek history of time Gabriel, thank you for your time.

I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.