Tag Archives: Theresa Delgadillo

Living Without a Car

May 10, 2012

By Theresa Delgadillo

I rode home the other day in the pouring rain, on my bicycle. A few drops fell as I left my office, a few more as I packed the bike and headed into traffic. The umbrellas were out, the windows on passing cars were all rolled up. Then the deluge hit. I stopped under the thick, spring-green leafy branches of a beautiful old tree by the law school to keep dry. From the pace of the clouds crossing the sky it would probably be about twenty or thirty minutes before it let up enough to get home fairly dry. The safest thing would have been to stay under the tree for a half hour … but I didn’t. As nearly everyone else – with the exception of other bikers and runners along the way – ducked for cover under awnings and bus shelters or hopped into cars, I headed into traffic and in short order was completely drenched. The other bikers mostly sped by – those with rain gear looked just so comfortable (I hadn’t packed mine that day). The runners seemed mostly okay in the rain, several laughed and waved, recognizing another intrepid spirit. Bystanders exclaimed and pointed as this completely empapada bicycle commuter passed by. I hadn’t expected to have a hard time keeping my eyes open, but I did – the rain was that hard and fierce.

It felt glorious. It was a moving massage. It inspired joy. If I go on, I will wind up romanticizing – or maybe I already have – a ride on a warm, spring, rainy day on which I welcomed a change in my daily routine. For the past eight months, my bicycle has been my primary mode of transportation. I actually sold my car in the fall – my way of making sure I didn’t backslide on this new adventure. That’s when I realized anew something I had, in fact, long known: in the U.S. only poor people and New Yorkers don’t have cars. I’ll tell you about the many ways I’ve re-learned this another time, but for now let me note that people look at me a little funny when they learn about my “transportation status.” Part of the surprise has to be about the gap between what people imagine a university professor makes and the lack of an automobile as a sign of lower income levels, but another part of it is surely about the difficulty most of us have imagining life without a car. A friend reports that in her neighborhood the parents have started a “bike ride with the kids to school in the morning pool” rather than the traditional car-pool. At a recent conference, I heard several people comment on how they’d like to live in a more ecologically sound way, but we just don’t provide the structures to allow it. I’ve found myself advocating for those structures more often and in more places now that I’m on the bike everyday, getting myself where I need to go on my own Chicana-power; getting a little bit of daily exercise; saving money on car payments, car maintenance, insurance and gas; not making the environment any worse. I highly recommend it. There’s great rain gear available for commuters so you don’t have to ride in the rain if you don’t want to … but I’ve re-discovered that it’s just rain.

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty at Ohio State University and is the Moderator of Mujeres Talk blog.

Comments:

  1. Ktrion  May 10, 2012 at 7:27 AM

    Love the image of you traveling under your own Chicana power!

  2. Danielle  January 20, 2013 at 8:55 PM

    I never owned a car and perhaps ten years down the road, I will eventually own one.

Glee and Chiquita-fication

March 5, 2012

by Theresa Delgadillo

The February 7, 2012, episode of Glee, titled “The Spanish Teacher” features Ricky Martin in a guest appearance as David Martinez, who, as a Latino teacher of Spanish, becomes a rival to Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) for both the affections of the Glee students and a tenured spot on the teaching staff. The episode opens with Mr. Schuester recognizing that his annual rendition of “La Cucaracha” on “Taco Tuesday” has been an embarrassingly tired class lesson. Alerted by the principal that a tenured teaching spot is opening up yet facing complaints over his glaring inabilities in teaching Spanish, Mr. Schuester tries to quickly improve his chances by taking Martinez’s Spanish class in night school, and recruiting Mr. Martinez to assist him in teaching the kids Spanish through Glee Club.

The students quickly become enamored of Mr. Martinez’s language teaching skills and knowledge of Latina/o popular culture, and they demonstrate this learning in bilingual performances of Gloria Estefan’s “Si Voy A Perderte (Don’t Wanna Lose You)” and a mash-up of the Gipsy Kings “Bamboleo” and Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero.” Student Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) calls attention to the contrast between, on the one hand, Martinez’s sophistication and savvy about Latina/o culture and language and, on the other hand, Will Schuester’s hackneyed, stereotypical representations of Latinas/os and Latina/o culture in his Spanish classroom. Santana engineers a showdown by challenging Mr. Schuester to defend his Spanish teacher honor in performance, and he accepts Santana’s challenge to produce a Glee Club number that demonstrates his competence, “coolness” and masculinity. In the Spanish teacher showdown, Santana joins Ricky Martin as Mr. Martinez in Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita,” a performance that seems to call into question the heteronormativity of the song given the sexuality of both fictional character and actual performer. Schuester does a Mariachi inflected performance of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” in Spanish, wearing a full matador costume. Santana’s role in this episode is interesting. Her anonymous complaint, though it eventually leads to the right spot for everyone involved, is taken by Schuester as a betrayal, and in a concurrent storyline in the episode Coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) also accuses Santana of betrayal on the false assumption that it was Santana who complained about Sue’s teaching. The notion of Santana as Malinche is upended, however, when both Will and Sue are shown to have been wrong about Santana. The episode thereby heightens its focus on a Latina/o student making an apt critique that hints at unspoken levels of discrimination, as it plays with notions of masculinity and norms governing gender and sexuality.

Jeremy Wetzel, who writes regularly on Glee, addressed the characterization of Schuester as incompetent, taking seriously the fictional show’s setting in Ohio: “However, such hiring practices have not been realistic in Ohio, or almost any other state, in quite some time. There is no way that Will would be hired to teach a foreign language without majoring in it in college and passing tests. The educational process in Ohio is pretty strict and he could not teach a subject he knows nothing about. As such, the entire episode is completely ridiculous.” (Jeremy Wetzel’s TV Review of Glee episode “The Spanish Teacher” on Gleekonomics web site, February 8, 2012). Wetzel overlooks the real issue in the episode, which Santana highlights when she tells Schuester: “you don’t even know enough to be embarrassed about these stereotypes that you’re perpetuating.” The issue is language but it’s also cultural competence when Latina/o students are in the classroom (or in our increasingly Latina/o future, as Mr. Martinez notes in his first lesson). Santana objects to what scholar Ana Celia Zentella calls the chiquita-fication of language. In this way “The Spanish Teacher” seems relevant to the recent ban on Ethnic Studies courses in Arizona K-12 education and the Tucson Unified School District’s banning of books by renowned Chicana/o, Latina/o and Native American authors. Could this be a pro-ethnic studies twist? Or is it about evaluations of teaching? What work is popular culture doing here?

Santana’s critique of Will Schuester is one that students in Arizona are now leveling: you don’t know our history here, our cultures, our languages, our literatures. Santana asks to be taken seriously as a Latina/o student in her school and asks that Latina/o studies be taken seriously. In the end, Schuester gets it, ceding his post to Mr. Martinez who he recognizes as the real expert (this is fictional, folks) and taking up teaching in his true passion – history (hmmm, what’s the subtext there?), while fiancée Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays) is awarded the tenured spot for her steady and dedicated work in health education (which Schuester previously derided as silly and gimmicky). A happy ending even for Latinas/os in this fictional Ohio school.

Theresa Delgadillo is Mujeres Talk Moderator. She is on the faculty of Ohio State University.

Comments:

  1. Between The Binaries  March 5, 2012 at 9:52 PM

    Brilliant! I had seen the preview for that episode but missed it when it aired. Can’t wait to catch up now ;D

  2. Anonymous  March 6, 2012 at 8:14 PM

    love it! i’ll be passing it on. thanks! :-)))))
    Francisca James Hernández, Ph.D.

  3. Anonymous  March 6, 2012 at 8:17 PM

    FROM: Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Associate Professor, Seattle University
    Love your piece Theresa, right on in your criticism. I know that in reality high school teachers need to be credentialed in their area in which they teach, however, I have seen this type of thing happen, where someone in Social Studies is given a couple of (leftover) classes in Spanish, that is, that language classes oftentimes are put in the category of PE classes, also wrong, but yet it is done, administrators feel that anybody can teach those classes.

    What was unrealistic about the episode is that if you have followed Glee all along you have seen a competent Spanish teacher in Will Schuester, and all of a sudden he does not know anything in Spanish. Also the torero outfit, is a bit much, yet I like what they have done by empowering Santana, but she also comes short in her Spanish, which is not addressed at all. Many of my Latina/o students are always complaining that people assume they speak Spanish because they are Latinas/os, which is not of course automatic, as we all know, that stereotype is perpetuated in the piece. It has it’s faults, but yet I find this type of pop culture program addressing these types of issues, and introducing these discussions to the mainstream viewer are absolutely timely. Thank you Theresa!!!!

  4. Anonymous  March 7, 2012 at 1:17 PM

    FROM: Jordan Kelsey, student at OSU
    Dear Dr. Gutierrez y Muhs, I agree that the episode does address these issues, but I think that it perpetuates just as many stereotypes as it seeks to discredit. In Theresa’s class we watched a documentary called The Bronze Screen. The film followed Latina/o depiction in American film from the early 20th Century on. One thing that the film discussed was the recurring patterns of Latina/o personas in film (the greaser, the Latin lover, etc…). This episode (perhaps unknowingly) contributes to that pattern in their depictions of Santana y Señor Martinez. The hypersexualized Latina/o appears throughout the film. The writers also make it a point to announce that Señor Martinez’s parents were undocumented immigrants. The way in which they do so seems very unnecessary and unrelated to any of the main concerns of the episode. It’s little things like this that perpetuate stereotypes in the episode.
In class we also discussed an article by Luis C. Moll and Richard Ruiz that talked briefly about the underrepresentation of Latina/o students in comparison to faculty demographics in public school systems. Although the authors were specifically talking about school in LA County with an overwhelming Latina/o majority, this episode speaks to the issue with the (in this episode at least) incompetent depiction of Will Schuester.

  5. Mujeres Talk Moderator  March 22, 2012 at 7:59 AM

    Thanks all for your comments! Gabriella, I’m glad that you noted that Will Schuester has not been portrayed as falling short in his teaching earlier in series, which adds the question of why now. I thought Santana’s singing in Spanish showed that it was not her first language but that she was bilingual, which tempered the stereotype for me a little. Jordan, I’m not sure I agree. In the episode, people are falling all over Mr. Martinez, but he isn’t acting that way, except for the performance of LMFAO song, which highlights the fact that it is a performance! I like the connection you make to Luis C. Moll’s and Richard Ruiz’s work — because the episode seems also about valuing the cultural resources of a community. Thanks all!

Finding Missing Latinas

February 6, 2012

by Theresa Delgadillo

Over the past decade, there has been significant attention focused on the murders and disappearances of Mexican women in Juarez, Mexico. The public protests and demands for justice directed at local, state and national government bodies by the families of the missing women have been joined by international women’s organizations, grassroots feminist campaigns, and several books and films about these events. A recent issue of the MALCS Journal, Chicana and Latina Studies, features a critical scholarly essay that compares cinematic treatments of the violence against Mexican women in Juarez, Mexico. However, few people know that similar violence against women on this side of the border, in this case against Latinas, proliferated in Albuquerque, New Mexico over the past decade.

In the fall, I caught a re-broadcast of a Dateline program that originally aired in December 2010 titled “Somebody’s Daughter.” This episode of the Friday night television news magazine dealt with the discovery of the serial murders of Latinas in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2006. As in Juarez, the women’s remains were discovered buried in the desert, in this case on the mesa, just beyond a newly developed housing tract. The program did not use the term “Latina,” or say much directly about the ethnicity of the missing young women. Instead, the program featured photos of the missing young women and told us their names — allowing these facts, as well as interviews with family members to make plain the ethnicity and race of the victims. The Latina ethnicity of most of the missing women was further highlighted when one of the victims found in the desert was identified as a young African American woman from another state, a departure from the profile of most of the missing women.

Dateline and shows like it often present violence against women as spectacle, frequently, it seems, featuring stories about women murdered by their husbands in which the recurring image of the happy wedding picture is juxtaposed to images of violence and death. The myth or illusion at the heart of a flawed relationship will be exposed by the show, most importantly by the presentation of a careful police investigation, one that proceeds only because someone in law enforcement has taken a particular interest in the case. It’s a curious formula. It might seem to be a formula for championing the victims of domestic violence, except that it also murder-as-entertainment. These stories feature heavy-handed and titillating narration, a focus on unanswered questions and doubts, employment of a deficit theory focus on victim’s lives, and the always flawless police work.

It was disturbing to see one of these shows focused on the serial murder of Latinas. At the heart of this story was another story: the Latina detective. Assigned to the “backwater” job of finding persons reported missing, Detective Ida Lopez identifies a pattern in the profiles of missing young women. Lopez is the only person assigned to these cases, and only part-time. The show takes Detective Lopez seriously, and reveals that for her “everybody counts or nobody counts,” that is, for Lopez, a woman who might be sick with addiction or desperate for money is not a disposable human being. Yet her investigation into the missing women doesn’t get any traction until “something turns up” – that is, until remains are discovered not by detectives trying to find the missing women but by construction crews called out to take care of flooding problems created for the residents of a new suburban development on the mesa. Michelle Valdez. Anna Vigil. Evelyn Salazar. Anna Herron. Angelina Guerra. The names of the missing women appear on the placards made by family members demanding an investigation.

At one point, Josh Mankiewicz interviewing a police officer, asks whether they wouldn’t have acted sooner if the victims were young, white women to which the officer answers that in some cases it’s months before these women were reported missing because of the nature of the supposed lives they lead, and in that broad stroke he, once again, dismisses them, and their demands on his time. Some family members are interviewed, but it would have been good to hear more from more of the families of the missing young women in Albuquerque, New Mexico; to learn more about the state of Latina life there; to see more of the investigation into the many other still missing young women in Ida Lopez’s case file, and to feel assured that there was a commitment to finding them. The television program wants to end on the note that the mystery is solved. But it isn’t. The violence against women in Albuerquerque, New Mexico mirrors the violence against women in Juarez, Mexico and the killers continue to roam free. What other kinds of violence against Latinas are we not hearing about? Is there a way to make this news known that doesn’t turn Latina death into spectacle?  Can popular television programs effectively tell our stories? What does the handling of the disappearances and murders of Latinas in Albuquerque, New Mexico say about the value of Latina life?

 

Comments:

  1. Anonymous  February 14, 2012 at 1:23 PM

    Thanks for watching and for asking some difficult questions- Josh Mankiewicz/Dateline NBC

  2. Mujeres Talk Moderator  March 22, 2012 at 8:01 AM

    Dear Josh Mankiewicz/Dateline NBC, Many thanks for your work on bringing this to light, and for the respect you showed to Latinas and their families in this episode.