Ask a Mexican

This morning on the way to work, I was actually listening to the radio.  Given that my CD-changer is on the fritz, this is very unusual, but given that I can't drive by myself without music, it's not terribly unusual.

While it was a little cold and a little dreary, the morning drive isn't terrible at all and the radio does make a world of distance during the five-minute commute.  What got me interested this morning, besides Kevin and Bean talking about the strange case of the 14 year-old victim who hooked up with both mother and daughter, was a segment on Indie 103.1's morning show titled, "Ask a Mexican."  The conceit of the show is that the audience calls in to the morning program and a frequent Mexican-American guest and collaborator fields questions.

First off, the initial round of questions amused me in that people were genuinely interested to know why there were certain "truths" about Mexican people they were familiar with.  There were even a few socially relevant questions, the most interesting to me being why there would be so much Mexican-on-Mexican hatred.  It got me to thinking, would I be able to answer these questions with as much knowledge and panache as the guest contributor?  What's more, how do the producers of this show manage to weed through many calls that could be construed as hurtful, mean, and maybe even racist?

I resign myself to the fact that I couldn't possibly be able to answer every question, given my Orange County upbringing and my relative minimal lack of Latino culture knowledge (Chicano Literature, that's as far as the scholarly roads have taken me).  What gets me, however, is how much more willing we are to make fun of ourselves as an ethnicity.  I suppose this is true for most other peoples of color, since you tend to laugh at stereotypes as much as you hate them.  For every offending Abercrombie t-shirt that is out there, there could very well be a person cracking jokes about his own culture and race to raucous laughter.  Chris Rock is evidence of this and so is John Stewart, to their own extents.

Myself, I'm guilty of this.  But is it any less true that we're truly taking life too seriously if we can't laugh at ourselves?

You got me, I was just enjoying the drive.


PS - If you really do have questions, I can try and answer.  Trust me, they won't always be right, true, or serious, but at least it could be entertaining.