juanzqui

(These remarks were delivered at the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, Tx, March 1, 2015, at a reception for an exhibit of César Chávez photographs.)
I DON’T KNOW if it is possible to adequately express how honored I feel to have been invited to speak to this group — in this community. San Marcos has held a special place in my heart from the day I first arrived here to enroll in what was then Southwest Texas State College in August of 1967.
When I drove into town on that hot summer afternoon, I had no idea that I would end up spending close to eleven years here and that I would meet and get to know some of the people who have most influenced and shaped my life. It warms my heart that some of them are here today.
I hope all of you have had an opportunity to view this wonderful exhibit. The photographs and the words of Cesar Chavez are priceless, and they remind us why he remains such an important figure in the lives of millions of people across this country – and all over the world.
And this Centro, what a wonderful place! My congratulations to all those who had the vision to create this magnificent Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos – to the board and the staff, and to all those who have been instrumental in the success of the Center.
I understand that its future is in jeopardy. I would hope that the powers that be understand why it must continue to exist, for there is a desperate need for the education and enlightenment that these centers of knowledge, history, arts and culture provide. Too many young people are oblivious to the reality that the gains made by Latinos in this country are as a result of the struggles and battles waged by courageous and determined men and women who saw Latinos become the victims of injustice, repression, hatred and violence and decided — as César Chávez did — ¡ya basta!
Enough!
It is gratifying that the name César Chávez is universally recognized and appreciated. But, I wonder how many of our young people today would be able to identify people like Juan Cornejo, José Angel Gutíerrez, Severita Lara, Tomás Rivera, Corky Gonzáles, Rudolfo Anaya, Tino Villanueva, Reyes López Tijerina, Albert Peña Jr., Henry B. González, Dolores Huerta, Hector P. García and others who played a prominent role in the social and political advancement of our people. And I wonder if they understand why the lives of these men and women were – and are – important.
Locally, I would hope that through the efforts of the Centro, young people do have an appreciation for those names. More important, I would hope that they know and respect the names of Ofelia Vásquez Philo, Rubén Ruiz, Augustín Lucio, Luciano Flores, Celestino Méndez, Frank Contreras, Ralph Gonzáles, Pete Rodríguez, Joe Hinojosa, Jerry Flores, Bob Barton Jr., Eddy Etheredge and others.
These brave men and women were local pioneers. They took chances and risked their livelihoods for the political and educational advancement of our people. Their lives and their work must be honored, and to the extent that the Centro is doing that, I salute you.
Honoring our heritage and our heroes is important, not because we seek to live in the past, but rather because knowing who we are and where we came from helps us better navigate through the difficult intricacies and challenges of our lives today, and because we cannot adequately prepare for our future without a solid understanding of who and what made us who we are.
That is why we should be grateful for César Chávez – because, 22 years after his death, Chávez remains the only Latino who is a universal symbol of the Latino experience in the United States. His cause was the farmworkers of California, but his influence was felt around the world and he remains our Martin Luther King Jr.

I HOPE THAT all of you had the opportunity to see the film “Cesar Chavez,” by the Mexican director Diego Luna. There is an early scene in the movie that depicts one of Chavez’s first forays into the fields of California’s Central Valley to recruit members for his farmworkers union.
In that scene, Chávez seeks out one of the farmworkers named Juan de la Cruz, who indicates that he may be willing to speak with Chávez, but he explains that they can’t talk in the fields – for obvious reasons.
In the next scene, Chavez is shown speaking with de la Cruz, who is surrounded by his family, in his small shack. De la Cruz admits that he owns nothing: his wife and older children work alongside him in the fields.
Chávez asks him, “Do you want something better for your kids?”
Pos, sí, de la Cruz admits, but he then explains that he, like the majority of the workers, is scared.
“They have to feed their kids,” he explains, in Spanish, and adds that as much as he wants a better life for his family, it would not be easy to fight for his – and their — rights alone.
¡Está cabrón! he said.
As De la Cruz talks, he looks to his children, who are watching with inquisitive eyes the interaction between the two men. And there is a look in De la Cruz’s eyes that is instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever spent time among migrant workers – or among anyone who has lived a life of oppression.
It is the look of a proud yet defeated and disheartened father, who is forced to admit in the presence of those who look up to him that — despite the long hard hours he and his family spend in the fields, he has been able to provide for his family little more than the beat-up old car that takes them from field to field and farm to farm.
And when de la Cruz utters that phrase, está cabrón, it is with a resignation that expresses the utter hopelessness and anguish that has been imprinted deep in the souls of the hundreds of thousands of poor people, of all colors, who have found themselves at the unforgiving mercy of the rich and powerful – and the uncaring.
With his few words, this farm worker conveys the desperation that moved him, and others, to join Chávez in proclaiming – at last — ¡sí se puede! and to begin to take the daunting steps of joining a cause that offered little assurance of success and promised plenty of hardships and heartaches – and brutal repression.
I NEVER WORKED in the fields of California, but I was born in North Dakota, while my family was up there working in the sugar beet fields of the Red River Valley. My family started going “up north” three years before I was born, and after I came along, our family continued going to North Dakota and other states for more than 30 years. By the time I made my last trip out of the state – the summer before I graduated from college my siblings had married and my parents were too old to work, so I went alone.
While it was a harsh existence, the tendency today among those of us who lived it is to downplay the harshness and suffering and romanticize the good parts. We tend to remember most the good times:
How we worked side by side and helped each other along, how our father told jokes to keep us entertained how one sister belted out songs such as Rosita Alvires or La Cama de Piedra or The Tennessee Waltz as she worked, how our godparents took us to the movies in a nearby town on Sundays afternoon, how on cold October days, during our lunch break, we huddled around the wood fire by the potato fields and listened, on the car radio, to the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers while we heated and ate our tacos, how baptisms and other occasions called for celebrations with other families who lived nearby – and for bringing out the accordion, the guitars and drums.
Those memories remain vivid. But there is one more memory that will never be erased from my mind and my heart. It is of a scene in Central Wisconsin, where we would go every July to pick cucumbers after the sugar beet work was done. We, my father and I, were outside the office of the labor contractor, where we had gone to attempt to collect from him money owed us to pay for traveling expenses.
Under the agreement, we would get the money only after we had completed the work. However, this was late in the season and there were hardly any cucumbers growing any more. We would spend the entire day – the six of us who were still traveling together – in the fields and earn no more than $10 or $15 together.
Meanwhile, the onion crop in Minnesota was ready to be picked and the contractor there was pressuring us to show up. But the Wisconsin farmer whose fields we were harvesting would not release us from our agreement. So my father, with me in tow, went into town to talk to the contractor (I was probably about 12 years old). In his limited English, he tried desperately to make his case, but the contractor would not budge.
Standing there, I wanted desperately to speak out but in my heart I knew that if I did, my father would see that as a betrayal: He, after all, was the head of the household. It was his duty — not mine — to speak up, to fight for what was rightfully ours, and I knew instinctively that he would find it utterly demeaning and disrespectful for me – his youngest child — to say a word in his defense.
So I remained quiet and we ended up not getting the money. And I’ll never forget the look in my father’s eyes as we drove back to the farm. It was the first time I had ever seen tears in his eyes. And it was the first time that I had seen sheer shame and humiliation and frustration on his face.
I was too young then to make the connection, but many years later, it occurred to me that maybe one reasons my father decided to give up on being the head of his family and take up drinking and womanizing and other bad habits because of scenes such as that one repeated over and over again in his life.
Here was a person, and adult male. His family, his neighbors and his friends saw him as such – as a man. He was expected to act like a man and provide for his family like a man. Yet, the minute he stepped out into the white man’s world, he was reduced to being a boy. Nothing more than a boy.
Can you imagine what that does to a man’s soul when he has to live like that day after day after day? It takes a mighty strong person to put up with this, day after day, without having his spirit broken.
Yes, I know there were many Latino men who faced the same realities and never gave up. They always continued to provide for their families. These were strong, strong men, and they deserve to be applauded. But, as we all know, not everyone can be strong. We all have our weaknesses.
I tell this story not to make up excuses for the sins of my father. Instead, I tell you this story because I believe it is important to be reminded — every now and then — about the great damage that can be caused by man’s inhumanity to man – by man’s lack of respect for the dignity of others. And that such damage is inflicted, not just on the person directly suffering the abuse but also on his family, on his community, and on society as a whole.

IT IS EASY – very easy – for us to shake our head in disgust over how the nameless, faceless powerful abuse the powerless. But I’d like to tell you another story:
Seventeen years ago, I lived briefly to San Marcos before I moved back to Washington. One day, I went to the HEB store on Hopkins Street and while there, I ran into one of my ex-students from San Marcos High School. I will call him Estevan. He was bagging groceries. We chatted a bit and he asked what I had been up to, and after I told him, Estevan said, “Well, this is all I do. Nothing much.”
Those words broke my heart. It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him, but rather because it disturbed me that he believed that what he did to earn a living was “nothing much.” And it angered me that because we place so much emphasis on what we define as “success,” we send a message to people like Estevan that reinforces their sense that what they do – and, therefore, who they are — are “nothing much.”
Think about it. Do we really have to wonder why many among us today refuse to accept the responsibilities of adulthood, why they don’t take pride in their work, why their attitude is less than exemplary, why so many are simply dropping out, turning to drugs and alcohol?
People who work at such jobs don’t necessarily see serving other people as demeaning or degrading. All of us serve, after all, in one way or another, and there is nobility in all work.
What is demeaning and degrading is the lack of respect they get from the rest of us.
And that brings me back to César Chávez. He claimed that what was at stake in the farmworkers struggle was not just better wages and better working conditions, but human dignity.
“If a man is not accorded respect, he cannot respect himself,” he said. And, he added: “If he does not respect himself, he cannot demand it.”
Chávez was talking about the relationship between the campesinos and the California growers, but there is little doubt in my mind that he would have the same observations about other relationships, in particular, the relationships in our everyday lives, he would be talking about how we treat other people, not just the Juan de la Cruzes but also the Estevans of the world.
I find it interesting how too many of us will go out of our way to complement and even fawn over the chef at a restaurant and tip the waiter handsomely yet growl at the poor busboy for making too much clatter while cleaning nearby tables.
I find it interesting how we treat with extreme reverence the doctors who treat us yet have little patience with the nurse’s assistant who brings us our food and empties our bedpan.
I find it interesting how we idolize professional artists and athletes, no matter how badly they misbehave, yet we’re ready to call the cops if a homeless person gets a bit too close to us.
And I find it interesting how we reward with re-election after re-election the corrupt and non-responsive politicians yet demand the heads of the clerks at the post office or the DMV, or city hall, or the courthouse because they are too slow and we have important things to do.

IN THE FINALE of the HBO series, “The Newsroom,” the anchor Will McAvoy eulogized his late boss with these words:
“Decency was his religion, and he spent a lifetime fighting its enemies.”
I don’t know about you, but when they put me in the ground, I would consider my life a success if somebody were to say something like that about me. Our world certainly would be a lot better off if more of us made decency – towards each other — our religion.

AND SO, WHILE we go on with our lives, patting ourselves on the back for supporting noble causes, such as that of the farmworkers or animal rights or the environment, maybe we should pause every once in a while, and ask ourselves how we rate on the decency scale, measured by how we treat those around us — especially those who serve us.
After all, every one of us needs a little bit of love, a bit of understanding. Everyone of us needs respect. Because life is tough. It’s a challenge.
As Juan de la Cruz says in the film, está cabrón.

THE DEATH OF MARIA Fernandes still haunts me. You might remember her; she is the 32-year-old New Jersey woman who died in late August in her car while she was taking a nap between two of her three jobs.
The story of her death was reported last week in The New York Times.
Fernandes napped in her car between her jobs at three different Dunkin’ Donuts because she didn’t have the time to go home to sleep. She died from inhaling gasoline fumes, leaving her young daughter behind.
Apparently, a gasoline can she kept in the back of her SUV spilled, filling the running car with fumes as she slept. She kept the gasoline can in her car because she slept with the car’s engine running and wanted to make sure she always had enough gasoline to get to her next job.
Dunkin’ Donuts told The Times that Fernandes was making a little more than minimum wage but wouldn’t disclose her salary.
I can’t imagine what it’s like, holding down three jobs. I briefly worked two full-time jobs one summer in California when I was in college, at a garlic/onion packing plant during the day and at a frozen fruit plant at night, but it was probably for no longer than a couple of weeks, and both were union jobs, paying considerably more than minimum wage. I was staying with my sister and brother-in-law, rent free, and I had no one depending on me, so I could have quite one of the jobs anytime I wanted to.
Maria Fernandes didn’t have that freedom. She had her daughter to feed, clothe and shelter, and she was behind on her rent.
I can’t help wondering how many other Maria Fernandeses are out there. Too many, no doubt.
The people who run the Dunkin’ Donuts and other fast-food joints want us to believe that the only people who work in their establishments are high school students and other teen-agers, people who don’t have families to support and therefore are OK earning minimum wage.
Maria Fernandes’ story tells us that those are dirty rotten lies. But, of course, we didn’t need her to die to know that: those of us have been to those places and seen who works there know that. We’d just rather not do anything about it.

I’M SITTING AT a tire shop waiting for my car to be outfitted with a new set of tires. Expensive stuff, but it was time, after four years and nearly 41,000 miles. If my plans involved driving around Houston for the next six months, I would have kept the old tires, but driving across the West on those baldies does not seem to make sense.
Doing this brought back something that I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time: the rituals involved when we went “up north” every summer to work in the fields, and repeated in the fall when we drove back to Texas. Oftentimes it involved getting a new car (used, of course), a task left up to my father. He never told us he was going out to get a new car, he just showed up with it one day and parked it in front of our house. He was the one who made the financial arrangements and I’m sure he got royally screwed every time – not because my father was dumb (although his knowledge of finance and automobiles was very limited) but because anybody who bought a car from any dealer was inevitably screwed, either in the price paid for the car, or in the financing. Along with the car, he also brought the installment payment book, which he handed over to my mother and it was up to us to make sure the payments were made because he wouldn’t be bothered; he had better use for his money.
The cars would generally last us a couple of years and then we’d get a new one. I think I remember most of them. The first I remember was a 1952 dark green Plymouth. That was a followed by a yellow and white 1953 Dodge and a dark brown and tan 1954 Chevy. I think that was the last car my father bought. By the time that one was ready to give out, my sister Mariana had gotten her teaching degree and had gotten a job in the local school and could afford to buy a car. It was a beautiful blue Ford Fairlane, 1963. Brand frigging new! Smelled so pretty. Rode beautifully. After my sister married she left the car behind and I inherited it, and took it to college in San Marcos. Drove it to California several times. In its last couple of years it was always running low on transmission fluid and every time I added fluid it would somehow get into the engine and thick black smoke would spew from the tailpipe for several miles. Embarrassing as hell. After I got my first job (teaching also), I traded that sucker in for a brand new bright yellow Ford Pinto. I was so proud; it was the first Pinto in town.
BACK TO THE rituals. It started with my father demanding several hundred dollars from my mother so he could go get the car lubricated and the oil changed. We never questioned the amount he asked for because we assumed that it cost that much to perform those two simple tasks. It was only until after my sister got her car and she started taking care of its maintenance that we realized that all these years my father had been cheating us of a hundred dollars, or more, each time.
When we were up north and ready to head back, after we’d been paid for the work we had done all summer, we usually took a day to all go to the nearest larger town (anything that had a JC Penney qualified as a big city for us. In North Dakota it was either Grafton (where I was born) or Grand Forks. One year when we worked near Casselton, we went to Fargo instead, because it was nearer. While my mother and the kids would be shopping for school clothes, my father was supposed to be taking care of the car, with the money my mother had given him.
By the time we returned to the parking lot several hours later, my father was waiting for us in the newly lubricated car. He too was lubricated. Well lubricated. He looked happy and usually had a joke or two he was eager to share. We listened to those jokes (some were funny, actually), while my mother seethed with anger. Inevitably, as we loaded our purchases onto the car, my mother would do a little poking around and she would find a pint or two of whiskey, which my father had stashed under the spare tire or other place my father assumed was secure. But my mother had a sixth sense when it came to finding my father’s alcohol and she was never satisfied until she found it, unscrewed the cap and poured the brown liquid on the gravel or pavement.
PERHAPS THE MOST important ritual, at least as far as my mother was concerned, was the blessing of the car on the Sunday before out scheduled departure. She made sure that we would all attend the same Mass and then, after Mass, we’d join other families in the parking lot and wait for the priest to come by to sprinkle holy water on the car, and on ourselves, and utter a few prayers.
Then came the night before departure. My father would back up the car to the back door, open its trunk and doors and my mother would go to work, methodically packing all that we would need in our home away from home – clothes, household items, kitchenware, blankets and pillows. By this time my father was usually in bed, dead drunk.
Most of our clothes would go into a huge military-style duffle bag, which would be stuffed between the two seats, leaving barely enough room for two people sit on either side of it. The rest of us, the youngest, would all climb onto the bed formed by the union of the backseat and the duffle bag. Often there would be a rack on top of the car for more of our belongings, and the trunk would be packed tightly.
Among the things that were included in the belongings was an empty can of Folgers of Maxwell House coffee, into which we kids would pee whenever we needed to so that we didn’t have to be stopping all the time. The pee would be tossed out the window, as the car was moving, and by the time we got to where we were going, there was a smelly splattering of pee all over the rear right side of the car, something I’m sure didn’t please the gas station attendants.
We only used the coffee cans only for peeing. If one of us had to shit before we needed to refill the gas can, we would park on the side of the road and we’d find the nearest tree or bush behind which we would do pull down our pants and do our business.
When the car was finally packed, we’d all go to sleep, only to be wakened up a few hours later for coffee and a light breakfast before we all climbed into the car. For some reason, 4 a.m. was always the hour for taking off — never three, never five – which assured that we would take off in the dark. I always stood outside before we left and looked up at the stars and think, will this be the last time I see these stars? I always feared that a terrible accident would happen and that there was a good chance that we may never make it back to Texas. (We did have an accident once, in Utah, but we all survived.)
FINALLY, THE TIME came for us to leave and we would all cram into the car (cars had a lot more interior room back then; entire large families like ours had no trouble fitting into those cars). My father would start the engine and we’d roll out of our lot, into the street. When my grandfather was alive, he’d usually be awake to bid us farewell. After he died, nobody was around to see us off.
There was the usual departure chatter (“Did you remember to pack such and such? Did you close the doors? Did you turn off the gas?), and then, as the car settled into a steady rhythm on US 83, the talking stopped and the only thing we could hear was the engine’s hum and the car’s rattles. Until my mother sighed, crossed herself and said, En el nombre sea de Dios.

I HAD NOT planned to visit the 9/11 Memorial during my recent visit to New York. However, the sight of gleaming single tower of the new World Trade Center was inescapable; just about anywhere I went in the city I could see it rising above its neighbors. I’ve always been a fan of architecture, particularly modern architecture, and the lure of the tower became just too much to resist, so I decided I needed to get a closer look.
I spent quite a while looking at and photographing the building from every possible angle. Before I knew it, I was at the base of one of the two destroyed towers that have been converted into powerful, solemn and beautiful memorials to the victims of that heinous attack.
At first all I could see was the black granite and the falling water, and I appreciated the beauty and simplicity of the design. As I got closer, I began to make out the names of the dead on the granite.
I was probably naïve, but I was not prepared for the emotional impact it would have on me. I had started walking around the edge of the memorial, running my hand over the engraved names, the thousands of names, and I was barely halfway along the first wall when the tears started flowing and my body began to shake.
I wanted to walk away; I wanted to be as far away as possible from that wall, but I just could not tear my hand away from the wall. And so I walked all the way around the first memorial, running my blackened fingers over as many names as possible, as if by touching a name I could bring the person back to life. I then moved to the second one where I did the same thing.
What I felt was a terrible sadness, combined with despair and anger, the kind of anger that rarely enters my heart. Images of a smirking Osama Bin Laden and his bearded cohorts kept running through my mind until I forced myself to banish them by recalling scenes of the attack on Bin Laden’s compound, from the movie Zero Dark Thirty.
IT WAS ON the final wall that I saw the name. I don’t remember the name, but I do know that it was Italian and that it reminded me of the word miserere in the pleas, Miserere Nobis (have mercy on us) and Dona Nobis Pacem (grant us peace) from the Agnus Dei in the Latin Mass of my childhood. And it reminded me of the haunting music of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
And the tears returned. Only this time the tears flowed not just for the more than 2,700 people who died on 9/11, and the thousands who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. They flowed also for the millions upon millions of inhabitants of this world, who — like the millions and millions before them – cannot or won’t grasp the futility of beseeching their unhearing God or Gods for mercy and peace.

JUST WONDERING:
What would happen if in every town or every neighborhood, for an entire year, everyone — communists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, tea partiers, neo-Nazis — would get together for one hour a week to just talk. To talk about anything and everything except those things that they disagree on. No politics. No challenges, no accusations, no questioning. They would just talk about their families, their experiences, their jobs, their friends, their communities, their vacations, their hopes and aspirations. Anything except the things they disagree on. And what would happen if this were continued for a second year, and then a third? People getting to know each other, as humans — proud, fearful, cautious, curious, daring. What would happen? How would our politics change?
Again, just wondering.

I LOVE SOCCER. That is something I would have been unable to say last week, before I started watching World Cup play. Does that mean that I will now turn my back on baseball and football – my two favorite sports – and basketball (my favorite sport during playoffs if the Spurs or the Rockets are involved)? No.
Does it mean that I will join my futbol-crazy friends and relatives who gleefully go out of their way to put down and ridicule all or some of these other sports and their fans? Hardly.
Baseball will remain my first love, and football will be not far behind.
What it does mean is that I will be more open to soccer and to the explanations of its fans as to why it’s a beautiful sport. I will try to learn more about its rules and other intricacies so I will be less ignorant when I watch a match.
I believe there is beauty and grace to be found in all sports. They are different in each sport and that is why different kind of personalities like different kinds of sports. Just because one sport appeals to our sense of what is beautiful and graceful in athletics does not mean that those who go for other aspects in other sports are wrong or stupid or ignorant.
Some of us love Mustangs and some of us love Camaros. Some of us like horror movies and some of us prefer comedies. Some of us go for Quarter Pounders while some of us love Whoppers (and still others among us would never be found dead in a fast-food restaurant). That’s just the way the world works and the sooner we accept that, the better off we’ll be – the better we will be able to unite in praise and admiration of beautiful athletic performances and achievements, in all sports.
I am glad that fubol is accumulating new fans every day, and I appreciate the role of World Cup competition in attracting new fans every four years so that soccer teams in the United States – high school, college and professional – would enjoy the same kind of fan support that football, basketball and baseball enjoy.
I believe that day will come, but not anytime soon, and I am amused by the way soccer fans cling to every news story showing that TV audiences for World Cup matches exceeded those of NBA playoff or World Series games. Those numbers are meaningless, when you think about it. They are comparing manzanas to naranjas.
While there are diehards sports fans who will watch all playoff games in all sports regardless on which team is playing, I think most people are like me: they will watch playoff games if their teams are playing. In football, baseball, baseball, hockey and other such sports, it is one American city’s (or one region’s) team competing against another’s for the championship, so the fan base is naturally limited. The rest of the country may or may not give a hoot, and it usually doesn’t.
We watch the Super Bowl not because we care about teams that much, but because we want to be part of what has become an annual national ritual, a Holy Day of Obligation.
It is significantly different in World Cup competition, where it is America’s team (USA! USA! USA!) competing against foreign teams, and if there is one thing Americans are good at, it is patriotism (most of it is shallow as hell, but that’s another story) and disliking foreigners. World Cup soccer is tailor-made for the kind of fan enthusiasm we’ve been patting ourselves on the back for these past few days. Moreover, Americans have been so bitterly divided about so many things for so long that we welcome with hungry arms anything that allows us to tear down those walls that separate us and to become one people, even if only for 90 minutes (plus overtime, of course) at a time. After so many years of hurling insults at each other, it feels so much better to spew disparaging words at unknown foreigners wearing another country’s jersey
If we had similar international championship competition in the other sports – separated from the Olympic games – we would see the same kind of fan enthusiasm.
It was exhilarating to watch news reports of fans crowding into Soldier Field or other such venues to watch the United States lose to Belgium. But my guess is that the vast majority of them will never pay to go watch a Major League Soccer game. I’d love to be proven wrong.
So yes, soccer is on the rise, and that is certainly something to celebrate. But I hope we can keep things in perspective. It is, after all, just a sport, just as baseball is just a sport no matter how many books George Will and others write arguing that it is more. And I hope that this week’s competition will mark the beginning of the end of the denigration of soccer and their fans by those who think American football (or any of the other major sports) is king. And vice versa.

THERE’S REALLY NO other way to put it: African American voters in Mississippi were duped into voting for Sen. Thad Cochran in his tight race for re-election. Without their vote, Cochran would have lost to his Tea Party opponent, Chris McDaniel. Enough African Americans and other Democrats voted in the runoff election Tuesday to give the election to the longtime senator.

What will they get in return?

Probably nothing, if history is any indication. And by history, I mean Cochran’s voting record. Aside from having voted for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2002 (not exactly an act of courage: 98 of his colleagues voted ‘yes’), Cochran has voted on the wrong side of most issues.

Cochran has voted against jobs and against the extension of unemployment benefits. He voted against most important Obama nominees to the courts (including Sotomayor and Kagen) and other high offices. He voted against extending voting rights to the residents of the District of Columbia and against the Libby Ledbetter fair pay legislation. He voted against equal-pay measures and against gay rights legislation. He has been anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-consumer and anti-poor people.

In short, Cochran has been a willing member of the obstructionist Republican minority in the Senate that would rather see the country fail and its citizens suffer than allow President Obama any claim to a legislative victory. Somebody please explain to me how McDaniel would have been any worse for Mississippi or the nation.

But maybe there’s hope for Cochran. Maybe he will prove me wrong.

Maybe now that he will be serving his last six years in the Senate (surely he will not run again!), he will develop a conscience, get a spine implant and begin, at last, to stand up to Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and other bullies, bigots and obstructionists in his party and start casting some correct votes for the good of the country and not just his party.

What has he got to lose? And really, to whom is he indebted now? The majority of the whites in his party have already told him they don’t like him and would prefer somebody else.

I’m not suggesting that he suddenly become an Obama lapdog. But he could seek out the more conservative Democratic senators and try to work with them to promote a middle-of-the road path to solving the country’s many problems. He could be a refreshing and much-needed voice of moderation in his party.

Cochran has not shown much courage in his lengthy career in the Senate, but it’s never too late. I would love to be proven wrong by this guy.

AND SO IT turns out that I’m a descendant of slaves. Of one slave, anyway. I just saw the latest genealogical research by my niece, Sandy Palomo González, and it shows that my maternal grandfather, Dionicio López, is a descendent of one Marcos Alonso de la Garza, who apparently is considered to be the founder of Nuevo León. Anybody named Garza (including my mother’s mother’s family) whose family came from northern Mexico is evidently a descendant of this one man. This Alonso guy had a son named Pedro de la Garza Falcon Treviño, in 1589 in Guadiana, Durango. Pedro had a wife and a bunch of kids. He also had a slave with whom he had a daughter, who was named Elena De La Garza in 1629 (10 years before he was murdered). My grandfather is a descendant of this daughter of a slave. Because she was the daughter of a slave, officially she was listed as a mulata, and so were many of her descendants. There is nothing to indicate whether this woman was Indian or African.
Another interesting piece of research: the first Indian to use the last name Palomo in our family was also named Juan. Juan Anselmo Palomo, who was born sometime around 1750 near San Luis Potosí. Apparently before that, Indians only had first names.
Juan Anselmo died May 14, 1806. He is listed as a “coyote” in the official records, one of several terms used to designate indigenous people.
Interesting stuff. By the way, from now on you shall call me Kunta Juanzqui.