The first thing that crossed my mind when I heard of Mr. Whitten’s actions was that he was probably from Texas, most likely West Texas.  Sure enough, researching his background, I found a local newspaper reference to Whitten as an “Abilene-based hotelier.”

Predictably, local Hispanos and people of good will immediately denounced Whitten’s actions and began picketing his hotel.  Local and state Hispano civil rights groups took up the cry against Whitten, who now says he plans to renovate the hotel, sell it and get out of town as fast as he can.

Whitten seems like a caricature from one of the Teatro Campesino’s old skits, where farm workers  drafted to be actors played out exaggerated caricatures of bosses and corporate flacks, much to the amusement and glee of the farm workers  in the audience.

Like the villain in an old West farce, Whitten is an easy (and deserving) target of the wrath he has brought upon himself for his stupid, racist and downright Neanderthal behavior.  Whitten told the media he was losing tens of thousands of dollars monthly because of the picket line in front of his hotel. Frankly, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

Whitten is just the latest in a long line of Texans who have ridden into New Mexico over the past 150 years armed with lots of bad intentions for the locals. When Texas declared its independence from Mexico and became a republic from 1836 to 1845, it also claimed large tracts of present-day New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Texans sent numerous armed forays into New Mexico in failed attempts to annex the territory into the Republic of Texas. While these efforts at annexation failed, they spawned a particularly virulent form of racism against Nuevo Mexicanos that persist to this day.

It was common for Texans, especially west Texans from towns in the Panhandle and in those areas bordering eastern New Mexico, to form parties to go looking for Nuevo Mexicanos.  Texans felt they could shoot or hang a Mexican with complete impunity throughout the second-half of the 19^th Century. Historians like Twitchell, Kelleher and Gonzales have detailed the extreme violence Texans inflicted on Nuevo Mexicanos in the middle and late 1800s.

And Nuevo Mexicano oral history is replete with stories of ancestors shot or hung by Texans.

After that brutal practice was ended, New Mexico Hispanos suffered continued racism in Texas whenever they went there looking for seasonal work as farm workers.  I have heard firsthand the stories told to me by Nuevo Mexicanos of their humiliation in West Texas when they drove there looking for work in the cotton fields. The most common sign at restaurants read “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.”  These signs were still up as late as the early 60s, yes, the early 1960s. César Chávez, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and countless written media reports and testimonials have corroborated this awful practice.

All past history?

Well, no.

Whitten is just another heir to the virulent strain of racism against Mexicanos that has taken deep root in West Texas. But perhaps unlike some others, he’s just not very bright about when to open his mouth and when to keep his mouth shut.

So this Taos morality play will probably follow the arc of so many others. Whitten will sell his hotel; Hispanos will feel vindicated that an ugly American has been driven out of town, and we can all return to the illusion we have created that New Mexicans all share a happy multicultural existence.

The problem with that scenario is that the racial reality of New Mexico is much more complicated then we’re willing to admit. While overt racism here in the Land of Enchantment is rare, there is no doubt it exists.  And race is tied to class.

We’ve developed a fragile social agreement not to openly argue the issues of race and class here.  You’ll rarely attend a public event where race and class are discussed. That doesn’t mean racism and classism don’t exist here.  It just means we haven’t learned yet how to discuss it in an open and civil manner.

The US Census Bureau reports there are now nearly 47 million Hispanics living in the US. That’s the second-largest Hispanic population in the world, second only to México’s 110 million people.

And the browning of America will continue unabated in the next several decades. The Census Bureau projects the US Latino population will reach nearly 133 million by 2050, or 30 percent of the nation’s total population.

Salsa picante, anyone?

Hispanic-owned businesses in the US generated $222 billion in revenue in 2002, up 19 percent from 1997. Nearly 30,000 Hispanic-owned firms had gross revenues of one million dollars or more. Between 1997and 2002 Hispanic-owned businesses tripled the rate of growth, 31 percent, compared with the national average of 10 percent for all businesses. In all, there were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses in the US in 2002.

Can you say ¡Ay Caramba!

And if you’re wondering what continuing education course to take this fall, I recommend conversational Spanish. Thirty-five million AMERICANS speak Spanish at home. And 78 percent of US Hispanics age 5 and older speak Spanish at home. Here in New Mexico, 45 percent of us are Hispanic, the highest percentage of any state in the union. And in New Mexico, at least one-in-five residents speaks Spanish at home. That includes ALL New Mexicans–Hispanics, Whites, Blacks, First Americans and Asians, y’all.

¡Orale!

What I find fascinating is that in New Mexico we’re coming full circle on this Spanish-language thing. When the US ripped-off one-third of México’s territory in 1846 and dictated surrender terms to the Mexican government, there were about 110,000 Mexicans living in the newly-conquered territories—Nuevo México, Tejas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, California and parts of other states. Most of those Mexicans, however, were heavily concentrated in New Mexico.  Of the 110,000 Mexicans who suddenly found themselves in a new country, 90,000 were living right here in the Rio Grande Basin.

My own family reflects just how fully the circle of language is turning in New Mexico. For example, my grandfather, Manuel Sandoval, was born in 1843 in Chamisal (near Peñasco), three years before our state became part of the U.S. So he was a full blown Mexicano, as were my other ancestors born in New Mexico. Manuel wrote and spoke Spanish fluently, as you might imagine. As an adult, he helped found the Presbyterian Church in El Rito de las Aguas Negras in Mora County. My father told me his dad was fully literate in español.

My abuelita Margarita Salazar de Kavanaugh, la mamá de mi mamá, was born in the 1880s in San José, a small village along the Rio Pecos. She spent all her life in northern New Mexico, and only spoke Spanish. While today some might say her Spanish-only background hindered her ability to earn income or move ahead in modern society, the fact is she lived a fully-realized life; she raised 11 healthy children and had more than 60 grandchildren. She was also a living part of New Mexico history. I remember her telling me the story of seeing her father, Leonardo Salazar and his brothers, riding out at night as freedom fighters, part of the famous Gorras Blancas of San Miguel County.

Both of my parents were fully bilingual in Spanish and English. My father was a columnist, essayist and poet who wrote for several Spanish-language newspapers in New Mexico during the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, including el Nuevo Mexicano, the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Spanish-language edition.

I spoke Spanish and English when I started elementary school, but lost my full conversational ability through my public school education. I relearned Spanish beginning in college and continuing on through my marriage to a Spanish teacher from Chihuahua. Un diccionario durmiente supreme.

My kids have benefitted most from this phenomenon of a turning circle of Spanish-language usage. All three can read, write and speak Spanish fluently. Oh, and they also read, write and speak English fluently. They have become fully bi-cultural, able to move easily in US culture as well as in Mexican culture. It’s helped them immensely in their social, educational and professional lives.

Today in New Mexico, it’s possible once again (or still possible) for a Spanish-only speaker to live a fully-realized life here,  just as it’s possible for an English-only speaker to live a fully realized life here.

Imagine how much richer all of our lives would be if we all spoke several languages?

It is beyond me why any reputable group anywhere in the U.S. would want to host a speaker who was arguably the worst Attorney General in U.S. history.  The fact that a Latino group extended the invitation to a hack like Gonzales is even more difficult to fathom.

Gonzales, you may recall, is the guy who, in his role as Chief Counsel to the President, authored a memo  arguing the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Based upon his legal opinion, the Bush Administration began detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts. That position has, of course, been largely repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gonzales apparently also lied under oath to Congress about his role in the firing of numerous U.S. attorneys across the country, including New Mexico’s own David Iglesias.

Gonzales is the same guy who championed illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency.

In almost any other civil society, Gonzales would most likely be occupying a jail cell. He certainly wouldn’t be speaking in Hobbs. Still, seeing a local Latino group invite Gonzales to speak brings to mind the shameful role most national Latino groups played in the Gonzales’ AG nomination .

At the time of his nomination, most of the national Latino organizations based in D.C. fell all over themselves in an orgy of Gonzales endorsements. Why? Truth be told, it was because Gonzales was a Latino. None of the national groups—with the notable exception of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)—bothered to vet Gonzales’ positions on civil rights and a host of other issues critical to Latinos.

Instead, they blindly issued statements supporting Gonzales as “eminently qualified” to be U.S. Attorney General. Had they done their homework, they would have discovered a disturbing pattern of political hackery at the core of Gonzales’ service to Bush.

While being a certified political hack might be tolerated at Democrat or Republican Party headquarters, it absolutely should not be permitted in high government offices that are particularly charged with following the rule of law. Like US Attorney General.

When evidence finally emerged that showed Gonzales had mutilated, spindled and bent the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, none of the major Latino organizations came forward to denounce his behavior.  To this day, MALDEF stands alone as the one national Latino organization that spoke out against the villainy Gonzales perpetuated.

Why did this happen?

Likely, it happened (and continues to happen) because national Latino groups feel compelled to promote Latinos when they (rarely) are nominated for high government office. They do this as a show of solidarity with the broader Latino population.

Having said that, I believe these national organizations do a disservice to all Latinos and all citizens when they blindly adopt a color code to endorse candidates or nominees for high office.  Just as most Latinos would react with horror if national groups supported a white or a black simply because of their color, it is wrong for national Latino groups to support a Latino candidate only because they are brown.  And yet, in the case of Alberto Gonzales, that is what occurred.

In stark contrast was the support for the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Yes, she is a person of color. But she also met and exceeded the standards for sitting on the Supreme Court . She had a long and public record of judicial opinions and legal practice. In short, regardless of her color, she earned her nomination and fully deserved the support of the major Latino groups (and all Americans, for that matter).

Unfortunately, the endorsement of major Latino groups of Judge Sotomayor rang hollow, given their putrid behavior in the Gonzales scenario. They lack credibility with me, anyway. And I suspect many members of Congress feel the same way.

What message do we send to our Latino youth when we refuse to apply the same rules to our own leaders as we apply to everyone else?

It’s time for national Latino organizations to mature. We need to let them know they serve all Latinos best when they apply the same discerning standards to any and all Latinos who purport to serve the public interest.

We’ve also had Spanish settlements here since nine years before Jamestown was settled in 1607. In short, we never developed in the same colonial model as did most other states, through Eastern seaboard-based, Anglo colonization.

As a result of the complex First American cultures that developed in New Mexico and the fact that the European settlers who first arrived spoke Spanish, New Mexico has a rich language heritage.

For example, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center reports that the 19 pueblos of New Mexico belong to three distinct language groups that are further differentiated into five separate languages and many discreet dialects. The New Mexico Pueblo language groups are Keres, Tanoan and Zuni and these encompass the Keresan, Tewa, Tiwa, Towa and Zuni languages. Add to that Apache and Diné languages and you begin to see the rich language mosaic that still thrives in our state.

Having traveled through most of Mexico, parts of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Spain, I can personally attest to the viability of New Mexico’s Spanish. We get along just fine throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

So why is it that the blow-dried, color-coordinated young TV reporters who parade across our TV screens in what passes as local news these days are turned loose on a helpless population to butcher Spanish and First American surnames and place names?

Shouldn’t local news stations require at least one session on New Mexico history of all its reporters? Shouldn’t there be a class that all TV journalists take on Spanish-language and First American languages pronunciation?

Perhaps acclimating new reporters to the place in which they work doesn’t happen because local news stations forget they operate in a unique cultural landscape and fail to make the small effort it would require to provide orientation to these “newbies” on the local beat.

I’ll even bet there are many First Americans and Latinos who would be happy to volunteer to teach these classes free for the local stations.

Why does it matter if they Anglicize and or butcher all of these First American and Spanish surnames and place names?

Well, it matters because there are a majority of New Mexico residents who speak these other languages. And there is increasing pride among First Americans and Nuevo Mexicanos to revitalize their languages.

Besides, we need to retain our rich cultural legacy. We’re all better off if we learn to respect our neighbors and what better way than to learn a few place names in their original language?

Look at San Juan Pueblo, so named by the Spanish colonizer Juan de Oñate in 1598. The pueblo people there changed its name back to its original Tewa name of Ohkay Owenge in 2005. And in case you wonder what the Tewa name means, it’s “place of the strong people.”

It took the people of Ohkay Owenge more than 400 years to revert back to their original name, but the process of decolonization isn’t determined by time, but by the collective consciousness of a people.

Similarly, two new overpasses just constructed at Pojoaque now spell out the original indigenous place names. Now it’s “Po-suwae-geh,” or “the water drinking or gathering place.” And Cuyamunge, which was the Spanish adaption of the original Tewa name, has also reverted back to its original Tewa spelling.

Hopefully, this trend among First Americans to revert back to naming many of the places we now know in either Spanish or English to their original Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Keres and other First American names will continue.

I’m all for it.

In fact, I hope we arrive at a point in time soon where we actively ask our First American citizens to re-name the places and villages in their native languages. Those villages, towns and cities that were created under Spanish colonial rule can revert back to their original Spanish names (Dixon would go back to Embudo, for example). Those settlements created by American colonists would retain their original English nomenclature.

Picture this: an official map of New Mexico with up to three names for each place and pueblo, town or village: one name in its First American configuration; another in Spanish and the third in English.

P’oosoonge (“Long water” in Tewa). Río Grande.  Sounds good to me.

No exception to the rule is the current madness passing as debate on health care reform.

Anti-immigrant activists are using the health care reform debate to attack undocumented immigrants as a major reason not to extend health coverage to all Americans.

At a recent town hall on health care attended by President Obama in New Hampshire, a man standing outside the meeting hall with a megaphone in his hand yelled: “We don’t need illegals. Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

The facts don’t support this xenophobic response. An in-depth study by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the uninsured showed that:

– Although legal and undocumented non-citizens accounted for 22 percent of the nonelderly uninsured in 2006, US citizens still made up the bulk of the uninsured (78%). Further, the majority (76%-80%) of the growth in the number of uninsured from 2000 to 2006 occurred among US citizens, not legal and undocumented non-citizens.

– Federal law already prohibits undocumented immigrants and recent legal immigrants from receiving Medicaid and SCHIP coverage.

– Non-citizens receive significantly less health care than citizens.

– Non-citizens are significantly less likely to use the emergency room than citizens.

So Mexicans and Latinos or anyone else living in the United States as an undocumented resident isn’t the reason our health care system sucks. Nor are any of the proposed health care reforms designed to let undocumented residents into the system.

So what gives here?

Health care reform is just the latest issue used by American racists and xenophobes to whip up anti-Mexican bias. There is a long historical pattern to this racist sickness that infects American society and that has been specifically directed at Mexicans and Latinos.

The first significant waves of Mexican workers coming into the United States began in the early 20^th Century, following the curtailment of Japanese immigration in 1907 and the consequent drying up of cheap Asian labor. The country needed cheap Mexican labor to permit Americans to fight overseas in World War I. Immediately after the war, a strong nativist climate led to restrictive quotas on immigration from Europe and to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, aimed at cutting back the flow of Mexicans.

But the nation’s economic demand for unskilled migrant workers continued throughout the 1920s, encouraging Mexicans to cross the border for work. The Great Depression brought a temporary halt to the flow of Mexican labor. During the early 1930s, Mexican workers — including thousands of legal residents — were rounded up and deported en masse by federal authorities in cooperation with state and local officials.

Mexicans then as now, became convenient scapegoats for widespread joblessness and budget shortages. Mexicans were accused in the 1930s of paradoxically, both taking away jobs and living off public welfare.

World War II caused the United States to again seek large numbers of unskilled Mexican labor for the war economy, and the Bracero Program was created to permit Mexicans to work legally in the country. This continued until just after the Korean War, when public opinion again turned nativist. In 1954, “Operation Wetback” was launched and the program apprehended more than one million undocumented Mexican workers for deportation.

The fact is the U.S. economy has historically pulled undocumented Mexican workers into the country. It is the “pull” of the economy, not the “push” of the Mexican economy, that has created the so-called “undocumented worker” problem we face today.

Yet, like the man with the megaphone in New Hampshire, we are always willing to demonize Mexicans and blame them for any and all of our societal ills, especially if it means we don’t have to look in the mirror to see the real cause of our anguish and malaise.

I ask you: If the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States were Canadians, would there be any public outcry? Would anyone grab a megaphone and blame them for the messes we create? Would anyone be calling for a bullet to their heads?

I don’t think so.

One long overdue idea to fix our pathetic public schools’ performance is mandating dual-language instruction for all New Mexico students in K-12.

It’s an idea that has successfully worked here before. According to New Mexico historian and educator Maurilio Vigil, in the 1870s the Jesuits started a private college in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when our state was still a United States territory. Called the Las Vegas College, it proudly advertised itself as “the only college in the country in which studies are pursued in the dual languages.”

The quality of the school was so high that students attended from as far away as Denver and Pueblo, Colorado and Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico. Among the school’s alumni were future Mexican President Francisco Madero (who lead the Mexican Revolution against the tyranny of Porfirio Díaz) and New Mexico’s first lieutenant governor and second  governor, Ezequiel C de Baca.

Census data show that 28 percent of New Mexico families speak Spanish at home. Add to that the use of First American languages among New Mexico’s diverse tribes, plus immigrant households from other countries speaking multiple languages, and it’s not hard to figure out that perhaps as much as one-third of our state’s population has dual language capabilities.

Rather than build on this potentially strong language capacity as a basis for creating a world-class education system, New Mexicans have inexplicably preferred to parrot the English-only tripe that passes for education policy in this nation.

We willingly suppress and ignore the opportunity presented to us by families steeped in the ability to speak more than one language.

From a purely practical angle, how much more attractive would New Mexico be to international companies seeking workers with multiple language abilities?

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff, either.

Two of the leading researchers on the value and impact of dual language education in the United States are Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier. Both have studied second-language programs for years in schools across the country.

Based on data they collected, including more than 2 million minority student records for more than 20 years, what they have found includes:

• Bilingually schooled students outperform comparable monolingually schooled students in academic achievement in ALL subjects, after 4-7 years of dual language schooling.
• Effective and sustained dual language programs can almost completely overcome the negative effects of low socioeconomic status.

Personally, I can attest to the power of dual language education. All three of my children attended Albuquerque’s Longfellow Elementary School, one of the first dual language public schools in the state. All three are now young adults and have benefitted immensely from their dual language education.

In contrast, I was educated in a northern New Mexico public school system that punished us for speaking Spanish. This practice was enforced despite the fact that some 90 percent of my elementary school teachers spoke Spanish fluently.

As a result of my public school mis-education, I had to re-learn Spanish as an adult. While I am once again fluent in Spanish, the journey to reconnect with my native language and culture should never have been necessary.

Gov. Richardson and Sec. García are uniquely positioned to create a climate in our state that mandates dual language education for every New Mexico child.

Gov. Richardson was raised in Mexico and is fully bilingual and bicultural. He would be the first to admit his language and cultural literacy has given him a huge edge in his public service career.

Similarly, Sec. García was a Chicana student activist when she attended the University of New Mexico in the early 70s.

Both of them know first-hand the power dual language education can have in propelling our school kids into the top tier of students across the country and around the globe.

¿Por qué no lo ponemos a prueba ahora mismo?

As they sat chatting and waiting for her son to get off his shift, three armed men approached them in the mall parking lot and forced them out of the car at gunpoint. All of her newly-purchased clothes disappeared as the three thugs drove away in her car, leaving the two women shaken but unharmed.

This incident brought home to me in a very personal way the carnage of violence and death that is raging just 270 miles south of Albuquerque, and barely a few minutes’ walk across the border from Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

Yet, New Mexico is home to 330,000- plus Mexicans, according to the Census Bureau’s 2000 estimate. The majority of them are either recent immigrants from Chihuahua, or descendents of Chihuahuenses.  Stories like mine about relatives suffering from the generalized violence and crime in Chihuahua state are commonplace today among New Mexico’s Mexicanos.

Rather than share stories about our family celebrations and our last trip down to visit friends and relatives, as we once were accustomed to doing, we now trade tales with other Chihuahuenses of the latest burglary, or carjacking, or assault or murder of one of our loved ones.

The facile response from many of my fellow New Mexicans to the economic, social and political agony Mexico is undergoing is to blame the victim. It is Mexicans who are creating the problem, they say. It’s that Mexico is a corrupt state, they argue. And I’ve heard the usual ration of jingoistic and xenophobic claptrap as well.

The North American summit getting under way today in Guadalajara, Mexico, with President Obama personally attending, will undoubtedly draw attention to the rash of violence currently plaguing our southern border.

But many Americans tend to react to the U.S.-Mexico issue as if we are the injured party when it comes to our relationship with Mexico. But we all know that it takes two to tango and our long and complicated relationship with Mexico is no exception to the two-to-tango rule.

Where, for example, is the discussion about the fact that U.S. citizens are consuming such massive quantities of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs that we are almost singlehandedly keeping the narco-empires in business?

Where is the in-depth and thoughtful reflection on our economy’s critical need for reliable human labor from Mexico since the mid 1800s? Or that is has been in our economic interest to ensure that Mexico continue to maintain an economy totally dependent on our economic needs?

Where is the debate about the need for a hemispheric solution to border issues with Mexico that includes a fundamental reform of both the U.S. and Mexican economic models?

While we vigilantly guard the border against Mexicans attempting to cross — armed with picks and shovels desperately looking for work — we conveniently ignore the assault rifles and automatic weapons pouring into Mexico to arm criminals and narco-traffickers (thank you NRA) in their war against civil society.

Instead, former President Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress gave us the border fence. And it appears that President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress will give us more of the same. Since 2006, Congress has set aside $2.7 billion to build 700 miles of fence along our country’s 1,900-mile border with Mexico.

Unfortunately, logic and common sense will likely not enter into the ongoing discussions about how best to solve the critical issues Mexico and the U.S. now jointly face. To be sure, the Mexican government has historically been a major reason why Mexicans suffer so much today; Mexico has consistently been betrayed by its political and business elites since the country’s inception.

Still, I can only hope that someday soon, Mexico and the United States will find a long-term solution to the agony occurring just down the road from us by leaving emotion and idiotic politics aside, embracing instead a healthy partnership filled with a dose of common sense and a sharp focus on regional economic reform.

I would also hope that the United States would look closely at its own deep societal fractures and seek a solution to the massive drug culture that has swamped our country in hopelessness and despair.

But I may be asking way too much.