Across The Wire and Nationality/Race in Mexico and the US

The challenges of race, categories and semantics in Across the Wire, Non-Profits, Common Ground Collective, Louie CK and Kony 2012

Review of Across The Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea (Doubleday, 1993)

While reading Across the Wire, I could not help but think about the controversy surrounding Kony 2012, the video produced by Invisible Children about genocide in Uganda. The video has received much flak by commentators such as Teju Kole’s White Savior Industrial Complex piece in the Atlantic. The article describes the tendency for charity organizations led by white men to have unintended consequences for the people for whom they are working, trying to help, or in this Kole’s analysis, trying to “save.” In this case the leader is Invisible Children's Jason Russell.

There has been much criticism about the growth and limitations of the non profit charity and social work sector in books like the The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non Profit Industrial Complex by the INCITE Women of Color Against Violence collective (Southend Press, 2009). For folks who have decided that there is enough inequality and devastation here in the US that we don't need to go to other countries to help people, and that Charity work is often paternalistic, there have been critical calls for “Solidarity Not Charity” after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. This is best exemplified by the story Scott Crow tells in Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (PM Press, 2011).

While Across the Wire is about a charity organization, there is a unique facet to this story that is harder to get your head around and I am wondering if it deflects some of the critiques mentioned above. Urrea tells his story of being an aide worker and missionary in the garbage dumps of Tijuana. There are parts of the story that reveal that he is half Mexican and was born in Tijuana but raised in San Diego, that his father was Mexican, but not the brown-skinned Mexicans that most white people in the US imagine when they hear the word. Urrea’s father was light skinned, blond haired and blue eyed. Urrea the author is the same. He identifies as Chicano and that he most certainly is. But in the US there is a conception of Mexican as a racial identity when it really is only a national identity made up of people with many racial backgrounds. As the Chicano comedian of European Dissent, Louie CK has commented on being perceived as white and therefore not Mexican. In this clip he is called a “counterfeit” white guy, and he comes out and says “white people is a bullshit identity....Mexico is just like America - it is made up of white people, brown people, black people...You meet Mexicans that look like me all the time only you don't recognize it.”

I wonder how Urrea’s European-appearing complicates critiques like the “white savior” that is coming out around charity work and activism in Uganda? I wonder how being a Chicano man who could pass as “white” and also be authentically Mexican helped him navigate situations in Tijuana. There was a little discussion about this in the book but I think that the discourse around whiteness in Latin America is still working itself out while the conversation here in the US is exploding.