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Guest Column

Sonia Sotomayor, Humpty Dumpty, and Catonist Americans

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

In spite the obvious—that the earth is awash with diversity—human beings tend to look in others for the characteristics they “see” in themselves, thinking, perhaps, that as human beings we all share the same characteristics. To be sure, while there are certain genetic commonalities among human beings, there are differences that increase the divide between human groups. For example, though Americans share many commonalities with the English, there are sufficient differences that enable people to tell us apart.  It’s this difficulty to decompartmentalize ourselves from our experiences and background that lead us to think that all people think like we do. In other words, that Spaniards think like Americans, that Iraqis think like Americans. Here we are treading perilously the terrain of cultural and linguist determinism and imperialism. We are unable to see others from their perspective of language and culture. Though many of us have grown up as Latinos in the United States we are not part of a homogeneous species of Americans. There is no such generic American. Like the rest of the world, as Americans we are like snowflakes—no two alike. Add to that our unique sentient experiences and our ethnic affiliations and the diversity of human beings nos asalta los ojos—is awesome.

In 1992 just before the first Iraqi war I wrote a piece on “Cross-Cultural Communication: Information Theory and the Grammar of Conflict” in which I explained why both Secretary of State James Baker and Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz considered their efforts a failure to sort out the differences between Iraq and the United States at the Geneva Conference of January 9, 1991. The obstacles in resolving the conflict between Iraq and the United Nations—principally the United States—grew out of grammars of conflict that differentiate one group from another. Messages between culturally and linguistically different groups are not understood inherently sui generis at transliteral face value. Those messages are products of evolutionary single-source information systems that create varying states of consciousness and conceptualization. That Secretary of State James Baker did not hear the message he had hoped for from Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz at the Geneva Conference reflects the states of consciousness engendered by the language of Americans. Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz also expressed disappointment that he had not heard the message he had hoped for at the Geneva Conference. Cross cultural conflict arising out of single-source information systems requires a transcendence of expectations based on knowledge of cross-cultural communication.

Secretary Baker’s uncertainty about Minister Aziz’ message was not because of faulty messages but because Secretary Baker’s single-source information system was making few allowances for error, miscue, or “entropy”—a state of disorder emanating from failed expectations—in his dealing with Minister Aziz’ single-source information system. All too often when embarking on cross-cultural communication, assumptions about cultural universals inhibit or deter success in transmitting the meanings of messages from one culture to another, the prime assumption being that the way one culture processes information must be the way the other culture processes information also, ergo understanding is mutual.

In information theory, “noise” is anything that weakens, distorts or diminishes the clarity or reception of a signal—the message. In messages between culturally and/or linguistically different groups of people, culture and language contribute to the “noise” of a message—that is, language and culture are screens through which messages are filtered en route to their destination, also screened and filtered in their reception by those for whom the message is intended. Little wonder that cross-cultural communication requires considerable effort when messages are dually screened and filtered. Add to that effort the factor of translation and the task looms large, not impossible—just formidable. That means, among other things, that cross-cultural communication requires work.

Cultures are large symbolic terrains that require considerable familiarity with their landscapes in order to traverse them successfully. A cultural Baedeker or map helps.  But it’s important to bear in mind that the map is not the territory as Alfred Korzybski pointed out, that a mark on a piece of paper is no substitute for what the map represents. Consequently, a translation of marks on a document sent from one culture to another is not a substitute for what the marks on a document represent in the language of the culture transmitting it. For example, in English the word “tree” is the transliteration of the Spanish word “arbol.” But as a transliteration the word “tree” is simply a symbol in English “approximating” a meaning for the Spanish symbol “arbol.” A translation is not a surety for understanding a message from another culture. Transliterations are therefore insubstantial in deciphering the lexical symbols of other cultures. In as much as translations are all we have to work with oftentimes in cross-cultural communications, we must use them cautiously.

Faced with this dilemma of cross-cultural communication some years ago when I was a fa-

culty member of the School of Social Work at San Jose State University (1974-75), I organized and taught a course on “Language, Culture, and Behavior” for social work students working in non-mainstream ethnic communities still preserving their distinctive languages and cultures. My thoughts on the matter are encapsulated in the piece that appears in “Language, Culture, and Behavior: Implications for Social Work Education” (Ortego, 1975).

Suffice to say, the mind contains an infrastructure of conceptual knowledge that determines the outcome of information processing and leads it to “conclusions” consonant with the design and architecture of that infrastructure. The overall disposition of the mind to apprehend objects in a particular way, to select and give form to what is seen, plays an important role in perception and judgment. What we see is as much the product of incoming visual data as it is of previous knowledge organized per rules of the mind’s infrastructure.

Perception is related in significant ways to the whole general culture and social structure of

the perceiver, and depends on the selection and organization of cues according to past experience and expectations. The perceiver sees a structured object or environment in the way his or her past experience and habits determine. What is perceived involves both the perceiver’s contribution and the contribution of the “stimulus.” In physics there is the contention that the observer affects the outcome of observation by the mere act of observation. In like fashion, Einstein reasoned that we see what the language lets us see. R.C. Lewontin put it this way:

Science, like other productive activities, like the state, the family, sport, is a social institution completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions. The problem that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience (3, emphasis mine).

“Social experience” is the operational phrase here. As human beings—and perhaps in all life—we are the products of our social (ambient) experiences. In other words, growing up as a Mexican American in the United States conditions (molds) my perceptions and judgments about life. That conditioning is not absolute; it is however sometimes pretty intractable. I certainly can’t view life from an Anglo perspective. The differences in behavior manifested by various groups may be in large part due to differences in their respective cultural traditions. Our behavior is conditioned significantly by our culture and by our home language. The inseparability of language and culture in our evolution is a given. I’m not talking here only about the Spanish language and Mexican culture. That tenet holds for the English language and American culture as well. In Faustian America the din of cultures is clarion clear. But everywhere in the United States there are many Americans who are in denial about the cultural mosaic of the country and its linguistic sonata.That denial is particularly evident in the current brouhaha over the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States. Much has been made of the following comment in a 2001 speech she made at Berkeley, California:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases…I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Out of context these remarks have been rendered as “infamous” contextually phrased that a "wise Latina woman would often reach a better conclusion than a white male.” The essence of Sonia Sotomayor’s remark is not that a wise Latina woman would often reach a better conclusion than a white male but that she would hope “that a wise Latina Woman with the richness of her experience would reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The expression is not absolute but conditional. Because of this remark, Sonia Sotomayor has been called a racist by mean-spirited opponents to her nomination whose vision of America is a vision of America as a nation of assimilated citizens hewing to one fundamental ideology.  In a recent Newsweek piece Jonathan Alter put it this way:

. . . replacing an ideology-driven White House with a data-driven one is a big improvement. But Obama’s faith in data and in his ability to reach the “right” policy answer will not be enough for success. That’s because every expert opinion is the product of the biases and backgrounds of the experts (21, emphasis mine).

Our gender, backgrounds, and social experiences born of the national origins of our cultural group do make a difference in our judgments, in the way we look at life. I cannot erase from my life experiences the segregated schools I was forced to attend in San Antonio in the 1930’s. It is part of who I am. Someone who has not attended and experienced segregated schools cannot fully know what that experience really is. Empathy helps to approximate some understanding. However, with due respect to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a wise old man and wise old woman may reach the same conclusion in deciding cases not because of wisdom or age but because they may both share the same legal training. If Justice O’Connor’s contention were true, then what accounts for such division on the Supreme Court in decisions that are rendered by 5 to 4 judgments? Why in their wisdom do the Supreme Court Justices not reach the same conclusions? Because they are who they are—products of their social experiences.  

One hears much these days about the Constitutional tradition of the United States as a country of laws. Indeed the United States is a country of laws—oftentimes bad laws as was the case when African Americans were segregated by the Supreme Court ruling of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. Or the myriad Jim Crow laws that endured in this country with the weight of law until the 1960’s. Or the laws that forbade Spanish-speaking Americans from speaking Spanish in the schools and in the workplace. Laws that perpetuated the inequality of non-white Americans in their search for America. Therefore I too”would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived that life. “

American literature in all its genres is full of stereotypes, defamations, distortions, slanders, and libels about Latino Americans by non-Latino writers who have not lived the Latino life in the United States (see Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature, Ortego, 1971).  Writers like Florence Kluckhohn, William Madsen, Celia Heller, and Athur Rubel, to name a few, have branded Latino Americans as fatalists, not goal-oriented, not future-oriented, deficient in behavior, etc., a brand accepted as gospel by many non-Latino Americans (see La Leyenda Negra/The Black Legend, Ortego, 2008-2009). The explanation here is simply that non-Latino writers and researchers approach the study of Latino Americans and their cultures from an already biased position. In a piece I authored with Marta Sotomayor (Chicanos and Concepts of Culture, 1974), we explained that “an outsider cannot hope to really understand a culture unless he [or she] is part of that culture, for cultural nuances may escape his [her] attention entirely, not to mention the subtle and intricate nuances of language engendered by that culture (6).

In an outsider’s view of Mexican American culture, William Madsen wrote in 1964 that “the Mexican American does not suffer undue anxiety because of his propensity to sin. Instead of blaming himself for his error, he frequently attributes it to adverse circumstances” (16). The already existing stereotypes about Mexican Americans are further reinforced by these pernicious expositions of Mexican American culture by an outsider—that they are a promiscuous people given to pecant excesses because of easy exculpability.  These characterizations of Mexicans/Mexican Americans by non-Latino Americans sprang up early after the end of the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-4848) the result of which the United States annexed more than half of Mexico’s territory which now makes up the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

As early as 1840, however, in Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described the Mexicans of San Francisco as “an idle thriftless people who could make nothing for themselves” (59). And in 1852 Colonel James Monroe reported to Washington that

The New Mexicans are thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-government, and there is no latent quality about them that can ever make them respectable. They have more Indian blood than Spanish, and in some respects are below the Pueblo Indians, for they are not as honest or as industrious (104).

Four years later W.W.H. Davis, United States Attorney for the Territory of New Mexico, wrote a propos of his experiences with Mexican Americans that “they possess the cunning and deceit of the Indian, the politeness and the spirit of revenge of the Spaniard, and the imaginative temperament and fiery impulses of the Moor.” He described them as smart and quick but lacking the “stability and character and tenderness of intellect that give such vast superiority to the Anglo-Saxon race over every other people.” He ascribed to them the “cruelty, bigotry, and superstition of the Spaniard, a marked characteristic from earliest times.” Moreover, he saw these traits as “constitutional and innate in the race.” In a moment of kindness, though, Davis suggested that the fault laid no doubt on their spiritual teachers, the Spaniards, who never taught them that beautiful doctrine which teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves” (85-86). Another outsider’s view of Latino Americans and their cultures.

In 1992 by way of advertising an undergraduate course on Chaucer, I created a flyer with the pertinent information about the course but added that the course would explain how Chaucer was a Chicano. The course registered 124 students. My explanation about how Chaucer was a Chicano focused on Chaucer’s language—a mixture of French and the English that was emerging in 13^th century England. No one calls Chaucer’s language Frenglish but many are quick to call the language of Chicanos “Spanglish”—a derogatory term for the mixture of Spanish and English used by many Latino Americans (see “Spanglish,” Ortego, 2008). The point of citing my Chaucer class is to explain that my approach to Chaucer (about whom I’m the author of published pieces) is from the point of view of a Chicano. In my undergraduate English classes at Pitt and graduate classes at the University of Texas (Texas Western College) I learned about the canonical Chaucer of gold standard English literature. And in my doctoral classes in British renaissance studies at the University of New Mexico I learned about the Chaucer of history. While I respect and explain to my students the varying historical approaches to Chaucer, I’m aware that my personal approach to Chaucer is influenced by my social experiences as a Mexican American by heritage and a Chicano by ideological choice. I know that who I am as a result of my social experiences influences my interactions with the world. I can no more stop being Mexican American than President Barack Obama can stop being black. I am not a brown thermo-fax copy of whites, though that has been the plan of American colonialism—boil all the foreignness out of Latinos in the great American “melting pot” then turn them loose to pursue the American dream (Ortego, 1994).

In 2005 I wrote:

The shadow of an angry god is covering the American landscape, a shadow engendered more by malice than mischief, made stronger by frightened xenophobes. This shadow is not a recent phenomenon. Nor is it group-specific. In the Americas it’s the historical shadow of apprehension and desperation brought into being when two worlds made contact with each other. It’s the shadow of fear of the “other” (Ortego 2005).

That situation still persists made shriller by the calumnious rhetoric surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. There is indeed a growing movement of Catonists in the American Republic who fear Latino immigrants and what they augur for America’s future. Catonists are pessimistic about that future. Cato was a senator in the Roman Republic during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the third century BC. He was an "anti-intellectual monumentalist" who fed Roman fears of encroachment by decadent foreigners whose alien values, he contended, would disrupt the Roman political tradition and the organization of the nation. And though the Roman Empire was a multicultural enterprise, Cato was a Roman supremacist who believed that Rome was for the Romans. It was not multi-culturalism that destroyed Rome, which Samuel Huntington believed will destroy the United States; it was the excesses of its leaders who believed that because of the power they wielded they were supreme, even deities. Diversity does not lead to disintegration no matter what Catonists like Samuel Huntington believed. Catonists have a single-minded view of America’s future and what the United States should be instead of a populist view of America which includes all of our visions for America’s future.

The inflammatory rhetoric of Hispanophobic Republicans in particular is imperiling the party’s already diminishing image among Latino Americans who are beginning to view the Republican Party as nemesis. Bad strategy considering that U.S. Census projections indicate that by the year 2040 one out of every three Americans will be Hispanic. This is not a demographic growth fueled by immigration but by fertility and motility. That’s a big population to disaffect. Better to begin understanding that population and its social experiences in the United States.

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Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Scholar in Residence and Chair of the Department of Chicana/Chicano and Hemispheric Studies, Western New Mexico University; Professor Emeritus, Texas State University System—Sul Ross

WORKS CITED

Alter, Jonathan. “The President’s ‘Whiz Kids’ A Misplaced faith in the meritocracy,” Newsweek, June 1, 2009.

Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. Bantam, 1959.

7Davis, W. W. H.  El Gringo: Or, New Mexico and Her People. New York: Harper, 1857.

Lewontin, R. C.  Biology as Ideology. New York: Harper, 1991.

Madsen, William. The Mexican-Americans of South Texas. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston, 1964.

Monroe, James (Colonel). Congressional Globe, 32^nd Congress, 2^nd Session, January 10, 1853, Appendix.

Ortego, Philip D. Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature, diss., University of New Mexico, 1971.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe and Marta Sotomayor. Chicanos and Concept of Culture.  San Jose, CA: Marfel Publications, 1974.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Language, Culture and Behavior: Implications for Social Work Education” in Chicano Content and Social Work Education edited by Marta Sotomayor and

Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, New York: Council on Social Work Education, 1975.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Cross-Cultural Communication: Information Theory and the Grammar of Conflict,” American Issues Forum, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas, January 17, 1992.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Myth America: Velleities and Realities of the American Ethos,” Journal of Big Bend Studies, January 1994.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Mexican Americans and the Insurgency Politics of Resistance: An Overview of American Immigration and English Only Initiatives,” Hispanic Vista Weekly Digest, April 25, 2005.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Spanglish,” Newspaper Tree, April 11, 2008; posted on Hispanic Trending, April 11, 2008. Discussed on National Public Radio’s Way With Words with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, April 11, 2008 (posts 213); Posted on American Mosaic Online: The Latino American Experience, hosted by Ilan Stavans, Greenwood Press, May 23, 2008.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “La Leyenda Negra/The Black Legend: Historical distortion, Defamation, slander, Libel, and Stereotyping of Hispanics” (Series of Articles), Somos Primos  (a website dedicated to Hispanic Heritage and Diversity Issues by the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research), 2008-2009.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)