Backlash Redux

Last Friday Maureen Dowd wrote an editorial for the New York Times describing the tendency of men to prefer subservient women who are caretakers to accomplished, successful women. She discussed the popularity of these portrayals in recent Hollywood cinema, with Spanglish as her test case.

As the daughter of a successful and loving single mother as well as a woman of partially Latin American descent, my objections to Spanglish are legion.

First, as Dowd argues, the Mexican mother-as-maid (Paz Vega) is pitted against the cold-career-woman-white mother (Tea Leoni) for the love of their mutual daughters (Shelbie Bruce and Sarah Steele) and the love of Leoni’s husband (Adam Sandler). In this equation, Leoni appears to be the woman who got it all wrong; her perfectionism and career focus has made her an insensitive mother and an unloving, self-absorbed wife. Meanwhile, Vega becomes the very ideal of the loving, caring mother with whom Sandler falls in love. Women are taught a very cool lesson here, either be a subservient, sensitive, passionate caretaker, or be a cold, self-absorbed, career woman who could lose her husband to her maid.

This tale is made all the worse because of the particular stereotypes now attached to Latina women-as-maids: fiery passion (she yells at Sandler in Spanish at one point) paired with subservience to their men and profound maternal instinct (largely because of the stereotype that Latino males are absentee fathers, also played upon in this movie as I will discuss momentarily).

The involvement of Vega’s daughter (Shelbie Bruce) in the tale only adds to my disgust. The entire movie is narrated through the prism of the daughter’s application essay to Princeton. When Vega moves in with the family for the summer, Bruce is quite charmed by Leoni, who manages to get Bruce a scholarship to the prestigious private high school Leoni’s own children attend. Leoni and Bruce, both strong and intelligent women, seem to find quite the affinity with each other. Meanwhile, Vega rails against it and eventually quits her job in part because she wants to insure that Bruce ends up like her and not like Leoni. Bruce then narrates in her essay that an acceptance to Princeton would not define her because her identity is rooted in her mother. While I agree that an acceptance to Princeton should not define anyone’s life, rooting her identity as being Vega especially in contrast to Leoni is to accept the myth of Western society perpetuated in this film: men can have it all, women can’t. And listen well, Latinas, remaining true to your culture means not being learned or successful; it means remembering your place in structures of white patriarchal dominance. As Musa Dube said of Pocahontas, Vega and Bruce’s characters are clearly the products of the colonizer’s pen.

The glaring abuse of the colonizer’s pen deepens when employing the stereotype of the macho Latino father who abandoned Vega and Bruce. His absence only serves to demonstrate Sandler’s unstoppable goodness as the successful, loving, white male father who did not desert his cruel wife even after she cheated on him.

I would not be as angered by this narrative if its portrayals were not such an accepted part of the reality I live. Many men I encounter assume this tale reveals a deep truth; an intelligent learned woman cannot be spiritual, passionate, or maternal. I have to disagree with this since my mother, who was a better mother than many stay-at-home moms I’ve heard of, is successful, learned, spiritual, passionate, and an excellent mother. Latino men are often erased from narratives as Latino/as are being broadly integrated (not just in CA, NY, or TX) into the front lines of the culture wars; with the re-election of Bush partially thanks to 44% of Latino/as, they are only bound to become more prominent.

What is most perennially upsetting to me is the way that women have always historically been pitted against each other, a strategy that could not work if women did not fall for it. I know a woman who chose not to pursue graduate work because she feared it would prevent her from having a husband and children. I fear that the anti-feminists have already won when we ourselves buy into these things.

Remembering class

Not having lived through all that much of the Cold War, I am not certain exactly what the lasting cultural impacts are upon U.S.A. culture. I hope that the popularity of Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is helping to undo a certain popular aversion to Marxist critiques of U.S.A. culture.

Having grown up in Kansas, I have some difficulty finding Frank’s analysis so incredibly new. I am not certain why everyone is now making such a big deal about it. The only thing truly shocking to me about Frank’s work is that he tries to pass Kansas and Kansans off as a type through which we can understand the rest of the U.S.A. In all fairness, Kansans have been even more religiously zealous, from the first abolitionist settlers to Fred Phelps, than the rest of this already religious nation.

What I think is truly great about Frank’s analysis is that he does raise up a question that can apply to all of the U.S.A. How do the Republicans get lower middle class and working class people to vote for them? In order to engage this question, Frank had to assert a fact commonly ignored in U.S.A. culture, and he points this out himself. Despite all of our beliefs to the contrary and all our patriotic fondness for the capitalist system, class really does matter. By class, neither I nor Frank mean whether you use the salad fork to eat your entrée, or whether you prefer NASCAR to sailboat racing, we mean class in a redefined Marxist consumer analysis, one that has moved from the industrial age to the digital one – how much you make, what you can own, and what you can buy.

In a time when blue collar and now white collar jobs have disappeared or been outsourced overseas (California lost 25,000 jobs in December alone), the sense of the class divide between an elite and those who appear to be on the underside of the capitalist system, has become ever more crucial. Congratulations to Frank for recognizing this and putting words to it. Such a divide, one would think, would offer all those opponents of the WTO and IMF ample opportunity to go into these areas and rally people to the banner of changing the global-capitalist system.

Yet, the point that Frank makes in his book is not only that this did not happen but also that the conservatives have shaped the culture wars in such a way that this could not happen. For these people in Kansas, class is identified not by what you make but by what you buy with what you make and where you spend your Sundays. Frank recognizes the way this class-divide has been cast as an issue of “culture,” as one that will identify the wealthy well-educated Bush as “one of their own” but forget that someone like Bill Clinton really once was.

What Frank does not really do in this book, and what I wish I had some better suggestions for, is offer a solution. He suggests that the Democrats should talk to their base more, as if the working classes are still the Democrats’ base.

I think the problem is a wider cultural one requiring a much broader program than that. Not being a politician or a labor organizer, I am not certain how best to go making all the necessary changes. Obviously, the Democrats if they do not want to die out and merge with moderate Republicans, do need to redefine who they are and maybe try to become a party of the working and middle class again in a way that working and middle class people can actually recognize. Grassroots organizers really do need to renegotiate their spiel so that they can appear to belong to that Kansas culture just as much as Bush seems to. And these organizers need to be out in droves, which requires money, which requires the support of large businesses and wealthy patrons. For this, I do believe we need a return to Marx and the flaws of the Marxist system in order to understand how settling some of the problems of the class question are in everybody’s best interest.

Yet another problem is that of a broader cultural phenomenon. As Jared Diamond argues in _Collapse_, we need to reinvent how we see ourselves if we hope to survive. People living in the U.S.A. need to become willing to learn and then actually learn how to think long-term and think of ourselves as part of a global community. We need to learn to get along with neighbors and allies and people who think differently than we do. We need to let go of beliefs about “American exceptionalism.” How you manage to sell an identity change to the people who most tenaciously cling to Cold War and pre-Cold War views of U.S.A. identity and place in the world, I am not sure.