SEARCHING FOR AMERICA IN

THE STREETS OF LAREDO

BY FERNANDO PINON
To the ancient Greeks, the word arte meant that which makes a person be good
atsomething. A womans arte, for example, was measured by her beauty, by the purity
of her manners, and by her wise economic management. The arte of a farmer was
determined by his work being done at the right time and with the rhythm of nature, the
arte of a warrior was his valor in battle, and that of a ruler was what Plato referred to
as a philosopher-king.
But the Greeks would not take the arte of anything for granted, and they would always
search for that particular element which made someone good at something. What,
they would ask, is the arte of being a good father, a good husband, a good blacksmith or
a good citizen?
In a way, my search for America was a search for Americas arte, a quest to determine
just exactly what makes America good. Is it its Constitution, its democracy, its electoral
system, its economy, its judicial system, or its people? But like the ancient Greeks, to we

must be forthright and truthful in our assessment of Americas arte. Otherwise, we will
never find the true essence of our countrys virtuousness and our private and public lives
will always be in a state of continuous dissonance.
As such, we cannot merely assume America is good simply because of the lofty

declarations that are deeply engrained in the American narrative. America did not
become a great country just because Thomas Jefferson declared it to be the worlds
best hope or because John Winthrop defined it as a city upon a hill. Moreover,
Americans did not become exceptional because Thomas Paine believed it was within
our power to begin the world again, or because Herman Melville asserted that
Americans are the peculiar, the Chosen People, the Israel of our times. We bear the Ark
of the liberation of the world.
These famous utterances of the American narrative did not make America great; they
merely helped to create the mythological ideology upon which the American narrative is
based -- an assumption of what America was supposed to be and of the chosen Western
European people who were destined to make it so. These are the assumptions which led
to the Melting Pot, the theory which held that to be an American one had to shed the
culture of ones native country and become a WASP. It is a narrative so deeply
engrained in our psyche that most Americans believe we are, indeed, an exceptional
people and why any criticism of America is often taken as being un-American.
In a way, I started searching for Americas arte since I was growing up in Laredo during
the 1950 and early 1960s, and I did so because the American narrative through which
Americas arte was defined did not reflect my reality as a Mexican American living in a
barrio a stones throw from the Rio Grande. America, I was taught, was the land of the
brave and the home of the free, the country which prized equality before the law and which

offered immigrants the opportunity to work so they too could share in the American
Dream.
But the reality in which I was growing up didnt reflect these lofty ideals. My reality was
that of a South Texas in which Mexican Americans were segregated, where the vote was
manipulated, where Mexican American students were herded into a vocational education
curriculum, where their culture was devalued and where they were denied jobs of power and
delegated into jobs of service. I realized that as a Mexican American, I was stuck in an

American ideology that did not reflect my reality, thus creating the socio-political
dissonance that predominates in the lives of most Mexican Americans even today.
Yet, as I searched for the America I was taught really existed, I soon learned that not
only Mexican Americans but American society itself have been living in a state of
dissonance for several years, if not decades. As Americans, for example, we worship the
motto of E Pluribus Unum, but are distrustful of each other and characterize each other as
givers and takers. We cherish our democracy, but do not trust government, and
allow for the manipulation of the electoral mechanism. We praise the American worker,
but hesitate to establish a living wage and deny them the power to organize.
We relish America the Beautiful but criticize government when it attempts to curb
pollution and permit the destruction of our spacious skies, and mountain majesties,
and the fields of amber waves of grain. We revere the concept of equality but are
caught in a systemic web of intolerance and discrimination that we seem powerless to
eradicate. We glorify the immigrant as being the building block of our society, but rail
against the newcomers from south of the border.

So what and where is that arte which we believe makes America great? What has
happened to the American narrative so gloriously -- but fictitiously -- described in our
American narrative by our Founding Fathers?
While attempting to deal with all these questions, I came to the realization that
Americas arte was right in the very town in which I grew up. Laredoans have lived
under the political authority of seven flags. Yet, even as they have seen countries come
and go, Laredo still remains a closely-knit community whose people are tied more to its
history and its culture than to its flags. Laredoans understand that while governments can
be created by one generation such as Mexico in 1810, Texas in 1836, or the United
States in 1789 societies evolve in history.
This is what Edmund Burke, the English philosopher, told us this many years ago,
when he wrote that society is a partnership in all science, in all art, in all virtue and in
all perfection. Since the objective of this partnership cannot be obtained in one
generation, this contract becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but
between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.
Like Burke, Laredoans have understood that it is not the state that empowers people,
but the cultural cohesiveness of the people that empowers the nation. The greatness that
was Rome took centuries to achieve and it was not built by the strength and power of its
emperors, or by the privileged status of its patrician population, but through the character,
diversity, talent and dedication of its common people, the plebe. Christianity itself
became a great religion not because of the eloquence of papal encyclicals or by the
benevolence of bishops but by the actions of its common believers.

In fact, Scripture describes the Kingdom of God as a woman who sweeps the house in
search of a coin, and like a father who has a great feast upon the return of his prodigal
son, both prophetic examples which demonstrate that it is the common people in society
that are the guiding force in history. And perhaps what is even more important is that
countries that fail to understand this do so at their own peril.
The monarchies of Europe, for example, fell not because the Kings became despotic and
people rose up against them, but because common people who used to believe in divine
right ceased to do so. It was them who decided that Divine Right was no match the
vitality and relevance of the social contract which they had accepted. The monopoly of
dogma which the Catholic Church enjoyed for centuries crumbled not because
Christianity lost its fervor, but because the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility could
not compete with the principle of freedom of conscience which the common people
had begun to accept.
By the same token, mercantilism succumbed not because the nation states lost their
power to protect their colonies and their trade, but because mercantilism could not
contain the onslaught of free enterprise capitalism launched by small merchants.
As a Laredoan, I know that Laredoans have always given the Founding Fathers their
due, as demonstrated every year in February when the whole city celebrates
Washingtons Birthday with a multi-day celebration that includes a man and a woman
portraying George and Martha Washington. But as working people, they also
understand the greatness of America is not due to the triumphant ideology which clothes
the American narrative, but to what Carl Sandburgs observed in his poem, Chicago:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and course

and strong and cunning.Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a
savage pitted against the wilderness. Bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning,
building, breaking, rebuilding under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth under the terrible burden of destiny -- laughing as a young man
laughsproud to be the hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads
and freight handler to the nation.
Sandburg didnt see the hog butchers, tool makers and stackers of wheat as immigrants
or as citizens, nor did he notice the languages they spoke nor the texture of their skin. He
saw them merely as workers whose toil was reshaping American society into the diverse,
energetic and dynamic society which made possible the industrial revolution and
ultimately modern America. And if he had written his poem a generation later, he also
would not have noticed that the hog butchers, tool makers and stackers of wheat were
now mostly Mexican immigrants like my own parents who, like thousands of other
Mexican immigrants who fled from the violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910,
ended up in Chicago in the 1920s.
In Laredo, I grew up with people who every year would go al norte, a las piscas,
with recently arrived immigrants who spoke little or no English and worked in the fields,
with Mexican students who were here only to study, with people with green cards who
crossed the international bridge every day to work in the different department stores, with
people who were descendants of the original settlers of Laredo and were involved in
ranching and agriculture, and with people who had come to Laredo to open up new
businesses.

All of us lived in what for many years was considered to be the poorest city in the
country, the one with unpaved streets, scorching heat, and the one identified as the most
Mexican of American cities. But while we may have lacked the wealth, municipal
services, and public infrastructures that people had in other cities, we always knew who
we were, where we had come from and where we were going.
My grandfather used to collect cardboard at Sears, and then load them into a little red
wagon I had been given one Christmas so he could sell it at a business some 20 blocks
away. My mother was a seamstress and my father was a bracero in the Napa Valley in
California. As most Laredoans, our family was money poor but culturally rich simply
because we were raised in a culture of inclusion and empowerment the very model
through which the United States can truly become e pluribus unum from the many, one.
Somehow, Laredoans have always understood what Harvard historian Orlando
Patterson, meant when he wrote that American culture doesnt belong to any group; it is
constantly changing, and it is open. What is needed is recognition that the accurate
metaphor or model for this wider literacy is not domination, but dialectic. Each group
participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed, as much as any other group.
This was the lesson that was given to me by another Laredoan, one of my students at
San Antonio College. After class, a young, enthusiastic, bright girl whose features were
unmistakably Anglo asked me in perfect Spanish, Es usted de Laredo, Profesor Pin?
I was surprised she could speak Spanish so well, and I told her so. Yo tambin soy de
Laredo, she told me. Then, in perfect English, she goes on to tell me who her
grandfather was one I knew as a prominent Anglo American attorney. Her father, she
told me, married a Villarreal. As she talked to me, I realized I had, indeed, found the real

America. This young girl was the proud product of two cultures and histories
converging with each other on equal terms, not one culture seeking to dominate the other.
She understood that speaking Spanish and clinging to her Spanish/Mexican culture did
not minimize her identity with America but expanded on what it meant to be an
American. And her confidence and cheerfulness showed me that it is people like her
who will, indeed, change, and legitimatize, the character of America and that this can
happen if the country will follow what Laredo has done for decades.