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How to Define the “Character of America”
Thoughts on Searching for America in the Streets of Laredo, a memoir
By Fernando Piñon
The author reflects on his memoir, set in the border town of Laredo, Texas, which he offers as a starting point for a broader assessment of what makes America “good,” a quality of social order that, he points out, has been sought since the writings of the Greek philosophers dating back 2,500 years. Such soul-searching, sadly, has become extremely critical in light of what is happening now in the electoral politics of the USA. –Editor’s note.
To the ancient Greeks, the word “arête”meant that which makes a person be good at something. A woman’s arête, for example, was measured by her beauty, by the purity of her manners, and by her wise economic management. The arête of a farmer was determined by his work being done at the right time and with the rhythm of nature, the arête 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 thearête 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 arête 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 America’s arête, 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, we must be forthright and truthful in our assessment of America’s arête. Otherwise, we will never find the true essence of our country’s “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 world’s 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 one’s 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 America’s arête since I was growing up in Laredo during the 1950 and early 1960s, and I did so because the American narrative through which America’s arête was defined did not reflect my reality as a Mexican American living in a barrio a stone’s 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 didn’t 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 arête 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 America’s arête 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 they who decided that Divine Right was no match for 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 “Washington’s 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 Sandburg 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 laughs…proud to be the hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and freight handler to the nation.”
Sandburg didn’t 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 modelthrough 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 “Americanculture doesn’t 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 Piñón?” I was surprised she could speak Spanish so well, and I told her so. “Yo también 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.
