Brianna: next, breaking racial stereotypes in the United States.

As the son of Guatemalan immigrants, Pulitzer prize-winning author and professor, A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino Hector Tobar details in his new book, "A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino."

Thank you for talking with us.

Hector: Thank you for talking with me.

>> I read a lot of books.

How do you describe this?

Hector: is my attempt to make sense of what people call me, the more I think about that term, the more I see stories and history and thinking that we as Latino people have to do to understand who we are and why we have been given this name, Latino, or Hispanic, or Latin.

It is a bit of a memoir with storytelling in it, reporting, people I talked to and met along the road driving through the United States and going back to my home country.

It is a little bit of everything.

It is meant to be a journey into this idea of what Latino is.

>> It is also a beautiful love letter to the many students you encountered over the years.

I wondered if I can ask you to read a little bit?

It is the prologue.

Hector: you write words for me to read, memories that placed me inside the eyes of the child you were.

A daughter of Mexico and Puerto Rico and the central valley of California with its flat, dry plains, and filled with chickens.

You sit in my office and begin to weep as you tell me the story of your undocumented boyfriend and the demons that haunted him.

It is clear to me you should break up with him, even though I cannot say this.

You tell me about your best friend, a white girl, and African-American family who lived next door.

In your stories I see a suburb of rectangular lawns and a rancho in rural United States were the neighbors heard your mother and father yelling at each other, and where you took solace in a natural beauty of your surroundings in the crisp desert wind, and the muddy yellow outline of the mountain ranges.

You write, I am having a nervous breakdown, but your prose belies this.

Controlled and precise, it tells the story of a violation that you endured when you were a kindergartner.

Michel: it goes on in that beautiful poetic vein.

If you have someone in mind when you wrote this book?

Hector: I had somebody standing over my shoulder, James Baldwin.

During my pandemic, I read "The Fire Next Time," and I had James Baldwin's voice in my head.

I thought about who I would write to.

I heard the voices of my students.

This wonderful experience being at a public university with students all over California, many Latino, many of Mexican immigrant heritage, or Guatemalan or South American heritage, and just their pain and confusion and pride in who they are, so many different emotions.

Michel: I'm curious about why now.

There have been so many inflection points along the way with the experience of being Latino.

We will talk more about that and what it means.

The experience has been so fraught.

Has there been some particular episode or incident or event or person that led you to want to say this now?

Hector: I started writing during the George Floyd spring.

This moment of reflection.

The entire country is reflecting on racism in the history of race hatred and discrimination in this country.

That reflection did not extend to our relationship with people of Latin American descent.

There has not been a national reckoning.

We do not have that presence in the media.

You have these images of chaos at the border.

The image in the media, the most common image of Latino people is of the maid or cartel member.

There is erasure from intellectual discussion from media punditry.

We are not seen or heard.

Michel: the subtitle of the book is A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino.

Here is one phrase in the book, you said, truth be told, those of us who can call ourselves Latino feel ridiculous.

Half the time we use the term.

Why is that?

Hector: if you ask your average person, what are you?

Your average brown person of Hispanic descent, they will say something like Mexican or Mexican-American or from South Central Los Angeles, or my father is Ecuadoran, my mother Puerto Rican.

Latino is not the first term that comes to our minds.

Latino in many ways feels like a marketing category.

Hispanic, the other term often used to talk about us, is invented by the Census Bureau, what you mark on the form.

There is this aspect of marketing in which we are all grouped together as this suppose it one people when in fact we might be Afro Latino, we might be Jewish and Latino, Asian and Latino.

Were very light skinned and white passing.

Latino is such a huge term that has a veneer of marketing to it, so it can feel ridiculous.

Although it is also a term of solidarity.

My kids are Guatemalan, Mexican, Angeleno.

Michel: why is it important to view history in terms of Empire?

Hector: A lot of Latino kids have this feeling that they are flawed, because they are running away from home, starting a family at 18 19 in Los Angeles.

When you start a family when you're 20, it is hard to be a stable family.

Part of the message for my classes is that we are not messed up.

We are the products of a system that is messed up.

Imperialism is messed up.

Our people suffer from a lack of power.

Look at our histories, there are deliberate policies in Central America to make us dumb.

Democratic governments that were overthrown, reformist and forward looking governments were overthrown by lackeys of the United States with deliberate policies to make us dumb and powerless.

We have to understand this as part of the equation of what makes us.

That is my message.

We have to study that the United States is an empire to understand our own histories.

Michel: you write about the American tradition of giving nonwhite people legal categories , certainly where people of African descent are concerned it has had specific legal consequences.

Indigenous people for sure have had legal consequences.

Talk about that reality of needing these categories to differentiate people from white, and what that has meant.

Hector: no human being is white or completely black, we are all different shades of brown.

White and black are social constructs.

They describe a relationship or state of mind.

White and black are invented when black slaves are brought in to keep the colonials economy going.

This describes a relationship, you are either white or black.

Same with Asian, Chinese.

The Chinese were brought over to construct the railroads and do work in the West, then we decide there are too many of them, they are affecting the look of the United States.

We passed the Chinese exclusion act.

We brought over so many Italians and Jews and Germans that we decided we did not want any more from those countries, so in the 1920's they created the new immigration law that restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Now we live in this time where Latino people do this work, we are synonymous with the service labor of this country.

Most of the crops are picked by Latino laborers.

The country is dependent on immigrant workers, people who have a border crossing in the past.

We as a country have invented this idea that they are a race of people, that they share these qualities in common that make them want to work in the fields were do service work, and we created these legal categories and immigrant status.

There are dozens of immigration status as you can have if you are of Latino descent.

This is the idea of Latino identity being equivalent to an alien status, and that is a legal term.

To be alien is a legal category that exists in American society.

Michel: there are people of Latino dissent who present as white and can if they want to.

Some famous actors and actresses are Latino dissent who change their names, and you would not know unless they told you.

I wonder, does that feel like a shared experience?

Hector: yes, for a lot of people Latino is like a suit of clothes that you can put on or take off.

There is definitely this color is him in our community.

Many of us are white passing.

40% of Latino people mark themselves as white on the census.

We have a very strange and long relationship with whiteness, absolutely.

Michel: why strange?

Hector: traditionally the old mindset is to think that lighter is prettier, lighter is smarter.

A lot of our relatives do things to lose their accents, change the color of their hair, the way they speak to embrace this idea of whiteness.

I say in my book that the relationship to whiteness is the comedy and tragedy of us.

At the same time there is increasingly now this sense that we should embrace our Africanness.

I know I have Mayan ancestors but my grandfathers never told me who they were because there was a shame with being indigenous.

Michel: I'm thinking about George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin, and he was trying to justify his conduct.

Their argument was he cannot be racist because his mom is Peruvian.

How do you understand something like that?

Hector: every Latino family that is big enough has at least one racist relative.

Being Latino does not make you nonracist.

Michel: how do you understand these guys who identify as Latino who are part of the proud boys?

With so many extremist groups tied up explicitly in anti-immigration ideologies and white supremacist ideologies?

Hector: I think it is liberal naiveté to think because you are a member of a people of color means you cannot have diverse views or you are born with this saintly manner.

That is not the way life works.

There are people who have shed this idea of pride in the immigrant story, and instead embrace the idea of erasure.

That is what white is.

Latinos were always supposed to become the next white group, like the next Italians were Jews, and that has not happened because of what immigration represents in this country.

It represents to many people this threat to our culture, this threat to our government, to our prosperity.

Latino as an idea has been racialized.

Michel: is that one of the myths you have set out to explode in this book?

Hector: absolutely.

Michel: this organic solidarity?

Hector: more than that, for me it is this simplification of Latino life, that we are just victims or criminals.

Even in the liberal media, the immigrant is this poor person in a caravan, not very educated, very passive.

To me, the dominant myth in the United States is one of Latino passivity.

Michel: that bothers you more than the myth of criminality that was so much part of the 2016 election?

Hector: they both bother me, they are both awful.

The idea that the number one job a Latino male actor will get is a cartel operative.

That is a terrible message to send to millions of Latino people, that is how you are seen, that is terrible.

The myth of passivity is one we have in our brains, one that we are fated to suffer or be the victims of this hatred.

People migrate because their lives are complicated, there is family dysfunction involved, and all of that is erased.

We are made to be simple people with simple motives, and that is maddening.

.

Michel: what is your dream?

Hector: my dream is a generation for these works of art to flourish on the airwaves.

That we have a Latino Harold Pinter or Arthur Miller waiting to be born.

We have our own "grapes of wrath" waiting to be told, and have that history be part of the American knowledge of itself.

The United States, so many people have married into Latino families or work alongside Latino people.

They have begun to do things they might not have done before.

The pinata is universal on American birthdays.

When the United States wakes up to we are part of the family and deserve to be heard and seen as much as anyone else, that is my dream.

Michel: for people who do not identify as Latino or see it as their heritage, can you offer anything to people not of this heritage, how does it include them?

Does it include them?

Hector: I would say the story of being Latino in this country has so many parallels with stories of being black or Asian or Italian or white, all these different identities that we construct, these labels are constructed to make us think that we are different.

And it is true, we have differences, but in fact the things we share in common, this incredible story called the United States history is such a powerful thing.

It makes us into a family.

My book is trying to tell the story of a member of your family that you might not have listened to as much before.

The quiet guy in the back, the cousin.

I'm trying to tell one more story of the American family, and that is an important one because it teaches us a lot about what it means to be American.

Michel: Hector Tobar, it has been a pleasure, thank you for talking with us.