A Surging New Spirit

By Richard Lacayo

America, the great receiver. From every culture to arrive within its borders, it embraces some new ingredient. Puritan wrath. Black cool. Irish poetics. Jewish irony. One after another, America draws them down the channels of its awareness and puts them into play in new settings. They collide and cross- pollinate and mix it up, nowhere more so than in the arts and popular culture. Sparks fly at the meeting points. The Jewish novel works variations on the keynotes of Puritan gloom. The western is reseen through John Ford's Irish eyes. Sinatra meets Duke Ellington. Every offering is admitted and set dancing with new partners. It may be better to give, but it's a lot more fun to receive.

Nowadays the mainstream is receiving a rich new current. More and more, American film, theater, music, design, dance and art are taking on a Hispanic color and spirit. Look around. You can see the special lightning, the distinctive gravity, the portable wit, the personal spin. The new marquee names have a Spanish ring: Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia, Maria Conchita Alonso. At the movies, the summer of La Bamba gave way last year to the autumn of Born in East L. A.; now the springtime of Stand and Deliver blends into the summer of Salsa. On the record charts the story is the same: Miami Sound Machine, Los Lobos, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. The rhythm is gonna get you.

An equivalent Latino surge is reaching the higher cultural circles. The art world is opening its eyes to Hispanic artists whose work, sharp and full throated, owes its strength to aesthetic intelligence, not ethnic scenery. Meanwhile, Latino playwrights are supplying off-Broadway and the regional theaters with new voices. And while the great Hispanic-American Novel is still waiting to be written, the splendid figures of Latin American literature -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes -- are being translated straight into the American literary fabric, not to mention the best-seller lists.

Then there are the developments that are harder to pin down, the Latin flavors and inflections conveyed through all the intricate paths of daily life, in the offerings at table or the bolero curve of a woman's jacket. You can't walk down the street without running into them. On the corner where the / disco used to be, a Latin-beat club; kids hip hop on floors that withstood the bump. For lunch, a burrito. What's that in the salad? It's jicama. (Say hee- ca-ma.) Things that once seemed foreign now seem as American as . . . a burrito. With each fresh connection tastes are being rebuilt, new understandings concluded. The American mind is adding a new wing.

Yes, but is this really new? Was there ever a time without a Mexican spitfire in the movies, a hacienda-style suburb down the road, a Latin crooner singing Cuando Cuando to the stars? And in the past hasn't the U.S. joined the conga line, bought the Trini Lopez album, then moved on heedlessly to something else? It has and it did. But this time the prospects are different. Latin influences that were once just a pinch of spice for most Americans are bidding to become a vital part of the wider culture.

Demographics are the main reason. The number of Hispanics in the U.S. has increased 30% since 1980, to 19 million. They account now for about 7.9% of the nation's population. Most trace their roots back to Mexico (63%), Puerto Rico (12%) and Cuba (5%); the rest to the nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean. By the year 2000 their numbers are expected to reach 30 million, 15% of the whole. And roughly one-third of all U.S. Hispanics intermarry with non-Hispanics, promising the day when the two cultures will be as tightly entwined as a strand of DNA.

Another reason is more subtle. The creative work being done by Hispanics today is more than ever recognizable to Americans as the work of, well, Americans -- Hispanic Americans. Paintings and music that spring from Latin sources are being filtered through a north-of-the-border sensibility. As in La Bamba: its story of Chicano life is told through myths of immigrant struggle and showbiz martyrdom that were born in the U.S.A. Increasingly, too, Hispanic artists and entertainers are courting the mass audience in English. Many of the nation's Latino theaters perform in English only. "I don't want to be a good Hispanic theater," says Max Ferra, Artistic Director of Manhattan's predominantly English INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center. "I want to be a very good American theater." After writing two books in Spanish, Novelist Roberto Fernandez has just published his first in English, Raining Backwards, a comic account of Cuban life in Miami. "I did it for the same reason that Miami Sound Machine sings in English," he explains. "I wanted to reach a wider audience."

/ The greater visibility of Hispanics in the cultural landscape is a reminder that the roots of Spanish culture go deep into American life, especially in that spawning ground of the national self-image, the West. Much of the territory of the Western states, from Texas to California, was held first by Spain, then Mexico. The Spanish names of many Western cities -- Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe -- bear witness to the settlements of the early Franciscan friars. The first play on American soil was performed by Spanish colonists in New Mexico in 1598. Yet in the hills of New Mexico and the old mission towns of the Pacific Coast, the descendants of Spanish settlers who greeted the Anglo pioneers are amused (and sometimes not amused) to find themselves perennially arriving in the national consciousness. As Luis Valdez, writer and director of La Bamba, once put it, "We did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us."

Even so, for years most Americans were content to imagine the Latin world as a tropical paradise or a giant border town, a torrid zone just across the line of sexual decorum, that most heavily policed boundary in the American psyche. Though that image is being discarded, it is not going without a fight. In a Miami department store not long ago, the Cuban-born fashion designer Adolfo, a favorite of Nancy Reagan's, was pained to overhear two women express surprise that he was the creator of a collection that was elegant and simple. "Obviously," he laments, "they just assumed that anything a Cuban designed would be full of neon, sequins and ruffles."

Which is not to say that Hispanic culture is dowdy. (Try telling yourself that after a night at a salsa club.) What it is, however, is diverse and complex, embedded with traditions inherited from baroque Spain, from the Aztecs and Mayans, from the descendants of black slaves who peopled the Antilles, from the mountainous country of Central America. Each winds its way differently into the American imagination, where it gets put to new uses.

There are the things that come from tropical sea-bordered places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic. African influences are the legacy of the region's old status as a center of the slave trade. They can be heard in the Afro-Caribbean rhythm that the Talking Heads deploy in their new song Mr. Jones to pay mock homage to a straitlaced character. No other rhythm would quite do, would say quite the same thing. Why? Because the point is not just to make a danceable cut, but to set up a dialogue between David Byrne's high- strung ironies and the irresistible counterarguments of the beat. That thrumming rhythm says forget the nerdy options of the industrial world, where the commands of the dollar sign squash the spirit. Why not a world where the brain and the hips are both engaged?

The civilization of Mexico, meanwhile, is undergirded by a powerful Indian legacy. It can be felt in the somber and ceremonial notes of Mexican Catholicism. And it can be felt in the work of a Mexican-American painter like Carlos Almaraz, whose series of car-crash paintings double as jokes about the encounter between Hispanic and Anglo in America. But the paintings are also built on a notion of duality -- strangeness and beauty, violence and peace -- that has roots in Aztec cosmology, which saw in pairings a sign of balance in the universe.

For all the diversity of Latin cultures, there are also some shared characteristics that bring new inflections to American life. The U.S. is a nation that puts no great premium on the past. Sometimes it seems that the prevailing notion of history is a Top 40 playlist from the 1960s. But Hispanic culture is consumed with the past, on both the personal and historical levels, and drawn to the memory play, the history painting, the musical tradition to accomplish the tasks of recollection. It was only fitting that the actor Edward James Olmos should star in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, the story of a 1901 confrontation between a Mexican farmer and the Texas Rangers that has lived on ever since as a corrido, a story song.

Hispanic life also puts a different stress on the claims of individualism. The arts in America are absorbed by personal experience, the melodrama of the interior life, the spectacle of "me." Hispanic culture offers a counterweight in the claims of community and the shared impulse. You can see those asserting themselves in mainstream life through such means as the outdoor murals -- acts of public declamation in the tradition of the great Mexican muralists -- that are an essential part of the Los Angeles cityscape. Add to that sentiment the claims of family, the primal unit of Hispanic life. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz recently described it. "In the North American ethic" he wrote, "the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals the true protagonist is the family." It shows in the work of a photographer like Tony Mendoza. He sees in his extended Cuban family what it is that sometimes makes * them comic, but he also knows that their fate is his, their picture is his own I.D.

So these ingredients of Hispanic feeling are absorbed, along with the Hispanic works that carry them, into the American repertory. In show business they sometimes call this process crossover, the chartmaker's term for the record or film that reaches beyond its expected audience. For many Hispanics, the whole notion is ringed all around with skepticism and mixed feelings. (Who wants to cross over anyway? You come here.) Not everyone is crazy about the term Hispanic, which came into vogue in the 1970s and was seized by marketers; it seems to smudge a dozen separate nationalities into an ethnic blur. And a phenomenon made up so heavily of pop charts and box-office receipts is not much help in the struggles against such things as low wages and poor education, the things that count most for Hispanics still in the barrios. There are misgivings too about the kind of treatment Hispanic life will get from big art galleries and entertainment conglomerates that can grind whole cultures into merchandise. Does anyone really need a sitcom with characters named Juan and Maria mouthing standard showbiz punch lines? The trick for Hispanic talents these days is to get to the market fresh, not canned.

Always chafing against cliches too narrow to contain them, Hispanics may find their greatest luxury in not being hemmed in by any preconceptions at all. Consider the Los Angeles artist known as Gronk. He has impeccable Chicano credentials: born in 1954 in mostly Chicano East Los Angeles, he was a co- founder in his younger days of an ad hoc group of Latino artists who brought their art to the streets. But all of that was the forcing ground for a talent that resists ethnic labels. His paintings carry echoes of Mexican symbolism, but they also wear the signs of European expressionism, new-wave imagery, old- fashioned camp. And he recalls low- and high-culture influences in his adolescence that are shared by half the Anglo painters in Manhattan. "Daffy Duck on TV in the morning and Camus in my back pocket," as he once described it. Someone like Gronk does not cross over at all. In him, the cultures simply converge.

Maybe convergence is the key. This is not just a box-office phenomenon, after all, but an episode in an ongoing cultural evolution, one in which Americans of all kinds learn to see a bit of Latino within themselves. In that process a Spanish term might help. The word is corazon, meaning heart. Let it stand for what is necessary in all relations between the Americans who are not Hispanics and the Americans who are. Their shared history, full of frictions and resentments, marked by episodes of bigotry, exploitation and even bloodshed, might yet become a comedy of reconciliation, but that would take real heart and plenty of it. Not the valentine of pop crooning, not the thumping bag inflated for election years, but the experienced heart -- tread marked, willing, unconditional. The one that listens. Because, as they cross over into the American imagination, Hispanics are sending one irresistible message: we come bearing gifts.

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles, Cristina Garcia/Miami and Edward M. Gomez/New York