Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now a substantive and thoroughly entertaining journey through over 500 years of Latino history in America. This is Latino History Month, and we're joined by cultural critic and Latino scholar Ilan Stavans to discuss the 25th-anniversary edition of his incredibly fun book, Latino USA: A Cartoon History. First published in 2000, Latino USA represents Stavans' innovative attempt to capture the nuances of Latino culture and history in the United States through the medium of comics.

The book covers a vast range of topics from Columbus's arrival to the Alamo, Desi Arnaz, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Salina. This revised edition, illustrated by Lalo Alcaraz, offers a few surprising updates we will let him reveal. Ilan Stavans, welcome back to WNYC.

Ilan Stavans: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First establish for our listeners why a cartoon history.

Ilan Stavans: Well, I think a cartoon history offers the opportunity to be irreverent and to approach the past in a way that is like outside the classroom and outside the conventions, to surprise people, to entertain them, and to show them aspects of history that they might not know in ways that are insightful and provocative.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump right to one of the images of the book that I have open in front of me. There seems to be a real debate about where to begin this broad and complex history. One of your characters, Maestra the teacher, says it all starts with Christopher Columbus and the Calavera, I may have asked you to explain. Calavera says, is it really necessary to start with him? Every history starts with this poor, misunderstood Italian. Couldn't we begin elsewhere? Ilan, that's really a good question. How do you present that pivotal moment in 1492, and what nuances do you bring to Columbus's arrival?

Ilan Stavans: Well, the first part of the answer, Brian, to your wonderful question, is that the book uses a number of deliberate stereotypes, like a toucan, a skeleton, popular comedian, canteen flask, to constantly question how we look at Latino history and not allow us to pass by without that skepticism and that doubt. That, I think, is essential to understand the past. 1492 is usually the moment we say, "Okay, Latin America, began here in the encounter with Europe." It's a trite and repetitive and often a moment full of commonplaces.

The book tries to wonder if we have gone beyond that, if we should go way back to the indigenous past, where there was a thriving culture in the United States, in Latin America, that it should be as much part of the history as anything else? If the poor Columbus that has been trashed and targeted and revamped and revisited is now an empty vessel, an empty character that we should leave Ilane, for God's sake.

Brian Lehrer: You do have this Calavera recurring and explain Calavera. It relates to the day of the dead, right?

Ilan Stavans: Right. Both of us, myself and Lalo Alcaraz, the illustrator, are Mexicans, we used a number of tropes from Mexican popular culture and the Calavera. The skeleton, or in this case, the skull, is the image that everybody lands on when we think of the day of the dead. It was popularized at the beginning of the 20th century by a cartoonist, Jose Guadalupe Posada, and since then, it has become a symbol of Mexico and Mexican Americans that bridges the gap between the here and now and the afterlife, and is always irreverent and is always looking to understand how the aspects that define us should be seen with a larger perspective.

We thought that it would be a nice approach to bring the Calavera as one of the narrators of the history and see what our ancestors are telling about the story that we are looking to analyze here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Ilan Stavans, cultural critic, Latino scholar, publisher of Restless Book, and author, with Lalo Alcaraz of Latino USA: A Cartoon History. We're talking about the new edition of the book, which is now out in paperback and updated for its 25th anniversary. 212433 WNYC. 212-433-9692. We'll go on to a few more images, but how has your understanding of Latino identity, history, and culture changed? I realize this is a big question since the book was first published 25 years ago.

Ilan Stavans: Brian, when the book was first published, we had just come up with the term Latino. We had just come up with the idea that we should see a history of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Cubans and Dominicans, not as parallel lines, each of them, each of those national backgrounds on their own, but altogether, we had finally recognized that there's political power in the unity. We had finally come to the fact that second and third generations, Latinos are often not identified with the country of origin of their parents and that there is such a-- There's an invention, this Latinoness, that is the result of mixing and matching and juxtaposing.

The book tries to show how those various lines converge and tell us a history. In this 25 years of a book, I can't tell you how proud I am. It's a book that has been very popular among middle schoolers, high schoolers, in college. We have received hundreds of letters from readers and teachers. For a book in this day and age, to be 25 years of age and to be able to continue to expand, we expanded it for the 50th edition with new information, and now we've expanded it from-- It first appeared in the year 2000. Now it's coming close to 2025.

It just feels that the book has grown with me and with Lalo and we have grown with the book. It feels like it has become a staple of how to see Latinos and to laugh at Latino history graciously and in a benign form. I think it has also allowed us to age the last installment of the book, Brian shows us a veteran, delighted in what we've achieved, but also wondering how to take this book to the next stage. Mortality is an important feature.

Just feel very proud of the connection that we've generated with people and of the fact that a book can continue speaking and becoming a kind of mirror to a community that wants to see itself in a changing fashion, not in a state static and immobile way, but constantly revising its own versions of the past and its way of connecting with the future.

Brian Lehrer: Latino listeners, can you imagine a cartoon depicting something from Latino history? That may be a tall order on no notice. Don't mean to put you on the spot, but maybe that's a creative way to contribute here or invite Ilan Stavans and his collaborator, the illustrator Alcaraz to come up with a cartoon in a next edition or maybe in a standIlane format about something from Latino history, anything.

Ilan Stavans: I would love that.

Brian Lehrer: Anybody have the imagination, on no notice to come up with a request. It sounds like, from what Ilan is just saying as a reaction, that he takes requests like an old disc jockey, 21243 WNYC 212-433-9692, or anybody else with anything relevant to say or ask or to tell a story. I'm looking at the squares in this cartoon history of Latino USA that are near the end of the book, and people are kind of at a club here, I guess. Somebody says the lesson, I guess the lesson is that history is a theater of possibilities.

Right after that, the Calavera, the skull says, "We've reached the end, haven't we?" There you have it, a tour of more than 450 years in history. Then somebody else, just as comic relief, says, "I'd like a refund for this show now." To the original thought bubble there, the lesson, I guess the lesson is that history is a theater of possibilities. I'm thinking of what you said at the beginning of the segment, that on this 25th anniversary of the original publication of the book, that it was 25 years ago when the word Latino was first starting to be used.

Yet here we are in 2024, people still talk about this as Hispanic Heritage Month. I'm curious about your takes on the various terms and the debates around them. Latinx has been introduced more recently, and some people love it, some people hate it. Does it matter?

Ilan Stavans: I think, Brian, the fact that we're still debating how to call ourselves is a statement of a community that is trying to find its own identity, that struggles, but that, in a very healthy way, pushes in different directions. It all started with the Spanish language people of the United States. Then it went to the Spanish people. Then it went to all kinds of the Mexican Americans, the Puerto Ricans in the mainland, the Cubans. At one point in the '90s, late '80s, early '90s, the idea of Latino came up. People resisted it because it was masculine. It should be Latina, Latino.

Then it came Latinx. I frankly, personally, because of my passion for words, find Latinx to be appalling. It's a concoction that comes from academics, and it's mainly used in classrooms and in a university campuses. It doesn't have much inroads in the community itself. You wander around in Spanish Harlem or Washington Heights or Little Columbia, and you never hear the word Latinx, but you have a student and a professor talking about Latinx identity. That shows you how we fragment, how we compartmentalize in the quest to try to understand us all within one single rubric.

I don't know if we ever will. We are too many. We are too different. There are 60-plus million Latinos in the United States, and I'm not counting those that are undocumented and that are an essential part of this as well. I am also not counting the fact that Latin America is in many ways an extension of the United States, just as the United States is part of Latin America. It's a complex issue.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Celia in Rivervale, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Celia.

Celia: Hi, Brian. The first point I wanted to make is that the term Latino encompasses such vast number of cultures. I'm from Columbia. I'm having a hard time fitting into that. We're not homogeneous, and the Mexican story doesn't tell my story. That's number one. Number two, if they want to add a cartoon in the future to the book, I would add Juan Valdez. When I came to this country, that's the only thing Americans knew about Colombia, that they sold coffee, and there was this man on TV, Juan Valdez, who was a coffee grower on a mule with a poncho, surveying his property and promoting the coffee. I think he kind of is an iconic figure for Colombians.

Brian Lehrer: Is Juan Valdez in the book, Ilan?

Ilan Stavans: Actually, Juan Valdez is in the book already. I am delighted.

Celia: Beautiful.

Ilan Stavans: He is iconic. The fact, Celia that you don't feel part of Latino is exactly the same emotion that I feel. The term Latino is a rubric that makes me uncomfortable. You are Colombian and you have your own history. A Mexican. We are trying to find some commonalities in the book. Looks for those commonalities. Doesn't want to force anything on people. I think that the plurality of all that we are, it makes us stronger, even when we not always find a term that defines us all together.

Brian Lehrer: Celia, thank you very much. The cartoon history touches, among so many other things, on the Alamo, and it says, history books tell us only half the story about the famous twelve-day battle of the Alamo in 1833. What's the other half, in brief? How do you depict that in the panels of this cartoon history?

Ilan Stavans: The other half, Brian, is the half of Mexico. It is not a story of American heroism. It's also a story of Mexican tragedy and the abuse that the Mexican soldiers went through in that battle. Given that there are so many Mexican descendants of those Mexican soldiers that now live in the United States, it is high time to see the story whole, to understand that the white soldiers that are imprinted in the history of the United States are only telling one side, one version of the story, and the other story is the descendants that experience a different perspective.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, let's take another call. Here's Claire in Hartsdale. You're on WNYC with Ilan Stavans. Hi, Claire.

Claire: Hi, Brian. Happy to be here with you. I just wanted to make the point that I thank the person speaking, I don't know his name, for pointing out that our history should begin with the indigenous. The native people here who are really, they were already a culture already doing so many good things, and they were even kind to the colonialists who were not kind to them. That history should definitely go way beyond Columbus. I agree with him completely.

Also, I don't know if you want to mention that in Colombia there are the indigenous mamos who are healers and they have predicted a long time ago, saw them on Channel 13 saying, if the ice caps melt, our planet is in for a very severe, terrible time. They are brilliant native people.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Claire. Tell us a little more about how you deal with the indigenous people, the people who were here before Columbus and who really still make up part of the identity of what's known as Latino.

Ilan Stavans: Brian, and your color, that's an essential component of the book. For many, many centuries, our history has been the history of how Europeans tell the story of Latin America or of the US. What the book wants to show is that Columbus is just an artificial moment. There was much that started before, and if we consider that in the southwest was, up until the middle of the 19th century, part of Latin America and part of Mexico, in that there were many indigenous cultures in Mexico and in the southwest.

They are an essential component of who we are. They are dreams, they are mythology, they are stories. There were 2,000 indigenous languages at the moment of arrival of the Spaniards and the Portuguese to Latin America and to what is today the United States. That is an essential component of the book. It stresses it. I think it's not only about the past. I think what the book is trying to say is that those indigenous cultures are alive and well and constitute an essential component of our present and our future.

Finally, what I would say also, Brian, is that the book tries to show that the future is actually less mobile than the past. The past we debate, we contest, we rewrite all the time. The future we don't know anything about yet, and so let's have fun with the past, and let's bring in all the other perspectives, essentially the indigenous perspectives that have been left out to make us more wholesome, more complete, more accurate.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Here's Zeke and Park Slope. You're on WNYC. Hi, Zeke. [crosstalk] Let me try that again. Sorry about that. I didn't click you accurately enough. Now you're on Zeke. Forgive me.

Zeke: Okay. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got to now.

Zeke: Great. As I said, I'm becoming a regular calling in because you always have great programs. I am originally from Central America and Panama. When I came to this country, I have to admit, when I grew up, when we talked about Latin, our families could be as white, as white, as dark as night, okay? Because you look to self as this country, and then when you come here, begins to break it down on what kind of Latin you are. Well, if that's the case, then we also look at the Afro Latinos, okay? Because almost like a subculture within the Latin culture, okay?

[unintelligible 00:19:39] being [unintelligible 00:19:39], we we actually celebrate being our Black identity. We have, like, reggaeton, which is music really came from Caribbean, that's been adopted by the Latin culture, which is great. I don't know if it gets that great recognition that some African-based root music. It's great that we in Latin America have historically, I grew up, looking at our Latin cultures and our Latin country, you come to this country, they put us into a melting pot. This jumbalaya, this combination of Latin pollo, America's greatest separating and almost destructing or destroying our cultural heritage and Afro culture is one of those that's kind of lost in the whole conversation.

I wanted to bring that to the table because I think we're trying to fight for that recognition.

Brian Lehrer: Zeke, thank you very much. In a way, it's very related to the previous caller on the importance of indigenous identity to Latino culture, also African identity. Again, that's part of the mix of what contributes to what Latino is considered who came here voluntarily from Europe, who was brought here from Africa as slaves. They all mixed with indigenous people, and that's all part of what equals Latino. I assume you agree.

Ilan Stavans: Absolutely, Brian. Our friend, caller from Panama, the afro component in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in Colombia, in different parts of Latin America, is an essential, crucial aspect of our culture. The book, just as with the Indigenous cultures, pays attention to all the Black, the mestizos, the Afro-Cubans, and Afro-Puerto Ricans that have had an important role in pushing us to understand race more broadly. Race is understanding Latin America very differently than it is in the United States.

Within the latino population, race is sometimes, as the caller, rightly said, brushed over, because we come here and the country kind of pushes us to be more European or more white. I think it's very important to display the color variety of the Latino population and to give each of these different groups and backgrounds the place that they have and the voice that they need. In the book, there are a number of people from the colonial period, people during the independence period, that were Black or had been former slaves or are now mestizos, that are as important as anybody who came from a European background.

I think that concert, that symphony of voices, is a task that the young generation, that's why I think the book has touched the cord. The younger generation is eager to acknowledge, to sense, and to voice out.

Brian Lehrer: How do you address the civil rights movements within Latino communities in your book, in a cartoon history explicitly?

Ilan Stavans: That's a very important question, Brian. The civil rights movement coincides with the Chicano movement on the one side and with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans seeking to have a voice and be recognized for who they are. In the 1960s, the 1970s, figures like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta have a place in the book, and that they are also questioned. They were not heroic without their own mistakes. They struggled to be heard by the larger voices that were taking place in the United States that had to do with civil rights.

Civil rights at that time was mainly seen as Black and white rights, not mestizo rights. I think the book wants to convey the fact that even the period of the civil rights movement needs to be revisited to understand that there were other groups that were also fighting for a seat in the American table that were kind of recognized marginally, but that now in 2024, where there are 60 plus million Latinos in the United States, very soon, one out of every four Americans is going to be of Latino background.

It is high time to see what others were doing in the '60s and bring them in, into the textbooks and into the larger discussion. This country is not a Black and white country. This is a country of multiple colors with multiple voices.

Brian Lehrer: I love how many callers we're getting from how many different countries originally in Latin America. Before we run out of time, let's get Rafael and Montclair in here, originally from the Dominican. Right. Rafael, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Rafael: Yes, good morning. How are you? Indeed? I want to make a very clear distinction. I'm sorry that I jumped into the conversation somewhat late. I don't know the name of the person that you're interviewing, which, by the way, I appreciate the work that you're trying to do, but there are a couple of what, I think, inconsistencies that you made in your presentation that I think it needs to be cleared out. Number one, the term Latino, it seems to me, from what you said, that you are speaking of that term as in pre-1492, and that is not the case.

The Latino-- Hold on. Let me finish. The Latino terminology exists in terms of the Spaniards jumping in here, that's number one. Number two, the fact that there are a multitude of Spanish-speaking countries in America and even as far as Africa, the only thing that we have in common, for all intents and purpose, is what the Spaniards imposed of us, which was the language and the culture that they tried to impose. As you can see today, our native cultures are beginning to come to forefront because it's what we are.

When we speak about the, "The Latino agenda," we need to make sure that we understand that there are 21 countries feeding into this country of Spanish speaking background, and they have individual and very unique culture that identify them as a country with not only boundary, but culture and history.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a response because we're running out of time. Ilan, go ahead.

Ilan Stavans: Oh, absolutely. I think your caller from the Dominican Republic or with a background there is absolutely right. Those terms like Latino, Hispanic, mestizo, Latinx are recent creations. They go back to and represent particular periods. Prior to 1492, the terminology, even among the indigenous people was very different. That doesn't mean that they didn't have a terminology. Your caller is also absolutely right. In order to recognize the pluralism, the diversity of the Latino community, we have to see the 22 plus countries, each of them, that give force to who we are in the United States. Each of them has a different history. Some of them were marked by the Spaniards, others by the Portuguese.

Others themselves have gone through dramatic changes. It is absolutely true, Latinones is sum of parts. We are always questioning who we are, and that is what makes us powerful. The act of asking the question, of debating, not of assuming that a culture that came from Spain is one that is going to represent us all, that culture has to be contested.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we are out of time, but listeners, look what kind of a conversation you can start with a whole bunch of people with cartoons. So our great gratitude goes to our guest, Ilan Stavans, cultural critic, Latino scholar, publisher of restless books, and author with Lalo Alcaraz of Latino USA, a cartoon history. This is the new edition, which is out now in paperback and updated for its 25th anniversary. Congratulations on the long life of this and on updating it so brilliantly. Thank you so much for sharing it with us, the way you do. Ilan Stavans: Many, many--

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