Jimmy Akin

(NOTE: FWIW, this post was written several days ago, before the question arose about how often I say nice things about Latin Americans.)

When I moved to San Diego thirteen years ago, one of the things that I liked about the area was the ability it offered to listen to Spanish-language radio stations.

Faced with a lot of the junk on regular American radio, Spanish-language radio offered songs that were interesting musically and that featured lyrics that were often considerably more wholesome than what would be found on some English-language stations. (How many English-language songs have you heard about wearing a white shirt?)

But disturbing themes are present in the local Spanish-language radio market–like the image being projected by one of the most popular stations.

It’s call letters are XHTY (Mexican radio stations commonly begin with X instead of K or W) and its broadcast frequency is 99.7 FM, but it goes by the name "La Invasora."

What does "La Invasora" mean in Spanish?

"The Invader."

Here’s what the station’s web page says about it:

La Invasora is the fastest growing Spanish language radio station in San Diego. It’s the #1 Spanish language station in North County and #2 in the San Diego Metro area. *

San Diegans wake-up to El Levanton, one the best morning shows in town, which delivers humor, news, sports, great music and the hottest topics within the Hispanic Community with our popular personalities El Chon and La Chula.

La Invasora has high visibility in the market, obtained thru on going advertising campaigns on the top Hispanic television stations, print publications, billboards and community and grass roots events.

One of La Invasora’s specialties is producing high attendance events, such as Descarga Invasora Summer music festival in Tijuana had a crowd of over 45,000 in 2003 and our 4th of July music fest in San Diego drew over 25,000.

Station Profile:

La Invasora has a booming 60,000 watt Signal that reaches the greater San Diego/Tijuana area, the 3rd largest Hispanic market in the Country. Its format is the widely popular “Mexican regional” that plays a variety of today’s top Hispanic hits like Banda and Norteño collections.

Audience profile:

XHTY reaches a broad demographical and geographical are mainly composed 18-49 male and female demographic.

Now, the reason that radio stations adopt identities other than their call letters is because they think that the identity they craft for themselves will appeal to their target audience. For example, another local radio station (KPRI) has dubbed itself "Rock Without Rules," and it’s not hard to guess from its name that it wants to appeal to a younger, more rebellious audience than does station KMYT, which calls itself "Smooth Jazz."

Taking station marketing identities as a clue to who the station is trying to appeal to, what does it say when a local station starts calling itself "The Invader"?

In an English-speaking community in a radio market in the American Midwest, it might mean that the station is going after the same kind of young, rebellious market that "Rock Without Rules" is.

But when the language is Spanish and the market is mere minutes from the Mexican border and there are numerous people in the market who have crossed the border illegally, it takes on a different cast.

The cast is further affected when one realizes that there is an irredentist movement in the area in which some radical activists are advocating the idea that "Aztlan" (the American Southwest from California to Texas) should be flooded with illegal aliens who can one day gain sufficient strength to reclaim it for Mexico.

The fact that the station would conduct a massive marketing campaign for this identity, with logos like the one above put on busses, billboards, and auto decals, adds a rather brazen quality as well.

And the fact that the station is ranked as #1 or #2 in different regions of San Diego County in the Spanish-language radio market suggests that there are a significant number of individuals for whom the station and presumably  its identity are appealing.

Now, I have to issue

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: The identity a station crafts for itself is only a part of its success or lack of success. Not everybody who listens to La Invasora views himself or herself as an invader. There are undoubtedly many listeners who just like the music mix or the on-air personalities. Not all listeners are illegal aliens or even aliens at all. And not all listeners are supporters of the radical Aztlan irredentist movement; many are also undoubtedly patriotic Americans. So the mere fact that someone listens to and likes this station is NOT an indictment of that person.

But the fact that a station would choose a marketing identity of "The Invader" and be highly successful with it against a background of massive illegal immigration including radical activists who want to remove territory from the United States and add it to Mexico is at least disturbing.

It also, frankly, does not serve to foster good community relations between English-speakers and Spanish-speakers. Like the counterproductive wearing and waving of Mexican flags at the recent anti-immigration control rallies, having "Invader" logos all over busses and billboards and automobiles is more likely to inflame community relations than calm them.

Too much should not be made of the station and its chosen identity. It’s just a radio station and a marketing campaign. But it’s a straw in the wind that reflects a disturbing underlying situation.

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Honestly, Jimmy, I agree w/you about the immigration stuff, but I think it would help your cause if you would make better efforts to say nice things about Latin Americans once in a while. For example, no one would ever accuse me of racism, despite my views on immigration. I rather openly express my admiration for Latin American culture and all things Spanish. I live in Southern California, often shop at a Spanish-speaking grocery store, attend Mass with Latinos, eat various Mexican foods (not just tacos and burritos), have a devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and forcefully condemn the land grab of the Mexican-American War.

I appreciate what you’re saying, and I have often considered doing this. I may in the future.

Actually, I do say nice things about Latin Americans. I do that all the time.

But this is one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don’t" situations. If I were to go out of my way to praise the Mexican people while criticizing illegal immigration then people would accuse me of being a phony and of only including the praise as a hypocritical attempt to neutralize criticism of myself. On the other hand, if I don’t go out of my way to praise the Mexican people then this gets taken in and of itself as racism, so either way you go you are damned (i.e., condemned, look up the word damnatus in Latin).

Knowing this, my instinctive solution is to try to keep people and personalities largely out of it and stick as much as possible to talking about issues and principles. This is an extension of my general apologetic practice, which is to talk about issues and not people. If you listen to the radio show, you may notice that I try to avoid commenting on individuals (i.e., "So-and-so is a good guy" or "So-and-so is a bad guy") and instead focus on the issues that the caller has on his mind in connection with so-and-so. I find it is generally more productive this way.

Thus, while I can’t stop anyone who wants to commit rash judgment and accuse me of racism from doing so, I can try to keep my own hands clean by treating the subject on as abstract a level as possible that focuses on principles instead of ethnicities.

The issue is whether America should secure its borders and do its best to stop illegal immigration (it can never be stopped completely any more than other crimes can be stopped completely, but that’s not an excuse for not trying).

And the fact is that many illegal aliens are not Mexicans or even Latin Americans. They are people from all over the world who either crossed the border illegally or who overstayed their visas illegally.

I may document just how porous our border is, but a porous border doesn’t care whether you’re Mexican or Chinese or Arabic or Afghani. In fact, it would be the latter two groups of people who I would be more concerned about coming over the Mexican or Canadian borders illegally since they are groups which are more likely to harbor individuals wanting to blow up planes or buildings than the first two groups.

I may even comment on the particular problems concerning illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America, but when I do I wish to treat matters as neutrally and matter of factly as I can, without seeking to offer character assessments of groups one way or the other, because character assessments tend to distract from the issue.

If I were to just call attention to positive things about a particular group then I would (a) open myself up to charges of pandering in order to deflect criticism and (b) paper over problems that may exist with the group (e.g., the fact that some of the people coming over the border are drug dealers and not hard working people seeking a better life).

If I were to just call attention to negative things about a particular group (e.g., the drug dealers among illegal aliens) then I would (a) get slammed for criticizing the group and (b) fail to call attention to its good points (e.g., the fact that many are hard working people seeking a better life).

One solution to this would be to offer an assessment that calls attention to both positive and negative things about the group but this would have its own problems–e.g., who am I to judge? and it would start arguments about whether the assessment is accurate or whether it is really balanced or not; and it would have to be re-issued every time I touch the subject and thus become a kind of obligatory "Let’s get the balanced character assessment out of the way so that we can prove we’re not racists and get on with the issue-discussing part of the post," and I just really don’t want those headaches.

To date I have found it better to stay out of assessing people’s characters altogether and just stick to the issues when possible (not that it is always possible).

I also have a good bit of trust in my readers that they have a sense of my own racial and ethnic openness as displayed on the blog and the radio show, where I have defended interracial marriages, referred to skin differences as simply cosmetic differences with no more intrinsic status than hair or eye color, defended  Masses that mix English and Spanish, talked a lot about cultural variability and that we need to seek to understand what other cultures are trying to accomplish with the way they write or speak or bury their dead and not automatically assume that our own way of doing these things is the right one and that we should not just evaluate them in terms of our cultural practices–and then there’s all the discussion of language that I get into, language being the central aspect of any culture.

Without going to the extreme of saying that you can never criticize anything another culture does (e.g., female circumcision in the Middle East leaps to mind as a cultural practice I would criticize), I tend to be on the more multicultural end of the spectrum, but I don’t feel the need to step forward and try to prove this each time I talk about illegal immigration.

I’m not the one who has something to prove.

I could, of course, go on the blog and point things out like the fact that I work with and socialize with folks of Latino origin, that I study Spanish, that I speak Spanish when around Spanish-speakers precisely in order to honor their culture, that I go to Spanish-language Masses, that I like Mexican music, that I like Mexican food, that I like travelling in Mexico, etc., etc., etc. But these things would get me absolutely nothing.

They would be twisted against me as an overanxious attempt to prove that I’m not a racist.

As an illustration of this point, consider the post I wrote yesterday about how the race card is being overplayed in the debate on illegal immigration.

Now, I’ve been doing a series of posts on illegal immigration (a series that will end once I’ve said what I have to say on the subject; this ain’t gonna be a perennial on the blog), and as part of that series I’ve been doing posts that point out bad arguments that are being used in the debate.

Allegations of racism are a bad argument. In fact, they aren’t arguments at all. They’re simply as ad hominem attacks on people one disagrees with. And I’ve been reading about these attacks in various newspaper stories and editorials online, and I’m thinking, "Man, that’s a really stupid argument. I’m going to do a blog post about it."

So I do a blog post about it, in which I never once mention the fact that I’m rather multicultural or the fact that I’m not a racist or anything like that, and I stick to talking about the issue, and one reader who was behaving like an asinus (look up that word in Latin if you need to), pops off with:

Oddly enough the racism charge is the only thing that has given pangs to your conscience.

which is a direct statement that I have pangs of conscience over the racism charge, which implies that I have a guilty conscience on this, which implies that I’m guilty of racism and am overcompensating, which is a rash judgment on the part of the commenter.

Excuse me, but I was talking about a dumb argument. I’m not overcompensating every time I comment on a dumb argument. The reader really should try out the Catechism’s giving a favorable construction to others’ words and actions idea.

Then there are some people who are just over the top, like this fine commenter:

For those who didn’t to bother reading the entire post, let me summarize:

1) I’m not racist.
2) If you accuse me of being racist, the Catholic church says you are a sinner.
3) Let me quote some church law.

Honestly Jimmy, if you want to debate whether or not you are racist, you can do better than threaten Catholics with church laws. You might try actually discussing the issue.

Respectfully,

NAME DELETED

who is simliarly behaving like an asina, and in a more heavy-handed way than the first commenter.

So you see what happens: I do a post pointing out the vileness of making unfounded allegations of racism because they’re vile and because they’re being made in the current debate, and two readers behaving like asini decide to make vile allegations against me to the effect that I must have a guilty conscience over racism and am therefore overcompensating by doing a post that is really all about me, though the post wasn’t about me at all. It was about a dumb argument–which is really an interpersonal attack rather than an argument–that is out there in the debate right now.

What these people were doing was making a personal attack on me by publicly suggesting that I’m a closet racist with a guilty conscience. It was an attempt to embarrass me in public and thus an attempt to hurt me emotionally. It wasn’t an attempt to engage in rational discussion. It was an attempt to shut down rational discussion by making an interpersonal attack.

That’s vile.

Can you imagine what these people would do if I started saying things they could translate into, "Hey, many of my best friends are Hispanics!"

My conclusion is thus that there are simply asini in the world who will behave in a vile manner no matter what you do, and as a general matter it is better to ignore the tea-leaf reading that the donkeys will try to do and just stick to the issue.

That way we don’t get distracted from the issue and if the donkeys try to distract us then they’re the ones who have been acting like asses.