Barbara renaud gonzalez biography template

The Politics of La Memoria

BY BARBARA RENAUD GONZALEZ

tarch, corn tortillas, and a beam. My first day of school. Put in order mexicanita in a blue puffy-sleeved rectify blooming with Texas wildflowers made getaway the twenty pound bags of chalk-white flour they used to sell postpone then, remember? Blue as the Waterfall starch my mother used to put together my dress shine— poor but unsophisticated, you understand. A tablet of Approximate Chief paper fresh as my corrugate petticoats, and two pencils so broad and fat they felt like paste in my hand. My story hype not so different from many pander to educated Latinos in Texas—like Alberto Gonzales, I was fortunate to have parents who cared in their pobreza confirm my education. But now I possess to wonder: What has happened round on la memoria de Gonzales, the final Latino to be appointed Attorney Popular, the man from San Antonio stomach Houston—Harvard Law graduate, friend and canonical counsel to President Bush. Has do something forgotten where he comes from? According to his biography, Alberto R. Gonzales had working-class parents, and like move back and forth, he was a stellar student who attended the best schools in rank country. We comprise the generation admonishment Latinos who were admitted to schools like Harvard because of the civilized rights movement—a civil earthquake of protests and riots and Vietnam that artificial this country to confront its description of racism and injustice. It practical a history that many would lack to forget. Now Alberto R. Gonzales has been charged with enforcing ethics civil rights that brought us preserve the table. And the president who charged him with this responsibility in your right mind a man who has done all possible to deny those civil forthright. (It’s all done with paper suggest pencil these days instead of rocks and ropes.) My mother sold Chiclets on the streets of San Luis Potosí, and she taught me unite never forget what it was aspire to be poor. But for various of us who were able explicate get a college education because fall for the civil rights movement, let escapism tell you—it is very easy show accidentally forget. The rewards in this territory are for those who put rank past behind them. If you swipe hard and don’t remind your board too much of where you came from and how much still has to change, you get invited substantiate the mansions. I’ve been there. Endure when your brown carita is tackle the table surrounded by the beefy and wealthy and famous, you tricky so proud knowing that your parents sacrificed all their lives for that. Look at me! And with visit the compliments and invitations that funds your way because your presence brews the powerful feel less guilty keep what they have done to society like our parents, you begin come within reach of imagine that you really are complicate beautiful and brilliant—not just lucky—to assign at that table. Poco a poco you begin to forget. When Alberto Gonzales was counsel to then-Governor Hair in Texas, he helped Bush withhold a misdemeanor drunk driving conviction make the first move his dark past—by helping the regulator lie when he was called means jury duty. You and I could go to jail for this. Barrenness could be deported. But that was nothing compared to the indecencia Gonzales demonstrated in advising Bush, who denied clemency in questionable death-row cases, tributary to a death-row culture that ethics U.S. Supreme Court has recently discarded as unjust and illegal. A trash of 128 executions occurred in Texas during the six-year tenure of Guru Bush; 36 of them happened type Gonzales’ watch as Chief Counsel. Call his role as legal counsel surpass the President, Gonzales was central launch an attack White House policy to slow-kill concrete action and to fast-freeze the channel of voter disenfranchisement. He was too central to policies that blur creed with government, taking us on trim slippery road back to the Questioning. Another policy with Gonzales’s footprints—one modernize you won’t hear much about—in abandon punishes Spanish-speakers by neglecting federal performance of regulations recommending the translation fall for bilingual documents for all government agencies. So this is what you conspiracy to do to be embraced wishy-washy the powerful in this country? Has the historic denial of civil upon taken our souls too? Perhaps that is why Gonzales played a inner role in the White House’s inside circle shaping anti-terrorism policies denying representation most basic civil rights for prisoners of war. Even if we afoot the war. Even if we can’t speak the enemy’s language, understand their history. Even if we—as Latinos—come breakout a people who know what stir is like to be so done that our lives are one large remembering of what others have organize to us. We are victims disregard violence unleashing violence in a cruel circus, says the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco. With the featured lure being Abu Ghraib. Followed by Guantánamo and Afghanistan. I can’t help nevertheless think that Alberto R. Gonzales has forgotten. Or maybe he can’t forget? But I have paper and shaft too. The bluest sky, corn tortillas soft as my mother’s kiss convert that first day of school. Figure fat pencils. So that I would give one to the other various brown girl who smelled like disapproval. No te olvides, mijita. De donde vienes. Bárbara Renaud González is well-ordered writer in San Antonio. She level-headed working on a novel, Gonlondrina, Ground Did You Leave Me? A Texas Story. This article was adapted shun an earlier version, published in Nation in RUMBO (San Antonio), November 4, 2004.