ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCT. 19, 1992

Ethnicity as a Fashion Statement
By Karen Lynn Clos

Call me a cynic, but I’m not buying it.

Affluent shoppers with expendable incomes have made ethnic paraphernalia fashionable. Consequently, everything from brightly colored Guatemalan skirts, guaraches, headbands, hair clips and Oaxacan dresses are showing up in the same circles as Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren.

These items are no longer sold casually from truck beds or street corners of the barrios, as so many might remember, nor from beneath the shade of pecan trees, but from behind polished storefront windows of tragically hip shopping circuits.

The more ironic element of the situation is that someone – and it isn’t your Doña Patricia – is asking for and getting at least a 5.000% mark up on this trendy merchandise.

I had hoped for more than just an economic reaction to ethnicity. Naively, I anticipated some sociological trickle-down. Maybe this interest was an indication that the times were right.

Driving through an upscale neighborhood, I saw no evidence that anything was different. There were just as many people of color doing the same things as before — working the yards and in homes of the affluent class.

Is it a perverse version of the good news-bad news game?

The good news is that this is not the past. Children are no longer ashamed of their lunches de taquitos, nor are they scolded into silencing their bilingual tongues. Ethnic issues are discussed legitimately and bilingual employees are in demand for their skill.

The bad news, perhaps inevitable, is that the market was ripe for mercenary types, eager to convince the majority that all they needed to redeem their lingering sense of responsibility was a sense of fashion. However subtle, reminders exist that suggest it would be much simpler if we would just let go of our differences in exchange for the comfort of the melting pot.

IS ‘CONVERTIBLE ETHNICITY’ NEXT?

I know. It boggles the mind with ironic contradictions. It’s chic to stand out as colorfully as possible, as long as you aren’t a real minority and provided you have the stones to afford it.

Enter the concept of “convertible ethnicity.” Not genuine cultural awareness, but generic entertainment, as easily acquired, worn and removed as so many silver bracelets.

This is not the first time that one group has been superficial about what it chose to liberate from another group’s heritage.

A couple of decades ago it was something else.

People who didn’t know a cow pie from an Eskimo Pie were slamming down longneck beers and riding mechanical bulls, wearing Levi’s with Texas-sized belt buckles, happily plunking down 10 times what a San Antonian in his right mind would have paid for cowboy boots.

Real Texans scoffed at those urban cowboys. They knew deep down those guys were about as Texan as George Bush.

No one became more informed about Texas because of all the economic hoopla; people still thought that Texans talked funny, rode a horse, owned an oil well or knew J.R. Ewing. No one became less culturally stereotypical because they were hanging out in country-and-western bars or learning the two-step. They made a whole lot of folk a bunch of money in the process, not many of them Texans.

So go ahead. Buy the necklaces of milagro charms, Mexican sun dresses and multicolored belts. But while you’re at it, dare to go one step further. Do more than throw money at it; learn the language, know the people, recognize the value of multicultural- ism and live it. Remember that the definition of shallow is drinking green beer on March 17 without knowing who St. Patrick was.

By the next time Dieciseis rolls around, know what the grito de Dolores means or find out who Father Hidalgo was.
Know that he died in order to free Mexican citizens from Spanish tyranny.

If we can do this much, maybe, just maybe, we’ll all get somewhere a little farther than the mall.

La cultura no se vende.

(Karen Lynn Clos was director of career services at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. We have since lost touch with her.)