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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771862028 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Baraka Books |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2019 |
| Sold by: | De Marque |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 292 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Berryessas and Peraltas, Descendants of the California Resistance
Kit Carson is described as a mountain man, an explorer, a scout, a soldier, a transcontinental courier and a general.
He is the hero of movies like 1933's Fighting with Kit Carson, and in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Kit Carson, but California historian Kevin Starr calls him "bloodthirsty."
I visited the Kit Carson museum in Taos, New Mexico. The exhibits expose him as a gun fetishist.
One of his many victims was Rose Berryessa's ancestor, 75-year-old José de los Reyes Berryessa. He was on the way to visiting his son, who was jailed along with other Berryessa brothers, and Mexican General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. They were taken prisoner by a group of white settlers called the "Bear Flaggers." Described as men capable of brutality by historian James David Hart, they challenged Mexican rule by establishing the independent Republic of California. It lasted for about a month.
The Californios, people descended from Spanish-speaking settlers from New Spain or Mexico, invited these "Bear Flaggers" into their homes, graciously, only to be murdered. General Vallejo, who offered them breakfast and wine, was taken prisoner. While at it, the thugs stopped at Rancho Cabeza where Maria Cabrillio offered them hospitality. In return they attacked and killed Californio José Ramon's wife, Rosita. One of them boasted about having murdered one hundred Indians.
During a murderous rampage by the settlers, a total of eight Berryessa men were murdered. The invading 49ers, who gained control of the Californios' land by squatting on it, murdered both Californios and Indians.
Berryessa says that a few years ago she found herself, serendipitously, at the scene of the murder, which took place at San Rafael, while listening to a radio broadcast about Kit Carson. She drove her car to the side of the road, and wept, and though Rose Berryessa says she holds no grudges for what the white settlers and American invaders did to her ancestors, the Californios, spiritual wounds from this tragic history can still be stirred. Her late aunts were not as forgiving. They went to their graves angered by the theft of their lands that included parts of present day San Jose.
The Berryessas are descendants of Nicolas Antonio Berryessa and his sister María Isabel, who came to California in 1775-76 as members of the Juan Bautista de Anza expedition. As a result of Spanish land grants, families who were members of the expedition owned most of what is now Northern California.
I requested that a descendant of the Peraltas, another Californio family, meet with the Berryessas at the Peralta House, part of the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, which is located in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. Holly Alonso, the park's Executive Director, got me Ken Talken of the Peraltas and descendant of Luis Maria Peralta and Maria Loreto Alviso, who came with Juan Bautista de Anza.
Rose, who was my student at the University of California at Berkeley, brought along her brother, David. Though they'd never met, intermarriage between the families has occurred on several occasions in the past including that between Juan José Peralta and Anna Isabel Berryessa in 1839.
Holly took us on a tour of the house, which includes touchable exhibits, audios of oral histories, and a recreation of its original furnishings. Upon examining the genealogy chart on which the families were connected, Ken and Rose found that two of their relatives were Hollywood starlets during the 1930s. One performed in a two-minute movie with Rudolph Valentino. But the biggest surprise was that Che Guevara was a mutual relative.
Not only is the home a reminder of Oakland's past, but it has become a community center where blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Native Americans gather to exchange stories and food, explore their shared history, create exhibits, and participate in picnics. A recent fundraiser called "Zorro By Night" drew a big crowd including Oakland's new mayor, Jean Quan, a good friend for the park to have in this time of budget cuts. Zorro, a fictional Californio character, takes the side of the poor against the landlords.
Though the Californios were wronged, Rose insists that Native Americans were here first and that the Californios occupied their land. Native Americans provided the labor that tended the Californios' herds, picked their fruit and built their adobes. The Peraltas built adobes in 1821 and 1840. The 1840 adobe was destroyed by the earthquake of 1868. It was replaced by the current Victorian styled residence, the Antonio Peralta House, which was built in 1870, and is now the Museum of History and Community we were sitting in.
Yes, Carson murdered the De Haro twins, but there's no count of how many Indians, their father, Francisco De Haro, murdered as he put down a revolt of the Indians in 1824.
The reason families such as the Peraltas and the Berryessas were brought into what was then Alta California in the first place was to curb the outrages committed against Indian men and women. Junípero Serra, a priest, was eyewitness to Spanish soldiers lassoing, and then raping Indian women. When the Native men tried to stop it, they were shot.
It turned into a wonderful afternoon of reminiscences, some sadness, and lots of laughter, as they examined the family tree in which the histories of the Peraltas and Berryessas were entwined.
Before the squatters came, the Peraltas owned what is now Oakland and Berkeley. One of the squatters was a graduate of Columbia Law School named Horace Carpenter. Called a rogue and notorious by some historians, Carpentier (he changed his name) and his cronies set up the city of Oakland on Peralta land and he used some political shenanigans to get himself elected mayor.
Outraged, the Peraltas took the matter to court, but by the time they won, they were so indebted with legal bills and weakened by a family feud that they had to sell the land. Lake Merritt was once called Lake Peralta. The descendants of those early pioneers, who met that afternoon, agreed that restoring the name to Lake Peralta would be a modest gesture toward reconciliation and provide a forum that would be both healing and educational. A forum that would include Californios, Native Americans and perhaps descendants of the Bear Flaggers.
I'm all for the restoring the original name because Dr. Samuel Merritt, for whom the lake is named, didn't like writers. Called them "cranks."
CHAPTER 2The Wrong Side of History. Who's Next? Are Gays the New Blacks?
I recently participated in two televised panel discussions about gay rights. In both cases, I was portrayed as the heavy. My fellow panelists — bright, young, black gays — concluded that I was dwelling on the wrong side of history. Their language and style indicated that the LGBT movement, like the feminist movement, has been co-opted by the middle and upper classes, even though it was working-class black and Puerto Rican drag queens who were the trailblazers for gay rights. They were the ones who fought the vice squad on two historic occasions. First, in 1966 at the Compton Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor streets in San Francisco. Then, in 1969, black and Puerto Rican drag queens fought the police at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, an event that is regarded as the turning point in the struggle for gay rights. Nevertheless when Time magazine decided to mainstream gay marriage in April 2013, it wasn't the working class and underclass types who fought the battles appearing on the cover, but two middle class white women.
The first televised panel focused on whether gay studies should be taught at Morehouse College, a black all-male college located in Atlanta. Morehouse boasts such distinguished alumni as Julian Bond, Spike Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. I argued that instead of a course on gay history, Morehouse should begin a course about the labor movement, or business, since banks have been hostile toward black development since Reconstruction.
I also argued that if Morehouse has a course on the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of black intellectuals and artists of the 1920s, it already has gay studies, since prominent members Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent and others were gay — including Alain Locke, who defined the term the New Negro. They shot down that idea, but I made out better than an alumnus, who said he was opposed to gay studies. He pointed out that in its history Morehouse has had gay professors and gay students without any problem. Boy, did they jump on him! He was banished to the wrong side of history, which reminded me of the old Sunday school pictures in which a giant hand points to the exit from the garden for an embarrassed Adam and Eve.
The topic of the second televised panel was whether gays were the new blacks. I said that before I cast gays as the new blacks, I'd have to know whether the Montgomery Bus Company discriminated against white gays. I'd also need to know the percentage of white gays on death row. Who had a better chance of getting a mortgage in San Francisco — a white gay or a black heterosexual? This question was inspired by a white gay gentrifier who told the San Francisco Chronicle that if blacks would stop buying Cadillacs and instead save money to make a down payment, they could have bought a home, too.
I also pointed out that black gay writers like Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs and Barbara Smith have written about racism in the LGBT world and that David Brock, in his book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, had outed powerful right wing gays, including Matt Drudge.
When confronted with these arguments, my fellow panelists rebutted me with such slogans as "oppression is oppression," which means their end of history, unlike the Marxist one, will resemble that of Downton Abbey. The upper class will be oppressed upstairs and the working class will be oppressed downstairs. And since the LGers have problems with the B and T parts, maybe the transgender folks will get jobs in the stables.
The smiley face that MSNBC attaches to same-sex marriage also conceals these fractures in the LGBT movement. Dr. Ardel Thomas, who has studied the culture more than talk-show hosts, calls it a "chasm." Some gays see gay marriage and gays in the military as an attempt to normalize or assimilate gays. A 2011 San Francisco Human Rights Commission report spoke of discrimination against bisexuals by both gays and straights. Others want to remove the T from LGBT. There was no transgender among the participants on both panels.
I support gay marriage. But I don't believe white gay history and black history are interchangeable. They should stop comparing themselves to the condition of blacks. A gay icon, Oscar Wilde, supported the Confederacy and in our time, prominent gay pundit, Andrew Sullivan, supported The Bell Curve, which was supported by the Neo-Nazi Pioneer Fund.
Should the issue of gay marriage be front and center when the situation of other groups is more desperate?
When blacks and Hispanics see well-groomed gay presences like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Tom Roberts or Ellen DeGeneres as the faces of gay marriage or the gay movement, why wouldn't they say: What the fuck, we have more problems than those three. Thirty-six percent of Latino children live in poverty, and the black unemployment rate is 16 percent. As a result of the Welfare Reform Act people from all groups are rummaging through garbage for food. So what happens if the Transexuals and The Bi's break away from the Lesbian and Gay parts of the LGBT on the grounds that the L and G parts discriminate against them?
Who will be on the wrong side of history then?
(Note: Covering the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the media portrayed it as white led, ignoring the fact that transwomen of color began it. Among those was Miss Major, a black transwoman who said that white gay guys came and took it away from us. Her complaints were made on Vice News Tonight, June 13, 2019.)
CHAPTER 3How I Became a Black Bogeyman and Survived to Tell the Tale
I think that the current intensified pariahization of black men began in the 1980s. As though the one-sided depiction of black men in popular culture, news, television, and Hollywood were not enough, a movie cowboy Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a promise to suppress a revolutionary drive, part of whose energy was provided by black male enthusiasm. It was his opposition to the Black Panthers that boosted him from a failed actor and FBI informant to president. Co-founder of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, told me that when he and his fellow Panthers walked into the capitol grounds of Sacramento brandishing weapons, Reagan was addressing a crowd. Seeing them, he ran. Coincidentally, on the day I entered Bobby Seale's home to interview him for my book, The Complete Muhammad Ali, he was watching the funeral of Ronald Reagan, a man whose career intersected with his.
The second bane for black men happened when the grassroots feminist movement was coopted by a bourgeois section with corporate ambitions. Harriet Fraad, in Tikkun's Daily Blog, February 20, 2013, wrote: "The original Women's Liberation Movement was a movement of both race and class integration, a vision of justice for all. It saw female liberation as the basis for social revolution." She claims that the movement was co-opted by Gloria Steinem. Harriet Fraad will find agreement among some black, Latina, Native American, and Asian American feminists about white upper class women coopting the feminist movement, but she's not likely to get much notice from the media, whose patriarchs have chosen Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf to represent the feminist movement just as they choose which blacks to represent blacks, which Hispanics to represent Hispanics, etc., preferably conservatives so as not to upset their target audience, which CNN views as "the majority."
Ms. Naomi Wolf was described by Ms. Camille Paglia as someone who romped about the campus of Yale "boobing her boobs in the faces of men," yet when Prof. Harold Bloom made a pass at her, she got all pushed out. Ms. Wolf was also one of those who agitated for the conviction of the Central Park Five; they were innocent. (Both the prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer, and the District Attorney, Linda Fairstein, who deprived these men of their childhood, were feminists!)
The wealthy patriarchs' chosen leader, Gloria Steinem, used a quote from Shirley Chisholm in which Chisholm, who was running for president at the time, described herself as having more problems as a woman than as a black person. Ms. Steinem took that to mean that women, whichever class or race, because of their gender were worse off than men, whom the bourgeois feminists find indistinguishable regardless of class or race. Using Ms. Chisholm's observation, Ms. Steinem came up with the dictum: Gender is the most restrictive factor in American life, which gave her and her followers license to assault black men with descriptions that would have been considered racist in a former time. After all, since women are more oppressed than black men, racism is a black male problem. Of course, by the time Ms. Chisholm arrived at the convention her feminist supporters, including Ms. Steinem, abandoned her for Fritz Mondale. According to Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, it was Gloria Steinem who was responsible for the success of The Color Purple, a film produced, directed and script written by white men, that placed the scarlet M on the skin of each black man and led to their even more hostile treatment in everyday life than before. Mr. Spielberg provided these corporate feminists with an incestuous, rapist character, Mister, a sort of piñata that they could bang around while sparing the males with whom they share an ethnic heritage and their patriarchal bosses. Their choice for leader of the feminist movement, Steinem, wrote an angry, hot piece about The Color Purple in which she defamed some black male writers by name.
Her comments printed in Early Bird (January 2019), in which she gloats over how her hatred of black men has been exported, shows that her using Alice Walker to batter the brothers hasn't changed. She wrote of Ms. Walker: "There is also a painful side to this possibility of being known but not understood. Especially after the movie came out, there was a storm of protest from some African American church groups and well-known male writers who disapproved of showing love between women and violence against women within their community. To know how painful that was to Alice, read her book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ishmael Reed.
Excerpted by permission of Baraka Books.
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Table of Contents
Introduction To Exterminate or Extirpate 11
Part 1 Land of Fluid Identities
1 The Berryessas and Peraltas, Descendants of the California Resistance 37
2 The Wrong Side of History. Who's Next? Are Gays the New Blacks? 41
3 How I Became a Black Bogeyman and Survived to Tell the Tale 45
Part 2 Culture
4 Black Audiences, White Stars and Django Unchained 87
5 Is Boardwalk Empire Trampling the Legacy of Marcus Garvey? 93
6 Hamilton, An American Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders … and it's Not Halloween 99
7 Hamilton: The Revolution. Brilliant Show. Bad History 107
8 Before the President There Was Mr. Tibbs 117
9 Personal Problems - Interview by Violet Lucca, March 30, 2018 121
10 Buried Alive 131
11 Mother Hubbard Goes to China 139
12 LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Me 151
13 Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Their Creations and the Reason Jazz Survives 167
14 Sex, Africa and Chinua Achebe 183
15 My Oldest White Friend, Oliver Clark: From U.B. to Broadway and Hollywood 187
Part 3 Politics
16 Who Owns Black Opinion? 197
17 Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency 207
18 Trump's Anti-Black Animus and How the Media Armed His Hate 229
19 Using Immigrants to Shame American Blacks 233
20 Confessions of a Neighborhood Watch Captain 247
21 White Nationalism's Last Stand 247
22 Trump's Irish-Americans "Without Hearts" 247
23 Do American Jews Still Believe They're White? 253
24 Why We're Shocked by White Heroin Use 263
25 Amid Mount Rushmore Warriors, Why Not a lover: Warren G. Harding? 267
Part 4 Culture
26 A Fly On Nicholas Kristof's Wall 273
27 Fly On The Wall-Bad Apples Bar 277
28 Fly On The Wall - Governor Huckabee Meets Beyoncé 281
Notes 285