Ricardo Chavira Chicano

BOOK REVIEW
We Were Always Here: A Mexican American’s Odyssey; by Ricardo
Chavira; Arte Público Press; 2021; soft cover; 259 pp.; $19.95.
Reviewed by Carol Baas Sowa, for Today’s Catholic

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ricardo Chavira, a third generation Mexican American, offers a unique perspective in his memoir, We Were Always Here: A Mexican American’s
Odyssey. His specialty was international affairs, with an emphasis on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border — a border his great-grand father crossed in 1870 as a teenage orphan, traversing 225 miles of desert from southern Chihuahua to Fort Davis, Texas. His grandmother also came from an immigrant family with roots in Chihuahua and their descendants later spread from Texas
into southern California.

Family aspirations for education were dashed from the start by racial discrimination and poverty, but persisted through the
generations. Chavira’s father managed to graduate high school, though he had to drop out briefly for work.

Against all odds, Chavira avoided gang affiliation and falling into the serious crimes of classmates in a substandard school system that offered little encouragement to rise above an unpromising environment.

When Chavira’s parents were finally able to move
out of “The Heights” (an old and largely Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles), real estate agents tried to steer them
away from the nicer areas, suggesting they didn’t belong there and
would be happier in a Mexican or African American neighborhood.

Chavira’s father had to complain vigorously to get them the house
they wanted on land where they definitely belonged. “Never for
get, this is Mexico,” he later told his son. “The Gringos stole California and about half of Mexico. We were always here.” Historically, Chavira notes, this is true.

In an educationally poor Los Angeles high school, he felt totally removed from the mainstream society he saw on television
and outside his “suburban ghetto.”

Resigned to joining the Army with a buddy after graduation in 1968, he would likely have been fast-tracked to Vietnam, as befell so many young Latinos. But only his friend wound up enlisting and dying there.

Fortunately, his father convinced him to try a year of community college, though his hopes there were initially
dashed by an uncaring composition instructor.

Rather than teaching, she simply assigned papers, repeatedly returning his marked “U” for “unacceptable.” When he asked why,
she coldly informed him it was because he did not know how to write.

Chavira was crushed and contemplated giving up
but, inspired by fellow students’ talk of earning degrees in interesting and lucrative professions, he accepted the offer of
a Latino classmate’s wife, an English major, to edit his papers before submission. (Chavira was doing well
in his other courses but had never received a basic foundation in composition skills.)

The first draft of his next paper returned from editing with massive red ink notations, which he dutifully studied for a rewrite and successively improving grades.

Before long, he was enrolled at Cal State Long Beach with the goal of becoming a history teacher. An astute English professor, however, steered him to a newswriting class in journalism department and Chavira was hooked. He switched majors and
began writing for the school paper, leading to undergraduate and graduate degrees, professional jobs at a variety of publications and awards.

He was a Mexico City correspondent for Time magazine during its zenith in the ’80s, and also wrote for The New York Times, The San Diego Union and The Dallas Morning News.
Early in his career, he covered Mexican immigrants working at a mammoth egg ranch who sought better
working conditions and pay. “With this story,” he recalls, “I was for the first time giving voice to the voice
less.” Later, his journalistic voice reported on illegal adoption of Mexican babies and the appalling squalor in which indigenous Oaxacans lived while eking out a living across the
border.

In Nicaragua, Chavira found himself embedded with Contra rebels,
running for his life to cross “The Road of Death” into neighboring
Honduras, with Sandinista forces hot on their trail.
Covering the genocidal campaign against Guatemalan indigenous, he tracked down the jungle location to listen to a man relate how his wife and daughters had been killed in a surprise massacre by Guatemalan military forces. The 5-year-old had been shot in the face; the 7-year-old, beheaded.

In El Salvador, he braved asking Roberto D’Aubuisson, long suspected of links with El Salvador’s death squads, if he was involved with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and watched him explode in anger.

An interview with dictator Manuel Noriega on the eve of
the 1984 Panamanian election, likewise, turned menacing
when Panama’s role in drug smuggling was brought up. Chavira would later opt out of accompanying U.S. invasion forces there in 1989. As a Latino, he could too easily be mistaken in the fighting for a member of Noriega’s “Dignity Battalions” who wore civilian clothes.

Also of note are Chavira’s on-the ground accounts of Cuba under and post-Castro (including interviews with some of his later disillusioned revolutionary cohorts) and of the grim days following Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake.

And there is reflection on the growing number of immigrants
streaming to and through our southern border despite the horrors they face to get here. In 2016, Chavira notes, Mexican immigrants started being replaced by a mass exodus of Central American refugees fleeing homicide, corruption, drug trafficking and gang violence. The triangular region of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador ranks in the top 10 worst in this worldwide. It is a legacy,
he adds, of the civil wars he covered in Central America — sadly, wars in which the United States played a significant role