Think It’s All Been Siestas and Fiestas? Baja, Humbug!

¿Oye, donde esta Osvaldo?

Where is Senor Waldo these days? Is anybody missing a Mexican?

Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen him for a while. But I can tell you where he isn’t.

The Missing Mexican isn’t in Santa Barbara, where Old Spanish Days begin today, the 80th year for the city’s annual costume and street party tribute to the vanished romance of California’s Golden Age -- its courtly caballeros and baronial ranchos, not the California of the poor, struggling Mexican laborer.

The Missing Mexican isn’t on display in Olvera Street in Los Angeles, where the fulminating mural that Mexican artist David Siqueiros painted there 72 years ago has been covered up and hushed up for more than 71 1/2 years and is still hidden away behind something that looks like aluminum siding.

Those pushing immigration reform will say there are just too many Mexicans here. By whatever yardstick they measure “too many” in the present, too few Mexicans appear in California’s commercial and visual past, including postcards, travelogues and a good many history books.

Like the censored Siqueiros mural, like Santa Barbara’s early Old Spanish Days fiestas, the Mexican was below the radar, neatly elided from popular history. “Sleepy” and “quaint” were the adjectives that Americans used as shorthand for the poorer brown population -- code words for “lazy,” “docile,” “backward.”

I’ve been to the Santa Barbara fiesta, and it is a great good time. In June, I drove up to the pre-fiesta costume sale at the Carriage and Western Art Museum, a happy muddle of locals trying on mantillas and Mexican hats and frocks like the ones dance-hall hostesses wear in Hollywood westerns. All of which should clue you in that it’s a swell street party, but a history lesson it is not.

On one wall of the museum is an early fiesta poster: a senorita, Spanish comb in her hair, clinging to a caballero who is crossing swords with another caballero. It’s Iberian gallantry, Californio style -- the California of Zorro, the aristocratic grandee of fiction who took it upon himself to free the Mexican peons because they couldn’t possibly do it themselves.

In its 80 years, the Old Spanish Days fiesta has added a few more Mexican elements, like folklorico dances, markets and mariachis. But you just know that a gala called Old Mexican Days wouldn’t have had the same enduring drawing power. (For about 20 years before World War I, Los Angeles also had its own Spanish fiesta; it played dress-up and culled history for the picturesque bits, used Mexicans as set decorations and crowned a fiesta queen who was inevitably a Yankee matron.)

Los Angeles has finally gotten around to acknowledging its founding families. But they were hardly dwelt on before, and least in the particulars: part Indian, part black, illiterate and prodded up from Mexico to this unknown wilderness practically at bayonet point.

As the San Francisco Chronicle put it more than 100 years ago, “The aristocrats of Los Angeles of today would not care, perhaps, to trace their origin to the pobladores” who founded the burg. Better to invoke the glamour of the days of dons on horseback and their ladies in lace, whose hold on the imagination has lasted longer than their hold on California itself.

In recasting a history to sell to the world, the modern reinventors of California set about very deliberately to cherry-pick what preceded them. Spaniards were fine -- so very European -- and Indians were doubly acceptable, as noble savages who’d also nostalgically vanished from the landscape.

But somehow the Mexican, scion of the country from which the United States wrested California, was less than the sum of his Spanish and Indian parts, and was, moreover, inconveniently still around.

In his 1912 book on California, globe-trotter John L. Stoddard casually writes off a good chunk of the population in a fashion that was widely subscribed to: “the Mexican, the lord of all this region in his earlier and better days, but now a penniless degenerate of Old Castile.”

California, the Yankees agreed, had been wasted on the Mexicans.

Nearly 20 years later, Siqueiros was invited to muralize in Olvera Street not long after it “opened.” In the name of rescuing surviving bits of the original pueblo, Olvera Street had been re-imagined and packaged for tourism as a “typical” Mexican street, which it is, if you also believe Disneyland’s Main Street exists in any Nebraska town.

“Whitewashed Adobe” is the title of Bill Deverell’s new book about the selective blotting out of the Mexican past, and it’s a nifty pun, especially for an academic, which he is: a history professor and director of the new Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Modern Californians preferred to “leapfrog over the troubled 1840s and ‘50s” of the war with Mexico to the “beautiful sunsets and noble Franciscans, the chronic point of amnesic departure -- our version of the plantation myth,” is the way Deverell puts it. The fondness for “siestas and fiestas” was “not entirely historically inaccurate,” but was hardly the whole picture.

And speaking of pictures, the Siqueiros mural -- with its crucified Indian peasant beneath the eagle of imperial power -- made its own “angry statement about patterns that the local community couldn’t tolerate,” and so, says Deverell, was a “perfect” rejoinder to the whitewashed decades. And of course the mural itself got whitewashed shortly after its debut.

These things have a way of working themselves out. Even old gringos don’t pronounce “Los Angeles” the old gringo way anymore, Mexican salsa has surpassed ketchup as the nation’s most popular condiment, and more than half of newborn Californians are Latino. If the rest of us promise to be picturesque and perform some quaint ethnic tasks, like playing a round of golf in plaid pants, maybe they’ll even put us in the history books.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is [email protected].