At least if Larry Whitten had his way. Back in mid-September, I diaried about this nitwit Texan who bought a hotel here in Taos, New Mexico. He stirred up a hornet's nest by demanding employees Anglicize their names, and by generally being a jerk. It has become national news after simmering for a few months. CNN and the AP have picked it up, and Barb Morrill linked in Midday Open Thread a few weeks back.
The fired employees announced they're getting ready to file suit against Virginia-born former Marine Larry Whitten. And they're planning a demonstration this weekend, Saturday November 14. (I wish I could go, but I'm presently out of town. Dagnabbit!)
Latin American Herald Tribune:
11/11/09
A group of Latino hotel workers in New Mexico who were fired for refusing to change their names to "more American" ones are studying the possibility of filing a lawsuit.
...
[Dennis Montoya, their attorney,] said that the constitution of the state of New Mexico establishes Spanish as an official language.
Attitudes have hardened over the three months since this dispute erupted in August. The local Chamber of Commerce has come forward to offer to mediate the case. Whitten says he loves all the free publicity. It's good for business. Maybe, but he's dropped the room rates hoping to gain customers. Cheapest room used to be $89, but now the most expensive (king with fireplace) goes for just $79 a night. That's Larry Whitten (aka nitWhitten) painting his own sign to the right.
Awhile back, during the still-warm days of September, I stopped by to check out the protesters from LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) who continue to picket the site, turning away potential customers. I said I hadn't even known Taos had a LULAC chapter. Shirley Reyes, its vice-president, told me it was formed in response to this situation. They've organized this Saturday's demonstration (11am MST.)
Reyes's son, Martín (pronounced mar-TEEN) Gutierrez is at the center of the controversy, along with Marcos Jeantete, who was to be known as "Mark." Martín's name has a spiritual connection for his family:
"When my son Martín was born, I had problems and – being Catholic – I promised St. Martín de Porres that if he helped me I would give his name to my son," she said. Reyes said that when the employees refused to accept the changes, they were fired. "These workers have been called ‘wetbacks’ or ‘illegals,’ but they are all U.S. citizens, many of them the sons of families who have lived in New Mexico all their lives," Reyes said.
Actually, well beyond "all their lives." New Mexico's Spanish colonial roots go clear back to Coronado in 1540. Oñate came with settlers to Española in northern New Mexico 1598, more than two decades before the Pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock, nearly a decade before Jamestown, in Whitten's birthplace of Virginia. We're not talking about Lou Dobbs style criminal illegal aliens here. Which perhaps is part of the problem.
Such narrow-mindedness can get you in trouble in New Mexico, according to Laura Gomez, a law professor at the University of New Mexico who is also a sociologist. "As much as there is still economic domination (in New Mexico)," Gomez told me, "there isn’t social and political domination by Anglos. That’s what this really rubbed against."
It’s also significant to Gomez that many of the fired hotel employees weren’t immigrants but native New Mexicans, whose families have lived in the state for several generations. "These are people who actively asserted their rights," she said. "They were saying, 'We’re not going to be treated like this’ — which immigrants don’t always have the luxury of doing."
Rick Sanchez of CNN, an immigrant himself, totally misses the point. He was born in Cuba in 1958, and his family came to the US with the Battista refugees. He somehow missed the part of American History about Spanish settlement in the southwest, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and so on. From Chicago Now, by Teresa Puente, 10/28/09:
"My real name is Ricardo Leon Sanchez de Reinaldo. I don't use it because I want to be respectful of this wonderful country that allowed us as Hispanics to come here, and I think it's easier if someone's able to understand me by Anglicizing my name," Sanchez said.
Sanchez should go to New Mexico and ask people about his notion of thanking "this wonderful country that allowed us as Hispanics to come here." In New Mexico, Hispanics were there before the Anglos and the Native Americans were there first.
According to Whitten (quoted in the Albuquerque Journal, subscription) "Rick Sanchez got on Jane Velez-Mitchell's butt."
Too many people have been treating this story like Lou Dobbs would - that immigrants ought to be learning English. Sanchez is clueless on this - he flat out gets it wrong. So I'll repeat it again: These are the descendents of settlers from the 1500s and 1600s. Not wetbacks by anybody's definition. And New Mexico's state constitution places English and Spanish on an equal footing legally.
From BET (staff) 10/27/09:
[Fired hotel worker Martín Gutierrez] says he told Whitten that Spanish was spoken in New Mexico before English, AP reports. "He told me he didn't care what I thought because this was his business," Gutierrez says. "I don't have to change my name and language or heritage. I'm professional the way I am."
Darren Cordova, the mayor or Taos, a liberal community of about 5,000 residents, says Whitten has done nothing illegal, but he believes he should have better familiarized himself with the town before moving there. "Taos is so unique that you would not do anything in Taos that you would do elsewhere," he says.
Albuquerque Journal, 9/20/09 (subscription):
[Whitten] said there's been something of a culture shock since he came to Taos. "This place," he said, "is weird."
To set a tone for this diary, let's listen to Darren Cordova y Calor perform, with Cordova as lead crooner. Serving as Mayor is his day job - he's been honored with a lifetime achievement award from the the New Mexico Hispanic Music Association (and a bunch of other awards ahead of that.)
The mayor's got his own You Tube page.
Former CNN host Lou Dobbs (I can't help it, I love calling Dobbs "former"!), and Sanchez have the story wrong, but CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell has it spot on. This video is nearly 6 minutes long, but it's worth it to see her rolling her eyes and hear how relentlessly she rakes NitWhitten over the coals.
Transcript highlights, thanks to ThinkProgress (Amanda Terkel):
VELEZ-MITCHELL: Did you, or did you not, tell someone who’s name is Martín (Mar-TEEN) to say that his name was "Martin," or similar changes?
...
WHITTEN: Yes, I asked Martín (Mar-TEEN) to change it to "Martin" to better understand it over the telephone.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: You can’t understand Mar-TEEN? Do you know that the vast majority of people in the community where you have your hotel are Latino? So your customers, to a large extent, are going to be Latino. Now how do you treat the customers when they come in? Do you them also to change their names? Like if I came in, would Jane Velez-Mitchell — so you could better understand my name — would you ask me to change it?
WHITTEN: No, ma’am –
VELEZ-MITCHELL: It’s ludicrous, sir. It’s ludicrous. You should just apologize and say that you made a mistake.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, let me just say this sir: All of these states that we’re talking about with all of these stories — Texas, New Mexico — New MEXICO — California — they were all Mexico at one point. That’s why, when you look at the cities and street names, most of them are in Spanish to begin with. [...]
So the idea that you’re presupposing that people cannot understand Mar-TEEN, but they can understand Martin, really says a lot more about you, sir, than it does about your customers or anybody else.
The address of the hotel is on Paseo del Pueblo Sur, fer chrissakes. That's the name of the street. And Whitten keeps calling him MART-in throughout the interview. (A high point in the interview is when Velez-Mitchell calls him on that. Of particular interest was that he says the young man was management material.
WHITTEN: It’s a matter of, I wanted Martin to get the recognition — who was a fine young man, I might add. We looked forward to him being one of our managers, if you want to know the real truth. He was an excellent fellow, and we wanted him to get the recognition over the switchboard, not say that "some boy" was good to me on the phone or did me a great service; we wanted his name to be recognizable. That name was proven not to be recognizable, and I wanted him to get the credit for great service.
But, it would seem that for management jobs with Whitten, if your name is Marcos or Martín, you need not apply. Whitten has long since quit saying nice things about his former employees, now instead claiming that they were insubordinate, and otherwise bad employees. One can probably safely assume that a key point in the alleged "insubordination" was refusal to Anglicize their Hispanic names.
Whitten's let loose with plenty of inflammatory talk along the way. The Albuquerque Journal elicited some pretty inflammatory comments from Whitten (you have to log on to read this stuff, on a one-day trial subscription, so I've skipped linking):
Larry Whitten said a woman recently walked into his hotel wanting to speak with him. "She was one of these mountain people that live around here," Whitten said, "one of these potheads who escaped society."
...
"This mountain lady who wanted to hear the truth, she asks me, 'When you told Martín his name was gonna change, did you ask him how he felt about that?' " Whitten recounted last week. "I said 'Lady, I'm not running a nursery.' When the Marine Corps teaches you to hit the dirt because there's a grenade, you don't say, 'Hey, fellas, you wanna hit the dirt or you wanna get your ass blown up?' "
Whitten quit school after the 7th grade, divorced two times and bankrupt twice, has ended up in court disputes, too. He moved to Taos from Abilene, Texas. That city's Reporter News has covered the controversy in Taos, adding some background from his experience in the Lone Star State:
Even in a life marked by conflict and challenges, his most recent hotel acquisition has mushroomed into a firestorm unlike any other Whitten has faced. "Of course, I wish I had never seen Taos," Whitten said.
...
He doesn’t hold back his feelings toward the protesters who gather in front of his Taos hotel. "I pray a car runs over all of them," he said.
...
In one 2001 case, later dismissed, an employee received a phone message described in court documents as Whitten threatening to "kick his ass." ... He acknowledged leaving the threatening phone message because the worker failed to show for night duty, though he said he was never serious about going to the man’s home and harming him.
He was a little more circumspect in his interview with Taos News. This piece is long, and a little slow, but if you're interested in the story, it's good back ground - this dates from August, when this all first flared up:
Not surprisingly, the paper has run plenty of LTE's on the subject. It's not often that our little town makes the national news. (It doesn't happen, for example, when an adolescent teenage girl with brown skin and black hair goes missing, for example.) It's easy to drum up anti-Texan prejudice. There's certainly plenty of 'em that have earned it. But, of course, there's plenty of Texans who are perfectly fine, too, like this one (with a second home in Taos she plans to retire to) whose take on the story is spot on:
I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr. Whitten is not only culturally tone-deaf to the point of cluelessness — he’s also a bad businessperson. How else to explain making a multimillion-dollar financial investment in a community without knowing (let alone caring) anything about what makes that community tick?
...
I grew up in Corpus Christi, in south Texas, which even in the ’60s and ’70s had a majority Hispanic population. I am Anglo, but went to school with, socialized with and was taught by people with last names like Sosa, Chávez, González, Alaniz, Mejia and Longoria. Despite my blonde hair and blue eyes, I didn’t find any of those names difficult to pronounce or understand.
Further, even though I was an ethnic minority in my community, no one ever asked me to call myself "Laurita" instead of Laurie (well, except for my Spanish language teacher — all of the Anglos in her class had great fun "Hispanicizing" our names). Most of my Hispanic friends and classmates came from families that had been in south Texas for several generations, unlike mine (my parents only moved there in the late 1950s).
The "stupid businessman" angle has even been taken up Republican Fox News analyst Linda Chavez. From a recent syndicated column:
And the irony couldn't be more acute, given the venue. Whitten's hotel is located on Paseo del Pueblo in Taos at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I suppose if Whitten had his way, he'd Anglicize all those names as well -- though no doubt the separation-of-church-and-state fanatics would have a field day if New Mexico chose the Blood of Christ as the new name for its spectacular mountain range.
Whitten has a record of turning around distressed hotel properties in several states, so he must be a savvy businessman. But in the state of New Mexico -- where Chavezes outnumber Whittens or Smiths, for that matter, and have been there a lot longer -- he'd be wise to turn around his attitude if he hopes to make money.
BACKGROUND INFO ON TAOS
Here's something to consider - public officials in the town of Taos and Taos County include:
One could go on. But I'll take a different angle on it - here's some names from the phone book. From letter A:
Emilio Abeyta, Geronima Abeyta, Epifanio Aguilar, Medardo Aguilar, Salvador Aguirre, Manuela Acantar, Padro Alvarado, Javier Alvarez, Dezmin Amrine, Angel Anaya, Evalia Andrade, Tito Anglade, Melecio Apodaca, Concepcion Aragon, Amado Archuleta, Celestino Archuleta, Crucita Archuleta, Orlando Arellano, Trinidad Arguello, Luis Armendarez, Juanita Armijo, Malnor Arthur, Maria Dolores Arviso, Abelino Atencio, Marcella Atencio, Rosario Avelar, Emerita Avelar, Leticia Ayala
Just letter A. Just some of 'em. This is friggin' New Mexico, after all. Part of the territory seized by the US in the Mexican American War. Long time locals (meaning here for 10-plus generations) most typically refer to themselves as la gente, not Latino or Hispanic or Chicano. This was a popular locally-produced election video last year, from Franco Mares:
U.S. CENSUS DATA
According to the U.S. Census, Taos County is 54.9% Hispanic (vs. 44.9% statewide), 37.2% non-Hispanic Caucasian, and 7.4% Native American. 4.1% of the population is foreign born (and that includes Palestinians, French &c), so we're not talking about immigrants listed in the phone book. The majority of households (52.4%) report speaking a language other than English at home.
Lemme reiterate: The majority of households report speaking a language other than English at home, while only 4.1% of the population is foreign born (statewide, it's twice that.) In other words, this is one of those "the border crossed us" places which never forgot its Spanish heritage. In fact, the dialect of Spanish spoken here is unique, and has archaic usages which haven't been in common use in Spain for centuries, and have even fallen out of use in Old Mexico.
Taos County's population is a stable population, with 64.4% living at the same address in 1995 and 2000. More stable than statewide, where that number is 10 points lower at 54.4%. Another indicator of stability is that 75.5% of the households are owner-occupied. 1/3 of all businesses are Hispanic-owned.
Coronado briefly visited the Taos Valley in 1540, and the present-day town was settled by the Spanish by 1615; nearby Espanola in 1598. Spanish has been spoken here continuously ever since. (Though there is some irony in the fact that Spanish names were forced upon the Pueblo Indians by the colonists, and are still common on the Pueblo reservations, in a way you don't find amongst the Navajo.)
And this nitwit Texan wants his staff to anglicize their names? It's a prerequisite to being moved into management? Ya can't have someone named Marcos in charge! Ya can't make this shit up!!
Our Congressman is Ben Ray Luján. That accent over the "a" appears on all his campaign material. La gente notice such things.
At this point, I'm not sure what demands would satisfy the persistent protesters. Might be that anything short of running Whitten out of town won't be enough. And perhaps exactly what Whitten deserves. Tomorrow's demonstration/fiesta should be interesting and fun!