Chicano concept of crabs in a bucket

Dear French Roll Gabacho:

You’re being a bit harsh. Mexican pan dulce (sweet breads, for those who don’t habla) is as varied as Mexican skin tones, including the conchas (the ones that look like sea shells—hence, their name), empanadas (turnovers stuffed with a variety of fillings, like apples, pumpkin, coconut cream and strawberries), rosca de reyes (the pan dulce offered during the Feast of the Epiphany that’s essentially a ring of sugar upon sugar) and that pan dulce with a top layer consisting solely of candy sprinkles. But you’re right to note that most pan dulce appears to originate from French pastries—because that’s true. You can blame two historical porquerías for this: the occupation by Emperor Maximilian that also brought Mexico the waltzes danced during quinceañeras, and the Porfiriato, the long reign of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz in which he tried to modernize Mexico by trying to act French and giving away land to the evil gabachos. I personally don’t have a problem with pan dulce being a mestizo version of French yummies—this is Mexico, after all, a country made up from the mixing of foreign cultures—but I always like to point out pan dulce’s roots to people who still insist there’s such a thing as “authentic” Mexican food. Their equivocations in trying to justify this sweet, inconvenient truth after having blasted a Tex-Mex combo plate as not authentically Mexican is as laughable as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto trying to appear as anything other than the pendejo he is.

Dear Gabacho:

If only. The sad verdad is that Escalante—whose story was immortalized in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, which has been seen by every Mexican high-school student in class at least twice a year ever since—is only universally admired by his former students nowadays. Chicano yaktivists dismiss him because he was a strong opponent of bilingual education and palled around with conservatives; Paulo Freire pedagogical types find his teaching methods not radical enough. There’s an elementary school in the working-class city of Cudahy, Calif., named after him, sure, but that’s about it in terms of public respect—and if that doesn’t exemplify the Chicano concept of crabs in a bucket, I’m not sure what can.