#lalo lopez

[staaygooldduudee]

Hace mucho quería hacer esto pero mi computadora es como un abuelito con bastón y esta cabrón hacer gifs. Las chaparras que mas amo. (via GIPHY)

[staaygooldduudee]

Guanajuato, México.

[staaygooldduudee]

Somos instantes.

[staaygooldduudee]

Cada que me preguntan que quiero hacer de mi vida solo puedo preguntarme cual será mi siguiente viaje .

[staaygooldduudee]

Aguascalientes, México.

[alexszatmary]

This is a profile on Lalo Lopez and Esteban Zul, two Chicano artist-pranksters who, among other things, started the self-deportation movement:

Lopez segues into the next subject. "I recently went to the GOP convention as my character Daniel D. Portado, who is the former head of the group Hispanics for Wilson and current head of HALTO, Hispanics Against the Liberal Takeover. D. Portado is this right-wing freak. You've seen these people on TV, these right-wing Latino spokespeople that are...uh..."

Someone yells out, "Coconuts," a reference to people who are brown on the outside and white on the inside.

"Yeah," Lopez agrees, "but they work for a paycheck, popping up at English-only rallies, and they're held up as representatives from the community by politicians, so we thought it would be funny to spoof these people 'cause they're very annoying.

"During the campaign for Proposition 187 in California, we were all pretty pissed off and wanted to think of a way that we could attack pro-187 people and get free publicity doing it. So we thought we'd take it to the point of absurdity and become militant self-deportationists."

Zul picks it up. "We put out newsletters and press releases on the Internet and sent them to radio and TV stations, saying that we believed in deporting ourselves. We told them stuff like we wanted to get rid of Linda Ronstadt because her garbled Spanish yodeling attracts too many immigrants to this country, Mexican food is just too unhealthy for you, there's too much banda music. We promised that before we self-deport we'd train all the white people to work in the hotel and gardening fields, and then we'd have an event with Pete Wilson called the 'Run for the Border 10K' to repatriate Mexico."

Surprisingly both the left and the right took the Hispanics for Wilson hoax seriously, and the Pochos received death threats as well as praise on their hot line. "We felt kinda bad with some of the calls we got from shocked and enraged Mexicanos taking us dead serious," Lopez admits, "and then we got calls from MEChistas." He's referring to the student activist group known as MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan), born out of the Chicano civil rights movement. Lopez repeats one death threat. "'187 bitch! I'll kill you motherfuckers!' And I met one of the dudes who placed the call at a MEChA meeting in Sacramento. He was really embarrassed! I just said, 'Hey, congratulations, you made your first death threat.'"

In November 1994, the Pochos pushed the envelope further when a TV station in Salinas, California, invited Hispanics for Wilson onto Sevcec, a Spanish-language talk show televised on the Telemundo network in 22 countries. The show featured an immigration debate, though the Pochos in HFW disguise were the only 187 advocates to show up. "Everyone else canceled," Lopez says. "All their pro-187 people realized, 'I'm not going into a room of angry Mexicans!'" Lopez went as Daniel D. Portado, clad in a suit, an Old Glory necktie, and mirrored shades, claiming to be Pete Wilson's former gardener. Zul followed as his bodyguard, Rudy Rico, who was introduced as a former Los Lobos roadie. "It was the longest half hour of my life," Zul recalls. "They took us into the studio, and the whole time they were screaming at us. There were these kids sitting behind us saying, 'You guys are coconuts, eh! Take off the sunglasses! You're a sellout, eh!'"

(As heard on This American Life #41: Politics)