Will the Wolf Survive?

This blog entry is also my post today on a series of curated, commented on videos about Latino culture in the USA on a project called InMediaRes, at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org

This video reminds me of my own process of discovery about Latino culture. I grew up in a small farming town in rural Southwest Idaho with several families of Latino migrant workers. One Latino friend was really smart, but he seemed to be losing traction in school. I found out that he kept getting pulled out of school to help work in the fields with the family. My father got the same treatment, which kept him from graduating from high school. I worked in the fields, too, sometimes with migrant workers, but it was back-breaking, and I knew already that I wanted to get out of there and go to college, so I remember feeling sad for this guy, who wasn’t going to be able to do that. How was he going to get ahead? I felt a little guilty that in my family, the decision had been made a generation earlier by my father, who deliberately gave me the chance he hadn’t had to succeed in school. I wonder, did the wolf survive?

This specific video kicked off a debate in YouTube comments about whether the main character was, horrors, an “illegal immigrant.” Some who liked the video really did not want the lead character to be a wetback making his way in the North. One of the strengths of Los Lobos is that they have a hybrid music that speaks across cultural barriers of Anglo and Latino, but it is interesting that some users of YouTube have a hard time accepting them as Latinos speaking about real issues that face real immigrants in the U.S. It also reflects that video is often much more explicit than lyrics, which in this case treat the theme more metaphorically and polysemically.