When You're Not The Intended Audience
I’ve been on a bit of a Karla Cornejo Villavicencio kick recently. First I read her latest book which I wrote about earlier but since then I’ve been listening to podcasts with her and in her appearance on the Barnes & Noble Podcast (which apparently is super active?!) she describes a phenomenon that I did not realize happens to so many people.
Suppose you’re a minority of any kind here in the United States and suppose you like to consume culture in any way shape or form. Without a doubt at some point you’d start getting some favorites, drawn to certain authors or creators or whatever right? Something about them would draw you into them, some sensibility some commonality. Something. The point is you see something of yourself in them or their work that resonates with you and so inevitably they become, as Marc Maron would say, “your guys”. So you keep on consuming content from your guys and then at some point you’ll run into something that they did that very clearly points out that you’re not the intended audience. It’s jarring, it’s upsetting, it’s lame, it’s everything…it’s confusing mostly. And for me at least it leaves me feeling kinda stupid? Karla talks about running up against the misogyny in Philip Roth’s writing and how it actively pushed her away, my example isn’t as harsh but it’s still true.
After I learned enough english to start to get comedies in english I would watch as many of them as I could. Syndicated shows were my bread and butter. Every night before bed I’d watch The Simpsons, or Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or Seinfeld. Jerry’s little stand up bits at the beginning of the show were sort of aspirational for me, I thought I could do that. The fact that he just hung around his house all day was also aspirational for me. The point is, I got into Seinfeld. I was repeating phrases from the show (Nothing as bad as a buddy of mine who tried to drop the Seinfeld “hand” phrase thing in normal conversation and is still roasted about it to this day) my friends and I would come up with nicknames for everyone, all that. Mexicans kids from the lower valley of El Paso, literally a stone’s throw away from the border fence, talking about David Putty. It’s nuts, but it worked. It was fun. Seinfeld was our guy, the show was our show.
That was until the “Seltzer vs Salsa” bit, I’ll never forget it. George and Jerry are out there ranting about how no one can tell the difference between wether they’re asking for Seltzer, or Salsa. It was the whitest thing I’d ever seen in television. Not just in television. Ever. It slapped me right across the face THIS IS NOT YOUR WORLD. It was jarring.
There should be a word for that treasonous moment when one of your cultural guys turns out to be just a stranger. Maybe treason is as good.
I hate to be part of any discourse(derogatory) especially on such a niche platform as Substack, but there’s been a few posts rolling around here on the bigger sites about how as the cultural “center of the galaxy” twitter is dying there’s less places for people to go to to get a pulse of culture at large. To them all I say, welcome to the club! there’s never been a cultural center for Pochos or Latinos anywhere online on the American internet. We’ve all had to make due with finding pockets where we can, resonating with people who are not like us. Finding like minded but incomplete cultural reference points. Inevitably also being confronted with the treason of finding out we’re not the intended audience. There’s never been a center of the cultural internet. It’s only that the white one was super loud. Everything’s been going down in the WhatsApp group chats for decades but those are silent.
It’ll be interesting to see how more and more online people branch out to what resonates with them and how they’ll navigate when they inevability find out their favorite creator is not infact “just like me fr”.
As for anyone reading this, unless you know what a taco de tripa taste like or what’s the biggest difference between Mexican and American bologna is, or what a sensu bean is, If you’ve never heard the song Mil Heridas by Cuisillos or FANCY by Twice or Kick Push by Lupe Fiasco, or been told “wow you’re so well spoken” or been in a place where you’re the only one who can talk to “the help”. Unless you’ve experienced a couple of those and similar things to that you are not the intended audience for this. But it’s ok, you can be like me and the rest of us and find something here that resonates with you. If I could find something in common with George Costanza you can definitely find something that resonates with you with this Pocho.