Oh, him again. That popular and yet offensive image: a Mexican in a big sombrero asleep against a wall or, more often, under a cactus. He's the Mexican-American community's Charlie Chan, our cigar store Indian, our black Sambo.
He personifies and perpetuates the wrongheaded idea that the reason Mexico lost half its territory in the land grab known as the U.S.-Mexican War and the reason that Mexican-Americans have been mistreated and discriminated against in the century and a half since then is, well, because they were inattentive, passive, asleep.
