Shopping

What’s in a sign?

By Noah Bruce

Nothing like a little ambiguous xenophobia to get you in the Christmas spirit, huh?

Seth Garfield and his wife encountered a bit of a shock this month while shopping at Monroe Salt Works at the corner of Congress and Oak streets. There on a shelf displaying hand-blown Mexican glass was a hand-written sign that read: “Your purchase helps the Mexican balance of trade, thus strengthening their currency. In strengthening the pesos you make it easier for Mexicans to earn a living in their country, thus inhibiting immigration. Be patriotic. Buy Mexican glass.”

Garfield, who is a professor of Latin American studies at Bowdoin, and his wife, who is an immigrant (though not from Mexico), decided to speak up. They confronted the owner of the store, Bruce Kornbluth, and asked him “to remove this sign because of its offensive nature, [but] he angrily refused to do so.” Garfield feels the sign and its owner “defines all immigrants as inherently undesirable and cynically equates US patriotism with xenophobia.” According to Garfield, Kornbluth said, “ ‘If you don’t like my sign, get out of my store,’ ” and dismissed him and his wife by walking to the back of his shop.

Kornbluth says his sign is a joke, a play on the campaign to “Buy American” spearheaded by Sam Walton. “They said ‘Be patriotic, buy American,’ this says ‘Be patriotic, buy Mexican.’ ”

He also defends the sign by claiming that illegal Mexican immigration to America is a problem for both the US and for Mexicans who are exploited in the States. “If the sign is anti-immigration, which it’s not, so what?” he says.

Kornbluth also tells a different version of the conversation he had with Garfield and Garfield’s wife. He claims they were not willing to have an honest dialogue with him about the sign and he characterized their sentiments as “knee-jerk” liberalism. When Kornbluth told the couple he once owned a factory in Latin America, they told him he was probably “ ‘exploiting the people.’ ”

From an economic perspective, Kornbluth has a point: buying glass from his store helps Mexican artisans, which in some small way may help the Mexican economy, which in turn could help the Mexico-US immigration problem. But taken from a human perspective, the sign says it’s patriotic to keep Mexicans at home. Chances are high that a Mexican immigrant would be pissed if she read the sign. And as a joke, the sign elicits the kind of uncomfortable feeling you get when someone asks you how many Jews it takes to screw in a light bulb.

According to Kornbluth, the sign has been on his shelf for two years and Garfield and his wife were the first to complain.

Garfield feels that these kind of issues need to be addressed by the community.

“I’m telling my students all the time to confront bigotry,” he says. “You go into this quaint craft shop, you’re not expecting to confront this.”