I was thinking that since we’re coming into Pride month, I would focus in on and talk about the queer media I have consumed growing up and pointing out specific instances where I’ve picked up phrases and thoughts or felt certain things that I still look back on fondly. However, a couple recent experiences have led me back to the other big identity I had been wanting to talk about, the other driving reason why I wanted to start this blog.
It is an increasingly frustrating part of my own experience to be called white washed by my fellow Latinos, but even more so by Chicanos and Mexican-descended Latinos who have never been to Mexico or who can’t speak fluent Spanish. I know that reeks of classism and elitism, issues within the community which deserve to be challenged. As the son of working class, undocumented immigrants, I feel justified in using that as the primary defense when accused of being white washed by my peers, “Well, have you ever been to Mexico?” Because not only have I visited extensively, travelled throughout with family in the capital and the ranches where both sides of my family originate, but I’ve even spent time living there, a period of time when my parents felt they could no longer afford to stay in California. Yet, the increasing frustration is borne from the knowledge that as my socioeconomic status here becomes more secure and as I help my siblings improve theirs, I will be further and further from the ignorant stereotype of what it means to be Latino, or Mexican, here in the US.
I don’t sit quietly when I am challenged this way though. I have in the past asked them to define what they mean by white washed and what they consider to be Mexican. What I have heard back is the most offensive stereotypes of us as lazy and uneducated, only interested in a narrow set of predetermined interests and certainly not in something like the great outdoors. I have heard this from other gay men. I have even heard this from other educated Latinos, who themselves acknowledge being called white washed. Some of these in the latter group are even foolish enough to consider themselves white passing, as if our degrees somehow conferred upon us a different racial status, a different color of skin. In this latter group, it reeks of the gay man so desperate for acceptance from the heterosexual majority that he convinces himself that he’s not like those other gays, who in his mind embody only the most negative stereotypes.
Against both groups I push back on the ignorance. That’s why it’s easiest to start by asking them if they’ve been to Mexico, because if they haven’t then it’s useful to point out that they only know of our culture from those of us who have migrated. My argument there becomes that we are not, as a majority of those of us in the US, descended from wealthy people who could afford to easily migrate. Rather, our antecedents are those who needed to travel here to work, to make a living, who were fleeing some sort of instability, or felt that the opportunity would be greater here. Again, the classism, because it is not that these people were inherently bad, but that in a society such as we have here, so driven by wealth and resources and so aggressively against the impoverished, it makes sense that the Mexican American community, lacking in familial roots, will struggle to be exemplary by American standards.
This does not hold true when you return to Mexico, not by any means. Within my own family and on both sides, there has been familial support and slowly but surely the families have been able to advance their socioeconomic status. The same generation of aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, great aunts and uncles on my mom’s side, are all going to leave their children with greater wealth than those siblings that decided to migrate north. But extended beyond my family, traveling throughout Mexico you see the greater diversity of Mexican culture, a different hybrid than the one we have here. Yes, I am aware that there are great problems down south that I am glossing over here; for example, one of my first exposures to the issue of water rights was not here in Southern California, but in Mexico City, as my older cousins had been invited to the screening of a film on the water shortages facing the poor on the outskirts of the city, water that was being taken from them to keep the wealthier inner city denizens hydrated. That complexity in the Mexican experience, one in which wealthy urbanites are doing their part by watching the woke film but going home and doing nothing about the plight of their rural poor, is what is lacking up here, in the north, where so many Latinos seem to allow themselves a narrow definition of what the Mexican identity is.
Finally, what triggered all of this is that I went on a friend date recently with a Mexican borne software developer who let me know that he’s gotten flack from other Latinos too. He came over on a work visa and recently got his residency. As a software developer, he has a comfortable salary and is proud of the work he did to get there. However, he told me he bristles when he is asked by other Latinos if he nabbed a guerro who got him his residency and his money. I wonder if I had a thicker accent if I would get the same questions asked of me or if I was less noticeably dorky. From there, I got into my views on how disconnected we are here from Mexican culture and the narrow options we have for ourselves. I’ll refrain from repeating myself, much of what I had to say is above.
I am going to write more about the Chicano identity, but wanted to get this specifically off my mind. Mexican culture is so much more than what we think of it here in the US and we need to acknowledge that. Those Mexican roots are growing in US soil and environment though, which is why I identify most with Chicano.