The Crisis of Ethnic Dualism in Latino California - By N.L. Belardes
I was asked by a few people to publish the unedited version of my article originally published in Mas Magazine last year:
The Crisis of Ethnic Dualism in Latino California - By N.L. Belardes
I was re-reading my copy of Sam Quinones book True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, The Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx when I began to think about my own ethnic origin and how I came to terms with such here in Bakersfield, California. True Tales is a book that in part talks about Bakersfield Latinos. Bonifacio Caballero, immigrant farmworker with a shared dream to return home to Nuevo Chupicuaro, a home he left in the 1960s only to return to year after year. It’s a home he frequently revisits as he was a Mexican immigrant with a simple dream to build in his homeland, to go live in Mexico for a few months each year. The rest of the year, he’s like thousands of other Latinos in America; the Mexican homes of those from the Southland that stay empty most of every year in such Mexican towns built on hard-earned American dollars.
As I put the book down I thought of my own Latino ethnic identity. For folks like Bonifacio, and others within Quinones study, the issue of ethnic identity is one of ‘who you are’ as a person, as a Mexican, as an Oaxacan, El Salvadorian, et. al. building some kind of life, and the issue is never ethnic origin—it’s how you live your days. The journalistic quest for Quinones and others was in finding ‘another Mexico’, one that exists differently from what the media, government and tourists say is out there. For someone like me who is half-Latino, the question of identity suddenly becomes mixed with the very idea of ethnic origin itself... it becomes not one of discovering another Mexico but in finding “What Mexico exists for those like me at all?”
Spin to the future…
It’s the year 2050. American society has gone overboard from the ethnicity questionnaire we were all used to being confused over back in 2005. Now it’s a pre-programmed DNA test right on the spot. You’re trying to get hired at what you hope to be your new corporate job; you have a nice four-year degree tucked into your back pocket to help in the endeavor. You say you’re Latino. That doesn’t matter. Someone pulls out a little gizmo, zaps you on the shoulder and then says, “You’re 46.7% Latino, 43% German, and we’re getting a strange reading on the rest, but we’re calling it 10.3% Caucasian. How about we put you down as Caucasian?”
“Wait a minute.” You say. “Where has the other 3.3% Latino gone? My father was Mexican…”
“Oh, that could be a system error,” the human resources DNA tester says. She hands you a certificate of authenticity and you walk away.
If growing up in the 1970s and 1980s were so easy—to have a simple test and be done with all questions of ethnic origins. Or would that be simple at all? Such testing, dare I say it, could cause even more confusion, more of an identity crisis for the mixed-ethnics perplexed by the checkboxes on today’s ethnic origin questionnaires…
Half the battle is with such categories on ethnic origin questionnaires. What do you check? I never know. I’ve sat and stared at them while twiddling a pencil, usually sure of my identity, yet unsure of what to put down because of the skewed vision others might have of my ethnic background; yet such forms are simple compared to the real life struggles of Latino Americans who battle with the question of ethnic identity. I’m part Latino, part German, part Swedish; that translates to half Chicano and half white; or if you think according to my perspective, that translates to Chicano, because that’s what I mostly am. There’s a host of Latinos who suffer similar ethnic origin confusion here in the Central Valley. There’s Latino-Filipinos, Latino-African-Americans, Latino-Caucasians, and many other combinations, too numerous to mention and just as confusing as the many dynamic styles in child rearing within such mixed homes.
Years ago I stood outside of MECHA on the Bakersfield College campus. I had just accepted my ethnic dualism as being straight up the middle with equal portions of both white and brown; perfectly half and half. Yet I wanted to join MECHA. I was refused. “Do you consider yourself Latino?” the gentleman at the information desk said.
“I’m half Latino and half white.”
“Well then you can’t join us. You have to be Latino.”
Where’s that DNA gizmo test that says who I am? Maybe I needed it back then. Maybe it would have proved I had Latino in me, or that I was just confused. Either way we’re closer to 2050 than you think. There’s going to be some test, I just know it. I walked away from that encounter debating once again who I really was in regards to my ethnic origin.
My college years were Latino identity transition years. In my youth I thought of myself as white. It was the household thought in a patriarchal-reigned home. I was what my father told me to be. He was a Mexican-American truck driver who emulated the Western cowboy hero stereotype by loving country music and carrying a big gun. He had a falling out with his Chicano-proud brothers and sister in the 1960s and 1970s. He didn’t see the point of Chicanos not assimilating their Mexican-American culture into the American melting pot, especially for his children. So he told us we were white. I believed him for most of my youth years.
I saw no color at home. I saw a white mother and a dark-skinned Mexican cowboy; but I saw no color. I got my taste of the culture of machismo hidden beneath the white veil of American pop culture through the movies he made me watch and that he emulated—but that was just normal to me. Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, John Wayne, Paul Newman. They weren’t vaqueros; they were cowboys. Back then I didn’t have the understanding I do today of ethnicity. Back then the idea of the Hollywood stereotype in the household wasn’t Chicano, or white—it was just growing up in pop cultureville with lots of television and stereotypes.
As a youth when I told other schoolkids my ethnic heritage, I was never believed. Forget the fact that I had choriso and eggs wrapped in a fluffy tortilla for breakfast. Forget that I had fideo the night before that. A light-skinned Latino is just that: light-skinned, white, a peckerwood, a honky, or worse, but not really perceived as Hispanic/Latino/Chicano/Mexican-American by a certain culture of Latinos who adhere to stereotypes—why?
Having light skin color and lack of Spanish-speaking in my home while growing up reinforced the Caucasian aspects of my ethnic origin; and that became the crux of the crisis of growing up mixed in Latino California for someone like me.
Recently there was an attack on BHS campus on at least one kid, and on nearby H Street upon three students right after the BHS-Stockdale football game. The students all acted in a locally made Vietnam film titled The War Days. I was to write in a related blog on N.L. Belardes: Bakersfield Music Gossip and the Arts:
BHS was supposed to lose its game against Stockdale—or so I heard. Griffith Field was alight with roars and cheers. The score was 28-26, and reminiscent of the old Taft-Bakersfield rivalries, this was going to go down as a classic match-up in local high school football lore. Although Stockdale made a valiant last effort, this richy-rich school lost to inner city Bakersfield High on inner city turf… that’s where I live.
The War Days director and the two actors, still on the high school campus, excited from the big game suddenly witnessed a mob of 20-30 Latino kids randomly attack a boy on campus. The mob threw him to the ground, kicked him in the face, and continuously punched him. Where the police were, I later listened as one kid from the game said, “Cop cars were on the other side of the stadium, sitting in their cars and talking, not patrolling.” High school campuses are supposed to be protected after big rivalries. I remember hearing of the Bakersfield race riots in the 1970s. And this sounded like a terrible mob attack. Were these BHS students attacking who they thought was a Stockdale student? Or was this a racist attack because of color? Latinos in a mob attacking who they perceived as a white student?
Having to walk down ‘H’ Street a main thoroughfare that connects to Bakersfield High, and just a few blocks from the downtown police station, no sooner had the War Days director and two actors crossed the street they felt something further was wrong. They continued along for a short block, and then on the corner of Blanche St. and ‘H’ they heard, “Get him!” The attack was on.
One of the actors, also a cross-country runner, yelled, “Run!” and instantly disappeared down the street for help, fully knowing he couldn’t take on a mob. The War Days director ran too but was tackled on ‘H’ Street by two Latino youths. The other actor was attacked by at least fifteen juvenile Mexican-American hoodlums. He was quickly brought down in a flurry of punches and kicks to his head to which he fell into the bush of a corner antique store. He covered himself. It was all he could do. The fight was unprovoked.
What’s most tragic is the attackers were Latino thugs. One half-Latino boy‘s father is a first generation immigrant, having come to America in the trunk of a car after walking miles through the hot Baja desert. He was locked in a cage—a way station of sorts for illegal immigrants. He came to America, didn’t know any English, didn’t have a job, but worked toward his own vision of the American dream. He worked odd jobs as a cook and then for a grocery store. He learned the language as best he could. He now manages a grocery store for a major food chain and speaks fluent English. He and his wife have three children, all successful students.
But thugs of any color stereotype those of us who may have a different shade of skin. They can’t see our Latino surnames; we don’t tattoo them on our foreheads. They would beat their own for being light-skinned it seems, thinking lighter skin means ‘white’ here in melting pot Bakersfield, America.
The War Days director and the other actor, both part Latino also take great pride in their heritage as their great great grandfather fought alongside Poncho Villa. During the Mexican Revolution he rescued a young woman raped by a local priest. He murdered the priest and took the woman and ran to America for a better life. This is the heritage these Latino thugs attacked. Makes you wonder if Americans themselves ever have the American Dream, or if such is simply an immigrant dream…
My mother came from the farmlands of Germanic Iowa. My father, from the Latino cannery heartlands of the Santa Clara Valley. I don’t know what their dreams were, but I do know mine. I do know youth of mixed ethnic Latino origins follow similar paths of self-discovery, even in the moments of an unprovoked attack after a rivalry football game, even after all the slow breathes of anger have faded to uncertainty and wonder about “What Mexico?” we mixed Latinos might be a part of…
The Crisis of Ethnic Dualism in Latino California - By N.L. Belardes
I was re-reading my copy of Sam Quinones book True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, The Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx when I began to think about my own ethnic origin and how I came to terms with such here in Bakersfield, California. True Tales is a book that in part talks about Bakersfield Latinos. Bonifacio Caballero, immigrant farmworker with a shared dream to return home to Nuevo Chupicuaro, a home he left in the 1960s only to return to year after year. It’s a home he frequently revisits as he was a Mexican immigrant with a simple dream to build in his homeland, to go live in Mexico for a few months each year. The rest of the year, he’s like thousands of other Latinos in America; the Mexican homes of those from the Southland that stay empty most of every year in such Mexican towns built on hard-earned American dollars.
As I put the book down I thought of my own Latino ethnic identity. For folks like Bonifacio, and others within Quinones study, the issue of ethnic identity is one of ‘who you are’ as a person, as a Mexican, as an Oaxacan, El Salvadorian, et. al. building some kind of life, and the issue is never ethnic origin—it’s how you live your days. The journalistic quest for Quinones and others was in finding ‘another Mexico’, one that exists differently from what the media, government and tourists say is out there. For someone like me who is half-Latino, the question of identity suddenly becomes mixed with the very idea of ethnic origin itself... it becomes not one of discovering another Mexico but in finding “What Mexico exists for those like me at all?”
Spin to the future…
It’s the year 2050. American society has gone overboard from the ethnicity questionnaire we were all used to being confused over back in 2005. Now it’s a pre-programmed DNA test right on the spot. You’re trying to get hired at what you hope to be your new corporate job; you have a nice four-year degree tucked into your back pocket to help in the endeavor. You say you’re Latino. That doesn’t matter. Someone pulls out a little gizmo, zaps you on the shoulder and then says, “You’re 46.7% Latino, 43% German, and we’re getting a strange reading on the rest, but we’re calling it 10.3% Caucasian. How about we put you down as Caucasian?”
“Wait a minute.” You say. “Where has the other 3.3% Latino gone? My father was Mexican…”
“Oh, that could be a system error,” the human resources DNA tester says. She hands you a certificate of authenticity and you walk away.
If growing up in the 1970s and 1980s were so easy—to have a simple test and be done with all questions of ethnic origins. Or would that be simple at all? Such testing, dare I say it, could cause even more confusion, more of an identity crisis for the mixed-ethnics perplexed by the checkboxes on today’s ethnic origin questionnaires…
Half the battle is with such categories on ethnic origin questionnaires. What do you check? I never know. I’ve sat and stared at them while twiddling a pencil, usually sure of my identity, yet unsure of what to put down because of the skewed vision others might have of my ethnic background; yet such forms are simple compared to the real life struggles of Latino Americans who battle with the question of ethnic identity. I’m part Latino, part German, part Swedish; that translates to half Chicano and half white; or if you think according to my perspective, that translates to Chicano, because that’s what I mostly am. There’s a host of Latinos who suffer similar ethnic origin confusion here in the Central Valley. There’s Latino-Filipinos, Latino-African-Americans, Latino-Caucasians, and many other combinations, too numerous to mention and just as confusing as the many dynamic styles in child rearing within such mixed homes.
Years ago I stood outside of MECHA on the Bakersfield College campus. I had just accepted my ethnic dualism as being straight up the middle with equal portions of both white and brown; perfectly half and half. Yet I wanted to join MECHA. I was refused. “Do you consider yourself Latino?” the gentleman at the information desk said.
“I’m half Latino and half white.”
“Well then you can’t join us. You have to be Latino.”
Where’s that DNA gizmo test that says who I am? Maybe I needed it back then. Maybe it would have proved I had Latino in me, or that I was just confused. Either way we’re closer to 2050 than you think. There’s going to be some test, I just know it. I walked away from that encounter debating once again who I really was in regards to my ethnic origin.
My college years were Latino identity transition years. In my youth I thought of myself as white. It was the household thought in a patriarchal-reigned home. I was what my father told me to be. He was a Mexican-American truck driver who emulated the Western cowboy hero stereotype by loving country music and carrying a big gun. He had a falling out with his Chicano-proud brothers and sister in the 1960s and 1970s. He didn’t see the point of Chicanos not assimilating their Mexican-American culture into the American melting pot, especially for his children. So he told us we were white. I believed him for most of my youth years.
I saw no color at home. I saw a white mother and a dark-skinned Mexican cowboy; but I saw no color. I got my taste of the culture of machismo hidden beneath the white veil of American pop culture through the movies he made me watch and that he emulated—but that was just normal to me. Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, John Wayne, Paul Newman. They weren’t vaqueros; they were cowboys. Back then I didn’t have the understanding I do today of ethnicity. Back then the idea of the Hollywood stereotype in the household wasn’t Chicano, or white—it was just growing up in pop cultureville with lots of television and stereotypes.
As a youth when I told other schoolkids my ethnic heritage, I was never believed. Forget the fact that I had choriso and eggs wrapped in a fluffy tortilla for breakfast. Forget that I had fideo the night before that. A light-skinned Latino is just that: light-skinned, white, a peckerwood, a honky, or worse, but not really perceived as Hispanic/Latino/Chicano/Mexican-American by a certain culture of Latinos who adhere to stereotypes—why?
Having light skin color and lack of Spanish-speaking in my home while growing up reinforced the Caucasian aspects of my ethnic origin; and that became the crux of the crisis of growing up mixed in Latino California for someone like me.
Recently there was an attack on BHS campus on at least one kid, and on nearby H Street upon three students right after the BHS-Stockdale football game. The students all acted in a locally made Vietnam film titled The War Days. I was to write in a related blog on N.L. Belardes: Bakersfield Music Gossip and the Arts:
BHS was supposed to lose its game against Stockdale—or so I heard. Griffith Field was alight with roars and cheers. The score was 28-26, and reminiscent of the old Taft-Bakersfield rivalries, this was going to go down as a classic match-up in local high school football lore. Although Stockdale made a valiant last effort, this richy-rich school lost to inner city Bakersfield High on inner city turf… that’s where I live.
The War Days director and the two actors, still on the high school campus, excited from the big game suddenly witnessed a mob of 20-30 Latino kids randomly attack a boy on campus. The mob threw him to the ground, kicked him in the face, and continuously punched him. Where the police were, I later listened as one kid from the game said, “Cop cars were on the other side of the stadium, sitting in their cars and talking, not patrolling.” High school campuses are supposed to be protected after big rivalries. I remember hearing of the Bakersfield race riots in the 1970s. And this sounded like a terrible mob attack. Were these BHS students attacking who they thought was a Stockdale student? Or was this a racist attack because of color? Latinos in a mob attacking who they perceived as a white student?
Having to walk down ‘H’ Street a main thoroughfare that connects to Bakersfield High, and just a few blocks from the downtown police station, no sooner had the War Days director and two actors crossed the street they felt something further was wrong. They continued along for a short block, and then on the corner of Blanche St. and ‘H’ they heard, “Get him!” The attack was on.
One of the actors, also a cross-country runner, yelled, “Run!” and instantly disappeared down the street for help, fully knowing he couldn’t take on a mob. The War Days director ran too but was tackled on ‘H’ Street by two Latino youths. The other actor was attacked by at least fifteen juvenile Mexican-American hoodlums. He was quickly brought down in a flurry of punches and kicks to his head to which he fell into the bush of a corner antique store. He covered himself. It was all he could do. The fight was unprovoked.
What’s most tragic is the attackers were Latino thugs. One half-Latino boy‘s father is a first generation immigrant, having come to America in the trunk of a car after walking miles through the hot Baja desert. He was locked in a cage—a way station of sorts for illegal immigrants. He came to America, didn’t know any English, didn’t have a job, but worked toward his own vision of the American dream. He worked odd jobs as a cook and then for a grocery store. He learned the language as best he could. He now manages a grocery store for a major food chain and speaks fluent English. He and his wife have three children, all successful students.
But thugs of any color stereotype those of us who may have a different shade of skin. They can’t see our Latino surnames; we don’t tattoo them on our foreheads. They would beat their own for being light-skinned it seems, thinking lighter skin means ‘white’ here in melting pot Bakersfield, America.
The War Days director and the other actor, both part Latino also take great pride in their heritage as their great great grandfather fought alongside Poncho Villa. During the Mexican Revolution he rescued a young woman raped by a local priest. He murdered the priest and took the woman and ran to America for a better life. This is the heritage these Latino thugs attacked. Makes you wonder if Americans themselves ever have the American Dream, or if such is simply an immigrant dream…
My mother came from the farmlands of Germanic Iowa. My father, from the Latino cannery heartlands of the Santa Clara Valley. I don’t know what their dreams were, but I do know mine. I do know youth of mixed ethnic Latino origins follow similar paths of self-discovery, even in the moments of an unprovoked attack after a rivalry football game, even after all the slow breathes of anger have faded to uncertainty and wonder about “What Mexico?” we mixed Latinos might be a part of…
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Tuesday, March 07, 2006.
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I'm glad you wrote this piece because many of us in the community can relate. I'm Mexican-Chinese and never felt truly accepted by sides of my own family. It made me bitter, yet stronger to be the open-minded man that I am now.
Again, I think it's great that you are being a voice for many like me with dual ethnicity.
I don't know where to start. Maybe I start with saying you may be a great writer. Your simple oratory that suddenly explodes and leaves me face to face with one of my own hardest questions. Yo soy gringo. Puro norteamericano huerro. By blood, that is. (German-English, 300 years New World, if you want the fine points.) From age 4 to 17 I was raised in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. I know the ache in my heart for the beauty of my beloved Borinquen. I live in California now. I have a Mexican friend... they all call him Pancho. He is Pancho. It is his name. When we talk, we talk in Spanish as often as we talk in English. And when we talk, most of the time I call him Don Francisco. I do it because I think it helps both of us to not forget who we are. And I think he likes that.
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