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The crisis of ethnic dualism in Latino California

N.L. BELARDES

Special to Más

   Imagine it’s the year 2050. American society has moved beyond ethnicity questionnaires that ask you to choose what race you are and now uses a pre-programmed DNA test.  You’re trying to get hired at what you hope will 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 only growing up in the 1970s and 1980s were so easy. Just take a simple test and be done with all questions of ethnic origins. Or would that be simple at all? Such testingcould cause even more of an identity crisis for the mixed-ethnics perplexed by today’s questionnaires.

     Half the battle is with the categories. 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 like me, that translates to just 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.

   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 regard 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 thinking in a patriarchal 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 the years of my youth.

     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 TV and stereotypes.

    As a youth when I told other school kids my ethnic heritage, I was never believed. Forget the fact that I had chorizo 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 not growing up in a Spanish-speaking home reinforced the Caucasian aspects of my ethnic origin; and that became the crux of the crisis of growing up mixed in Latino California.

     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 and wonder about what Mexico we mixed Latinos might be a part of.