Mexican in Trouble
The warmth of my grandmother’s embrace and the scent of Calvin Klein Eternity
are two things that always make leaving home feel less rational, more final. My
grandmother greets my mother and me at the door, smiles as if she hasn’t seen us in
years. It’s the end of summer, and I’m on my last visit home before the start of my senior
year at MIT. I always see my grandparents the night before I leave town, regardless of
how many times I have seen them during the rest of the visit. “I want to take you by
grandma and grandpa’s,” my mother says every time I come home, as if I will somehow
forget.
We walk into the house and make it to the dining room, the major gathering place
for our family— my mother, her seven brothers and sisters, and their families.
Everything happens here: eating, talking, reading, bickering, game-playing and, of
course, my grandfather’s storytelling. At eighty years of age my grandfather has what
seems like an endless collection of stories preserved in his mind for telling. He tells
stories about when he was a young boy growing up on a farm, or when he traveled to
India and China with the military during World War II. Mostly, he tells these stories to
illustrate lessons learned from times that everyone but my grandmother knows only
through history books, or simply to highlight the funnier parts of life. His stories also
have their place in my pre-departure visits. My grandmother, my mother and I will
usually talk for a while, and eventually my grandfather will appear, or I will find him in
his room watching novelas. (One that sticks out in my mind is el clon.)
On this particular visit, he offers me something of a wisecrack. Before speaking,
he pauses to rest his hand on the table.
“You should take a big sombrero up there, Elaine…and hang it up as a gift from
the Mexican community.”
And then he laughs because he’s not really serious, and then I laugh because I
don’t even own a sombrero even if he were serious. But on this occasion, it’s not so
much his joke that concerns me. It’s his use of the word Mexican. The sound of it
reminds me how strange the word has become to me. To my grandfather, to my
grandmother, to everyone in my family, we are Mexican— Mexican although we were not
born in Mexico; Mexican although we do not live in Mexico; and Mexican-American
because we live in Texas, in the United States.
Far away from home, though, it’s not so simple. Mexican provokes all sorts of
questions.
Mexican? I wouldn’t have guessed. My skin tone betrays me. The average
person believes that all Mexicans are “dark,” a shade defined by contrast to a white
person. The average person also believes that Mexican is a racial category as opposed to
a national or cultural one.
Mexican? From where? Texas.
So you speak Spanish?
And this is where my problem really begins, with the Spanish language. I don’t
speak it.
I know the usual phrases for introductions or goodbyes, can comprehend parts of
simple conversations, and have a list of curse and slang words that I use, but that’s all. I
am a monolingual English-speaking Mexican-American, the daughter of a monolingual
mother and a bilingual father, the granddaughter of bilingual native Spanish speakers.
This fact used to be a simple part of my identity, something I didn’t think about often but
that I now must. Through numerous interactions with others over the past few years,
I’ve become acutely aware of the extent to which I’m often not “Mexican enough” or
“Latino enough” in the eyes of others. I’ve also come to realize how much my reliance on
the English language is not appreciated by members of the wider Latino community.
I have been challenged by other Mexican-Americans to pronounce Spanish words in
front of people; I’ve been told in quasi-sympathetic voices, after someone has spoken in
Spanish, “Oh, you don’t know what that means?” as if to imply that I’ll never know what
it means; and I’ve sat quietly and listened as others have discussed the nuances of the
Spanish language. Perhaps the best insult of all took place when two people teamed up
to make my language deficiency even more apparent.
“I can’t believe you don’t speak Spanish. And you’re from San Antonio!” said my
Mexican-American friend.
“I know, she’s hopeless,” added my white friend.
All this serves not only to make me uncomfortable around people when there’s a
chance Spanish will be spoken, but also to make me rethink how my language abilities
affect my identifying myself as a Mexican-American. I return home and feel surprised to
hear the word Mexican-- the way it’s so casually used by family members, thrown around
as if its meaning is obvious, unchallengeable.
The word Mexican tumbles out of my grandfather’s mouth, his voice thick and
rusty and firm. When I first left for college, he had dubbed MIT the Mexican Institute of
Tortilla-Making. A year later, he dubbed it Mexican in Trouble, laughing softly as he
gave himself credit for what he thought was just another joke.
This Mexican is in trouble. But for what, exactly?
What people really mean to say is that I’m some kind of cultural blunder. At worst, the
monolingual Mexican-American is seen as the servant of the dominant Anglo culture, a
traitor to his or her Mexican heritage; at best, as the child of negligent parents who don’t
have enough pride in their culture to teach their children Spanish. The idea is that part
of your cultural identity has been irreversibly lost, an assertion that I find questionable
because it ultimately discredits (and thus trivializes) the experiences of monolingual,
English-speaking Mexican-Americans.
Consider the experience of essayist Richard Rodriguez. The son of Mexican
immigrants who encouraged him to speak English only, Rodriguez abandoned the
Spanish language at a young age and grew up a monolingual English speaker. He
received his undergraduate degree at Stanford and his Ph.D. in Renaissance literature
from UC Berkeley. He writes about the price he paid for “making it” in middle-class
America. In his latest book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, he explains how
people have discredited him for speaking English only. Not only did Mexican relatives
criticize him for speaking English (pocho, or whitewash, they called him), but so did the
public. “Complete strangers …picked up the taunting refrain. As if culture were a
suitcase left too long unclaimed. I had lost my culture. The penalty for my sin was a life
of inauthenticity” (130). His experience was considered inauthentic because he had
traded Spanish, the language of Mexico, for English, the language of Anglos.
An interesting conclusion can be drawn from the criticism Rodriguez received,
namely, that if there are inauthentic Mexican-Americans, there must be authentic
Mexican-Americans, too. In the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” from her book
Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa attempts to dismiss such an idea when she
writes, “There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A
monolingual Chicana whose first language is English or Spanish is just as much a
Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish”(64). Anzaldúa appears to be
giving credit to monolingual English-speaking Chicanas, and, by extension, monolingual
English-speaking Chicanos as well. But by phrasing the statement the way she does, a
monolingual is “just as much a Chicana” as the others, she reinforces the idea that some
Chicanas are seen as less authentic than others. She defends the monolinguals, when
she should be rejecting the idea that they need defending. She also blurs the distinction
between monolingual English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers by suggesting
that they are both seen as equally “less authentic” than the Chicana “who speaks several
variants of Spanish.” She fails to point out that monolingual English speakers are
treated much differently from monolingual Spanish speakers.
The point is (although Anzaldúa doesn’t argue it successfully), there really aren’t
authentic or inauthentic kinds of Mexican-Americans, at least not in reality. (How would
authentic be defined, and who would come up with the definition?) There isn’t one
Chicano experience. Not all Chicanos grow up speaking Spanish as a first language.
Monolingual, English-speaking Mexican-Americans are out there— my sister, my
mother, and myself included. My mother teaches remedial math at a community college,
and many of the Mexican-American students she teaches are not fluent in Spanish. At
MIT, I have met the gamut of Mexican-Americans: those who are bilingual but usually
speak English; those who are bilingual but prefer Spanish; those who understand
Spanish but don’t speak it and, if addressed in Spanish, will respond in English; and
those, like me, who understand fragments of Spanish but otherwise don’t speak it. Real
people, real lives, real Mexican-Americans.
But people will still try to exclude by defining Mexican-American by what it isn’t. For
instance, whenever people talk about being Mexican-American, they mention the
straddling of two cultures, the idea that Mexican-Americans are neither Mexican nor
American. But to what degree are we un-Mexican or un-American? Anzaldúa writes
that Chicanos live “a kind of dual identity: we don’t identify with the Anglo-American
cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values”(67). The
operative word here is “totally,” and it implies that Mexican-Americans are necessarily
less “American” or “Anglo” than they are Mexican.
But what does Anzaldúa mean by “Anglo-American” cultural values?
Thanksgiving, democracy, individuality, the English language? In stating that there are
“Anglo-American” values, she implies that there are other kinds of “American” values
that aren’t Anglo, but she doesn’t tell us what these are.
And what of the Mexican-Americans who do embrace the so-called “AngloAmerican values?” Are they putting their Mexican-ness on the line? I found something
like an answer to this question not long ago, when I picked up a copy of Latina magazine
(which, incidentally, I have only started reading in the past year). A reader had written
in response to some article that I hadn’t read and whose title I don’t remember now.
Part of her letter went something like, “your article was a reminder that some of us
Latinas are more American than we would like to think.” I found intriguing the
underlying logic of the statement: being American is at odds with being Latina. (Never
mind that Latina claims to be a magazine that caters to the American Latina
experience.)
The resistance to “American” culture seems to be for reasons two-fold: the need
to polarize, to categorize neatly a person as one thing or another, and the desire not to be
seen as white (“American” is often seen as a synonym for “white”). Anzaldúa admits that
the dual-identity of Mexican-Americans is a “psychological conflict”(67), and the Latina
reader would prefer not to think she harbors “American” tendencies. There’s no
(comfortable) middle ground to be found.
I can’t even call myself Mexican-American. Anzaldúa considers the term a “copout” because it means I consider myself “more the noun ‘American’ than the adjective
‘Mexican’”(67). If I’m going to be something— anything— it better not be American.
My birth certificate reads:
Name: Elaine Herrera
Race: White
Is the father of Spanish descent? Yes.
If yes, specify Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. Mexican
Mother: Lydia Sanchez
Race: White
Is the mother of Spanish descent? Yes
If yes, specify Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. Mexican
It’s funny how “Spanish” has different connotations. Somehow speaking Spanish makes
you more Mexican but calling yourself Spanish makes you whiter.
In describing the many languages spoken by tejano Chicanos—Spanish, Spanglish, and
English, among others— Anzaldúa concludes that the tongue of Chicanos is a hybrid
tongue, one that is part Mexican, part Anglo. Which, strictly speaking, is true, but the
designation part Mexican, part Anglo seems out of the way aside from the fact that the
two languages are simply different (it is, after all, undeniable that Spanish and English
have different origins, different histories, and were, at one time, the languages of
different peoples). Why call languages that are intuitive to many Mexican-Americans
“part something and part another?” Again, no middle ground.
The strangest thing about the label is that Mexican refers to Spanish and Anglo
refers to English, although the designations are not really analogous. There was a time
when “Mexicans” didn’t speak Spanish. It was only through the gradual elimination of
many indigenous languages (although some still exist today) that Spanish came to be the
language of Mexico. To say Mexican is Spanish, then, is to surrender to history, to
acknowledge the effect time has had on people and language. To say Anglo is English,
however, is to ignore history, to forget that English is no longer an “Anglo” language.
It is inappropriate (or at least inaccurate) to call English an Anglo language. While
English has Indo-European roots and was the language of the British colonialist
oppressors, it has been acquired by people all over the world. It always takes me by
surprise that at MIT, which is very much an international community, most
communications (excluding those made within specific cultural groups) are made in
English. English has become a kind of common ground in that it allows people of many
different backgrounds to connect. Which is not to say that learning English as a second
language plays out easily, but that is another story.
As Rodriguez points out, “Americans do not speak ‘English.’ We speak
‘American’”(129). The point is well taken, especially since British English and American
English are quite different language; each has different sounds, different spellings, and
different slang words. On a related note, just as “American” doesn’t have to be a
synonym for “white,” so it doesn’t have to be a synonym for English. Rodriguez
describes what he hears while waiting in line for a burrito in California: “And it occurs to
me that the Chinese-American couple in front of me, by speaking Spanish, may actually
be speaking American English”(115). The passage nicely illustrates the fluidity of the
terms American and English.
In a country as diverse as the United States, people and culture resist easy
definition.
Summer 2003 and I’m working at MIT as a writing tutor for a summer program for
incoming minority freshmen. I’m learning the hard way that Puerto Rican students
don’t think very highly of Mexican-Americans who speak only English.
One of the best ways to internalize a language is to read in that language.
Practice, by reading in English, and you will develop the intuition for what sounds right
and what doesn’t. I tell this to the Puerto Rican students, and it doesn’t go over well.
They don’t object verbally, but I can tell they don’t like my advice because they blatantly
ignore it. Once, a student was clearly annoyed while talking about a writing tutor who
was telling students to try reading and thinking in English. I said, “Yeah, that writing
tutor you’re talking about is me.” And then he was quiet.
My inability to speak Spanish leads to other awkward interactions, where I, by
virtue of being a native English speaker, am transformed into some kind colonialist
oppressor who tries to erase the native tongue of a group of people. A verbal and cultural
barrier stood between me and some of the students, and there was nothing I could do to
take it down, to regain their trust. How do I explain that I am just a different person
with a different experience?
I admit, I can’t blame them for their attitude toward me and my English.
Anzaldúa writes that other Latinos “had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their
native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in
school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper”(63). But at the same time, I
did not grow up immersed in Spanish, certainly not in school, and not at home, as my
parents divorced when I was young and I was raised by my mother, who spoke little
Spanish herself. I grew up immersed in English.
Richard Rodriguez hypothesizes in Brown, “Maybe there is something inherently
illegal about all of us who are Hispanics in the United States, gathered under an assumed
name, posing as one family”(123).
Sometimes I think he’s right.
Rodriguez writes, “Hispanicity is culture. Not blood. Not race. Culture, or the illusion
of culture, ghost-ridden. A belief that the dead have a hold on the living”(129). I write
this only a few days after El Día de los Muertos, Mexico’s Day of the Dead, hailed as a
celebration that “predates Spanish colonial rule and Catholicism in the Americas.”
(Holidays, like individuals, can also be legitimized). It is a time to remember the dead,
welcome them back with pan de muerto and hand-made altars and celebrations in the
streets, people dressed as skeletons.
My family doesn’t celebrate El Dia de los Muertos. I never thought about this
fact until recently. Some years back, before I was born, my mother wanted to trace the
family history, find out where in Mexico our family originated. “But nobody was
interested,” she said. Not my aunts and uncles, and not my grandparents. Their
response was, “Why? What for?” My mother gave up easily.
As for my parents’ attitude toward language: they have never expressed lament
over the loss of the Spanish language. They don’t feel their daughters are any less
Mexican than kids who do speak Spanish (“So are there other Mexicans like us up
there?” my father asked me once at dinner. How to tell him that it’s not that simple, that
“Mexicans like us” aren’t really liked?); they don’t mull over what it means to speak
English as Mexican-Americans; they assumed it their right to speak the language of the
country they raised their children in, the country they were raised in. And as for my
grandparents, they have never made any of us who aren’t fluent in Spanish feel inferior.
They don’t demand that we address them in Spanish. It was they, after all, who decided
to raise my mother and her siblings in an environment where English was the dominant
language.
Rodriguez writes, “the word culture in America pivots on a belief in the
individual’s freedom to choose, to become a person different from her past.”(130) My
family members and I are true Americans: Mexico, a three hour’s drive, is a distant place
of origin, not a destination or a place we inhabit.
My family is from San Antonio, a city whose population is majority Mexican or
Mexican-American, a city that was an eighteenth century Spanish mission, the remnants
of which linger in the city’s layout, its development along the banks of a river, and in the
way my father, a city employee whose office is downtown, works in a building across
from the old Spanish governor’s mansion (now a tourist site and a sad excuse for a
mansion, as it is a dumpy building), which is adjacent to a restaurant called Rocky’s Taco
House. A city that was Spain, then Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, and now the
United States.
A confused city, it seems, breeds confused people. Two thousand miles away
from the city, I’m constantly being pulled in different directions as the values of my
upbringing clash with those of my Latino peers.
“Y tú mamá?”
The woman catches me off guard in the shampoo aisle of a San Antonio grocery
store. She has just asked me something in Spanish, to which I respond, “no habla
español,” and shake my head in apology. My mother is a few feet away. The lady tilts
her head in my mother’s direction.
“Y tú mamá?”
I shake my head again.
My mother and I are at a Mexican (okay, Tex-Mex) restaurant. As usual, we have
conducted all business in English. Our waiter disappears for a while, so my mother asks
another employee for a food container. He shakes his head; my mother switches over a
bit awkwardly. She starts to ask, can you bring us…. and then hesitates, tries to find the
right word, makes gestures with her hands, then finds an approximation. The man
finally nods.
This situation has probably happened countless times. But only now do I notice.
Only now, as a twenty-two year old college student living far from home, do I notice all
the ways the Spanish language is used around me. My mother calls me m’ija, a word I
have never thought to translate all these years. She says andale! when she hears
something interesting or comes up with a good idea. She insists on touching pretty faces
for fear of giving people ojo (in Mexican folklore, the curse of the evil eye that one
bestows on someone he or she admires).
It’s only now that I notice, when I return home from school and open the gate of
the metal fence around my grandparents house-- where growing up, I used to hear the
call of roosters and the low rumble of passing trains in the early mornings, and the faint
steady beat of Tejano music from somewhere in the distance— that Spanish was all
around me when I was a child. I remember my father speaking in Spanglish to relatives;
I remember my father speaking to all the street vendors when we went to Mexico (and
remember feeling out of place as well); I remember that at age fifteen I had memorized,
and could recite, more than a dozen of the Tejano singer Selena’s songs, the majority of
which are in Spanish. (Incidentally, Selena sung in Spanish for years without actually
speaking the language, and she didn’t become fluent until she was a young adult. In the
movie Selena, she travels to Monterrey and dazzles a bunch of Mexican reporters with
her less-than-perfect Spanish. “Me siento muy….excited!” she says, unable to come up
with the Spanish equivalent of excited.)
I can even roll rs, articulate ñs. Yet Spanish is still foreign to me.
*
I will learn to speak Spanish. I understand now that I must in order to communicate with
others in a country where the Spanish-speaking population is growing rapidly. But I
imagine that the experience of communicating in Spanish will be bittersweet. I will speak
Spanish when others demand it, as I will undoubtedly prefer English. I will breathe a
sigh of relief to know that other Latinos won’t have language as reason to think less of
me.
Recently my grandfather wrote down some of his stories in a collection-- “a brief history”
of his life, he calls it. One of the concluding sentences reads, “We [he and my
grandmother] never spoke to our children in Spanish.” The following sentence explains
that seven of his eight children graduated from college.
I never knew, until I read the story collection, why my grandparents didn’t teach
my mother and her siblings Spanish. Withholding Spanish from my mother and her
siblings was, I realize, my grandparents’ way of teaching them how to survive in a world
where knowing English meant you could get an education and a well-paying job— things
my grandparents and their parents could only dream of.
When my grandfather said MIT meant Mexican in Trouble, I don’t think he
meant to suggest that going away to college was a betrayal of family or culture. Rather, it
was his way of challenging me to survive just as he and my grandmother--neither of
them college graduates— survived and raised eight children.
My family story is the American story, one of survival, no less important than the
ideal story of the bilingual Mexican-American. What ultimately ties me to Mexico and
the Hispanic culture is my experience growing up in the Southwest and the family stories
that I carry with me wherever I go, stories I will one day pass on to my own children.