Identity and the Latino Identity

My elementary school's ethnic composition was evenly split between Asian (mostly Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian) and Mexican/Mexican-American. During my time there, I met about 3 non-Mexican/Mexican-American Latinos, no joke. So for a long time I was always conscious of the fact that I had no one to really culturally identify with. There were linguistic differences that I noticed when speaking in Spanish with them, like accent, vocabulary and slang differences: 'popote' versus my 'pajilla’ or ‘chocomil’ versus my ‘leche con chocolate’ and Central Americans’ and certain South Americans’ predominant usage of the 2nd-person singular form 'Vos' instead of "Tú". Also, differences in tradition mattered: 'Día de los Muertos' is strictly a Mexican thing; Día de los Difuntos is observed in El Salvador, where a family goes to a dead loved one's grave and brings flowers, just like what the rest of Latin America and Latin Europe and the Philippines observe. Furthermore, the usage of Spanglish common among some of my peers (very much part of Mexican-American culture, ifI'm not mistaken) was very foreign to me. Because it is important to speak Spanish properly in my family, having a bad accent and poor grammar and vocabulary meant you were subject to being mocked. Speaking in Spanglish was seen as something of poor taste, as my family, though it had been poor and largely uneducated in El Salvador–and somehow arrogant and classist, interestingly enough—was not a campesina one. An example: I did not know my great-aunt was illiterate until a few years ago, when she asked me to read something for her. She, a very dignified woman in her early 70s, speaks Spanish very, very well and I would never in a million YEARS have guessed she were illiterate.

What does it mean to be Latino? In my elementary school, was it half Latino or half Mexican? Which designation was more important? Is East L.A. a predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American community or a Latino one? Was the farmworkers’ struggle a Filipino-Mexican one or a Filipino-Latino one? I wouldn’t call the grueling construction of the Central Pacific Railroad the work of Asians, but rather, Chinese.

I recently told a friend about my teacher from high school, a Guatemalan woman who was of German ancestry, and who was proud of being Guatemalan. He replied “So she’s biracial.” (By the way, Guatemalan isn’t a race, just like American isn’t)And I responded “No. Wait – what?”
“You said she was Guatemalan and German”
“No, I said she was Guatemalan of German ancestry”
He proceeded to disagree with me, essentially saying that because her family was not known to have been present in the colonial era, and not being of Spanish descent or Mayan descent, or a mixture of the two, she could not identify herself as Guatemalan. But wait: what about the black people that live along the Caribbean coat of Guatemala? My response to that is this: because the Spaniards uprooted the Indigenous peoples of what is now Guatemala—much like the English did to the Indigenous peoples of the 13 colonies as well as the Americans later did to what is now the rest of the United States (and what Guatemala is presently doing to its Mayan population)—and created a European-based society, Guatemala, just like any country in the Americas, has a culture that is malleable and therefore has a non-static identity. To agree with his argument would be like agreeing that the only Americans in this country are those that are descendants of the English, and the descendants of forcibly imported African slaves, who came during the colonial era. That would mean that many people in this country are not American, including whites who are of, for example, German, Italian, Polish, Irish and even English (descending from English people who immigrated AFTER the colonial era) descent. Though Guatemala did not have significant waves of immigration after its independence like the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina did, it is still a ‘New World’ country, where the power structure is not enjoyed by its original population, and in fact, it actually oppresses them. I think that if my friend were to argue that my teacher could not identify as Guatemalan because she did not have ‘nativist privilege’, I argue that only the Indigenous peoples can claim to be Guatemalan, in that case, and no one else.

Only when differences among ourselves are acknowledged can we begin to forge a Latino identity. Latino does not mean just Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban, who due to their longer significant presence in American history, have made contributions to the creation of a Latino identity, which incoming non-Mexican/Puerto Rican/Cuban Latinos acculturate to. I imagine that as the children of Central American and South American immigrants who came to the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s the United States begin to go to college and graduate from them, a challenging of what it means to be Latino, and a reinvention of the Latino identity will begin here in the United States.

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