Friday, February 7, 1997
IDENTITY:
Neighborhoods engender distinct notions of ethnicity and
class
I never realized that I was a minority until I came to college.
If you would have told me that in grammar school or high school, I
would’ve laughed in your face. How could I be a minority? My
grammar school was 80 percent Latino, my high school 95 percent or
more. A minority? Sure, maybe in the U.S., but not in California
and not in L.A., that’s for sure!
How could I be a minority? Growing up, most of my teachers and
even the city council was white, but our neighbors, our church and
our family was largely Latino. Our dentist was brown. So was our
mailman.
I’m from, what I’ve affectionately come to call the Eastside.
It’s a totally different world from the Westside, the UCLA area,
the valley, Orange County or wherever else you may be from. If
you’re from there or a similar ghetto, you might recognize this, so
play along.
I was born in East L.A. at St. Martha’s Hospital. (That’s my
claim for downness  being born in "East Los".) We lived in
south San Gabriel (bordering Montebello) up until about fourth
grade. I loved our little house on Lake Knoll Drive. I was always
happy there. I lived in the Mexican world of family and home. It
was completely natural to watch "El Chapulin Colorado," "Sabado
Gigante," as well as "The Little Rascals" and "Little House on the
Prairie."
The neighbors complained sometimes about the loud Mexican brats.
Although my world was brown, most of the neighborhood was
white.
The first time I knew of discrimination was when the neighbor
lady told her daughter she couldn’t play with my sister Sylvia.
Sylvia’s mom was a Mexican.
ROSEMEAD
When we became socially mobile we moved to the bigger house in
Rosemead. With five kids we needed a bigger house. But I always
hated Rosemead. More specifically, I hated my grammar school
because the majority of the kids were from Rosemead.
Growing up, the Espinoza clan and the Villa Guerrero folks made
up the majority of Mexicans at my parish. Everybody else was
Hispanic (white-washed Latinos). Sure, there were some white
people: the Irish, French and German Catholics who had stayed
during the white flight. There were even some white kids at my
school. But even they were Mexicans. Deanna, the tall blonde, had a
Mexican mom who died when she was little. The Andrews family had a
grandma who could only speak Spanish.
Rosemead people, those who were two or more generations away
from the ghetto, wanted to assimilate. They named their daughter
Jennifer, stopped speaking Spanish and wanted to move into whiter
areas. I guess it has to do with their past.
My mom lived in San Gabriel during the ’60s and ’70s. She was
the only Mexican girl still wearing her veil to church. She sat on
the bus to public school, (the daughter of a one-time mayor of
Villa Guerrero, Jalisco) accustomed to being treated with respect
and now being spit upon by the honky white trash. She still cries
when she talks about the way the hippies blew marijuana smoke on
her. They pulled on her hair and her clothes. They taunted her and
tried to make her speak English, calling her names she was only too
glad not to comprehend.
If you wanted a good job, at Newberry’s or Sears, you had to be
a light-skinned Mexican. If a customer asked for help in Spanish,
the Latino clerks pretended not to know. Rosemead people are
descendants of these. Passing for white was a big priority.
Assimilation, they thought, was the key to success.
The kids I grew up with came from families which were the
Cleavers in beige, the Brady Bunch with a tan. Indistinguishable
from the white people I saw on TV. I never fit in.
I used to hate them. I always thought they were trying to be
something they were not  middle class and white. What I
didn’t realize was that THEY WERE middle class. I wasn’t. I was too
Mexican and poor to be cool.
When the time came, I was glad to leave the hell that was
grammar school, the torture that was junior high, and go to a high
school in Montebello.
MONTEBELLO
At my all girl’s Catholic school, we had the great cross section
of the Latino community. Sacred Heart of Mary was on the border of
East L.A. and Montebello. There were girls who took the bus in from
East L.A. who lived three doors down from the projects and girls
who worked 30 hours a week to pay for their own Catholic school
tuition.
Many of these girls placed into second-year Spanish as freshmen
and spoke only Spanish at lunch time. I didn’t fit in with them.
Too many years assimilating in Rosemead made me different.
There were other girls from uptown Montebello and from the
better neighborhoods of Whittier and surrounding suburbs. Their
biggest concern was which car they were going to take to school in
the morning. Girls who went to Europe every summer. Girls like my
senior big sis, whose graduation present was an American Express
card.
Girls waiting to marry someone who could run daddy’s business
and take care of them. The glamour girls we called them. I wasn’t
one of them either.
So I hung out with the third- and fourth-generation Hispanic and
Tex-Mex girls. Girls whose grandfathers had fought in World War II
and whose parents had all graduated from high school and landed
plum government jobs when affirmative action made these available.
They were more like the white people I had seen on TV, but had less
of the self-hatred I sensed in my Rosemead peers.
But I was still too Mexican. My parents were too strict, too
backward, so uncool. When my father didn’t let me sleep over at a
friend’s house, they said, "Mimi, your parents are SOOO Mexican!"
This was a common complaint of theirs.
I didn’t realize that I was at the middle point of assimilation.
But it’s difficult to juggle the worlds of my immigrant parents and
the white world which Rosemead people had embraced. My friends were
that great middle ground which let me be both.
Montebello people, like Rosemead people, were also upwardly
mobile. But the dynamics and the cultural politics were different.
Once the jobs opened up with affirmative action  postal
service, police force, telephone companies  East L.A. people
jumped right in. Access to education  technical schools,
junior colleges and California State Universities (No one dared to
dream of the UCs then) Â also aided in economic and social
mobility. But when these Latinos moved into Montebello, the white
population left. So Latinos made up the police force, the nurses,
the teachers, and they created a middle class community made up
almost entirely of Latinos.
Montebello people liked being Latino. They assimilated at work.
They spoke white and acted white at work but came home to a brown
house with brown kids and a brown family. They made their kids
learn Spanish so they could still talk to grandpa. They made their
sons work at Lucky’s so they could learn the value of a dollar.
They did not "change sides"; they didn’t focus on "passing." They
served as bridges from one world to the next, kept having carne
asada barbecues for the fourth of July, and kept serving tamales at
Thanksgiving. They acculturated.
I’m not saying that everyone is like this. There are some
Rosemead and San Gabriel people who have acculturated and learned
to live in a white world but haven’t forgotten who they are. There
are also Montebello folks, and East L.A. folks for that matter, who
call themselves "caucasian" and change their names from Guillermo
to Bill, from Leticia to Tish. They hate themselves and change
their hair, their eyes and their noses to pass for white.
Roxane Marquez, last year’s Daily Bruin editor and a previous
Viewpoint editor, was a Hispanic from San Gabriel (bordering
Rosemead). This showed through in her articles. So I, as a
schizophrenic Mexican-Hispanic, am in a position to view both
worlds and hopefully serve as a bridge.
I’ve assimilated to a certain degree, acculturated actually.
I’ve had to. I couldn’t have survived at a major university without
mastering standard, middle-class white English. You couldn’t have
either. But I’d like to live in Montebello or a similar Latino
suburb. I want my kids to see brown doctors and brown engineers,
and to never doubt that they can be these things. I want my kids to
live in a sheltered brown world, and to never see discrimination
until they have a sense that they are as good as anybody else. I am
not assimilated. I don’t think my editor could figure it out until
now. I don’t care. I know who I am and what I stand for.