Identifying as Chicano is a choice, and one that has
produced a sense of homeland, despite my not being of Mexican descent. I am the
son of Honduran and Ecuadorian parents. What that exactly means? I honestly
have no idea. I love pupusas and have learned about a regional Honduran
context, local Garifuna and Maya histories, and not too much more from my
Ecuadorian side except that we run off of Spanish bloodlines and a Nacza
lineage—mind you this is powerful in itself, but I just didn’t feel connected.
Not much more to it, although there could be I’m sure if I took the time. But I
found something else that spoke to my struggle, that adopted me and rooted me
in something, in somewhere. I am Chicano…
However according to mainstream Chican@ discourse being born
of Centro and Sur American parents and raised under Caribbean urban influences
in the East coast, really doesn’t qualify entry to the Southwestern borderland
identity—I got to bleed Mexico in some fashion or another apparently. Whenever asked
what I am or what I identify as, I mention my parents then that I identify as
Chicano, but I’m scrutinized carefully and then told I can’t because I’m not a
Mexican born and raised here. Whatever…fragmented, I guess is the best way to
describe myself.
I came from one of the most diverse cities in the states,
yet I felt that I could not classify myself. The term Latino proved to be
hollow in defining who I was. I did not speak Spanish well, and Latinos from
Latin America all called me Gringo. In other words, I was rejected. I could not
claim their identity, nor their space, because I was not of them. Gringos/White
people did not claim me either. White people would ask me where I was from, I
stated NY but then they responded jokingly, “No, like where are you really
from.” As if who I was had to be construed as foreign. Why did I have to be a
stranger to this country?
I came in contact with the term Chicano in Utah through a
book by Soledad O’Brian. Soledad described her experience as a journey webbed in
social identities and opposing messages. She needed a label, but was surrounded
by categories that had vied for her attention and fought for ownership. For the
first time ever, I felt I had read something that spoke to what I was feeling,
to what I felt haunted me my whole life—I believe Soledad had one hell of a
journey too because her parents were Irish and Afro Cuban.
After Soledad I pick up on the term Chicano when I met other
Latinos—specifically Mexican-American—who were not from Mexico but purposely
re-identified themselves as from neither here nor there. I was amazed. This is
what I felt, and they called themselves Chicanos. They seemed at peace with
themselves, regardless of how often they defended their titles against Latin
Americans. I began to search myself. Chicano authors like Corky Gonzalez,
Sandra Cisneros and Rudolfo Anaya began to fill the void that broke me,
fragmented me, and in their words I felt whole. In their words I discovered the
middle ground, the separation of worlds and merging of perspectives, of
occupying a mental state that was only intensified by a real-time geography
experience.
In mentioning Anzaluda, I have to be honest in that her
literature very much represents the intersecting nuances of gender and
sexuality at the same time as race. To withhold that information would fall on
account of my privilege as male, and heterosexuality as a normative feature of
society. Yet these additive features to identity—although I could not relate to
and rightfully so—taught me so much more of the intricacy within the social
constructs of self, and the power in disrupting categories by naming your own
spaces. At the time, this was my gospel.
So I decided that I identify as Chicano. Why not? If race
and identity is socially constructed, who are you to tell me where I belong and
to who? The difficulty now is helping other Chicanos—specically
Mexican-American Chicanos—come to terms with the fact that I too can identify
as Chicano. Sadly, most Latinos and Chicanos have a very misunderstood and
lacking conception of the term itself. Welcome to colonial imperialism 101.
Historically Chicano derives from the transculturation of
Spanish and Indigenous language in Central Mexico originating in the conquest.
One version contests that the origin of the term grew from the evolution of
language in which Mestizos or Indigenous Mexicans came to be known as
considering the real pronunciation of the Azteca people—the Mexica (the X being
pronounced as a “sh” or “ch”). So one argument is the resulting cocktail of
language that is used as a derogatory term to affiliate individuals who could
not exactly adopt both worlds (Indigenous or European) or those who lived in
the Northern lands till Mexico and the Western half of the United States were
coerced as an imperialist strategy. This is one version and there are many.
But as we soak in the literature of the Chicano movement
from the Civil Rights era and look at the anti-colonial aspect of what it’s
formed into—a very anti-assimilationist project—we see resistance as a
prevailing theme for what Chican@ truly signifies. Yes it might be a creative
exchange of Spanish and Indigenous languages, but it is also the
re-appropriation of resistance for a group who really had/has no home. It
demands self-determination and representation. It seeks voice. That’s why the
term speaks to me.
But what about the African or Black experience of Latin America? Does
my identity not encompass that portion? Culturally? Racially? Yes. It
does.
Honduras and Ecuador are home to Afro-Latino demographics
and to deny them as part of my reality would be disappearing them from a larger
framework—this is how an entire people fade; their stories are never told. Neither is this process new. Just like the
Indigenous struggle of identity and representation, the members of the African
diaspora in Latin America face an equally oppressive challenge. No one wants to identify as Black…Colonialism
part II—Mexico also had 4X as many African slaves delivered to their shores
than the United States, FOUR TIMES as many, which suggests Mexico is just as
much Black as it is Indigenous or European (you see, entire histories
disappear)…
 |
| Mad love and respect to Juan Ernesto (Tan shirt on the right) who passed away. You're still in our memories hermano...Rest in power... |
Nevertheless, as I seek to untangle and not fragment, but
keep whole, I come to realize that there is true danger in the complexity that
I’ve arrived at. Rose Clemente critiques the neutrality of the 1/3 argument,
which is so contagious in the Caribbean—I am 1/3 Indigenous, 1/3 African, and
1/3 European. Contradictory to its own nature, hybridity results in the
dominance and expression of ones identity, the colonizers’. This hides the
racialized component of systemic oppression in one body. They will not see
three in one, but only one; and it will be the most European, the most Western,
the most White, and the most male. Politically this is a disadvantage.
Therefore, I identify as Chicano as a politically empowered
front, but I take it a step further than that. I do what Junot Diaz does, I
carry from the Caribbean and I introduce my other hidden selves by challenge
through creation. I add my home geography because place and space are critical
in this development, and I contribute with a contextualized Black experience of
the Afro Caribbean. In other words, I arrive at my own etymology, my own
conception of the borderlands and ocean gulfs: I am Chicano Newyorquino.
So let me make myself whole again, let me reintroduce the
assorted voices into my one body, and by extension the knowledge I wish to
share with my son one day. I’ve created the Chicano Newyorquino to withdraw
from a Western categorization and deliver an alternative, something that speaks
to my racial politics of adopting Atzlan as homeland, of resistance as dance
and Santeria, of occupying, of disrupting, of transcending, of loving because
my Brooklyn experience is all of this!…BUT…I say this with the understanding
that a radical racial politics must also arrive for Centro Americano identities
and Sur Americano bodies, LIKE ME! We can’t leave these folks hanging and
expect that our alternative discourses naturally fit them or just plain old
exclude them; yet they will have to define the parameters of their own
philosophy—no one else should. It will be an in-depth and long project of race
and decolonization. It begins ,and should be encouraged—not stifled—by all of
us. In fact, it is beginning though with the heavy entrance of Central American
youth into the United States from the frontera. People are beginning to realize
that countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras actually exist! 
We as the mixed bodies of Latino parents now have an
obligation to set up new spaces and disrupt current categories that would seek
to label us. We must find the power to name ourselves and self-determine our
bodies. If we feel like we fit into a current discourse, then let’s disrupt
that shit! No one else should be doing this for us; not Chican@’s, not
Boriquas, ni los Dominicanos, or other “Latinos”, and especially not White
people. We must find a new means of existing and knowing—that we can do such a
thing and in no one else’s shadow—or we risk our own narratives, and in the process…ourselves.Tino
Note: I apologize for not adding references. If you'd like to know them please email me at Tinouvu@gmail.com
I also feel that I did not explain enough about why we need a radical racial politics, why it's even necessary at all. Nor did I feel I provided a well enough application for Chicano to me. I hope you can forgive, but I just hashed it out and needed it out ASAP. One more thing, I want to acknowledge that my Honduran and Ecuadorean heritage have not disappeared. It's something I wish to search out better and understand more of. But I'd like to do this process with my son, and not by myself one day...
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