Personal Culture

Mexican, Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, Cuban, Spainard, Rican. These are all terms I’ve heard to describe the majority of El Paso’s population, including myself. I have always had difficulties with defining my ethnic identity.

My parents are both second generation Mexican-Americans. They went to schools at a time where speaking Spanish was a bad thing. If a teacher caught you speaking Spanish, you were in trouble. My father worked in the hard world of retail for most of his life, my mother a secretary for a church. They did their best to provide for my two elder sisters and I despite a lack of money. As I look back on our upbringing I feel that we were brought up differently than other third generation children. Our parents never taught us Spanish. They wanted to make sure we could speak perfect English so we’d never have any problems in school. As a result I had a vocabulary that was usually a year or more ahead of any class I was in, but I was basically known as a “brown gringo” to the Mexican-American children. I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and felt uncomfortable doing so, as my accent was beyond horrible, it was almost nonexistent.

I got the impression as I grew older that we weren’t like most Mexican-American families. We had very little contact with our extended family. After one attempt, when my eldest sister was a baby, at a typical Mexican-American birthday party my mother swore never again. From then on, she made sure each of our birthdays were geared toward the children. She made up games for us to play and made sure it will all organized with a set plan, rain or shine. There was no alcohol served. If anyone brought it they had to drink it outside in the front yard, as the party was in the back yard. The majority of the men stopped coming once this happened and many of our relatives stopped bringing their children as well; children that were used to running around wild without any supervision.

My parents instilled a deep respect and hunger for knowledge in each of us. I loved knowledge, but was bothered by not knowing things, or by being laughed at for being wrong. My parents laughed at my attempts at Spanish words when I was young. They thought it was cute since I had no accent, but this used to make me mad. I’d hear the Mexican kids speaking Spanish and couldn’t understand a word. It used to get on my nerves that I couldn’t understand it. Rather than learning the language, I felt I’d be laughed at trying to learn and speak it, so I pushed away any attempts to learn it. Without my parents knowing I ended up getting a warped view of being Mexican. I didn’t see myself as one. I thought of Mexicans as men that drank most of the time, women that gossiped and incited fights between family members, and children that were without manners and ran around wild, and all of them as speaking a language that sounded like gibberish and went on a mile a minute. Most of my friends ended up being white. I saw nothing good about the Mexican/Spanish culture; despite that my mother made Mexican food most of the time and that I ate biscochos at Christmas, bunuelos at New Years.

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