I started talking to myself on my walk home the other day. I constantly do this, especially when I’m troubled by something. I guess lately I’ve been troubled by the condition of my own identity, particularly as I encounter Mexican or Chicano artists whose art touches on their relationship to popular culture, and their understanding of what Mexican art is or should be. An example of the latter would be art that is overly decorative or appropriates traditions originated and practiced in Mexico. I understand what these artists want to communicate, and I also understand how the aesthetic choices in their work relate to their cultural experiences as a Mexican or Chicano artist. However, my experience has been different, and sometimes I feel that the imposition of their work as the whole and only Mexican experience in a way obscures my own. While living in Chicago, I started questioning my own ‘mexicanness’, something I had never had to do when living in Mexico City, where my Mexican legitimacy was a given. I’ve been feeling the need to deny this part of my identity; this seems rather impossible since I am Mexican. This is the name I have been given to my experience throughout my life.
As I walked, I kept on repeating ‘Yo no soy, soy Mexicana,’ I was amazed that it seemed natural in my “first” language to both affirm and negate something (in this case my own identity) in the same sentence. So I thought, how would I translate this into English? ‘I am not am Mexican.’ I knew this wasn’t a perfect translation, but I started to become interested on the linguistic space of the Spanish language, which is not dependent of a pronoun for a verb to take place; in other words, someone can BE without the need of an I. [1]
It is not that there are no pronouns in Spanish, but rather that we don’t need or use them all the time. I know linguistic, social, and economic structures shape culture, but also through these structures we might be able to understand the differences between cultures through a historical and linguistic standpoint, as well as further comprehend how identity is and has been constructed. I immediately drew connections between the need for an “I” in the Anglo-American language to its constant need and advocacy towards the individual. [2]
This seemed to me to relate to my own experience as Mexican, where I felt my mexicanness in Mexico was a given, but here in the United States I constantly felt the pressure to justify how and why I am a white Mexican. Contrary to my experience in the United States, my intersectional identity in Mexico had never posed any trouble. Rather, the issue of concern in Mexico seems to be focused on the nature of the mix, always placing higher value on the lighter type (although that in itself can be troubling). I believe it is in this Latin American history of ambiguity and its many faceted tones, that we understand there is certainly not a one kind racial type of Mexican, but rather we are a country who, since its colonization, has been mixed and imposed a certain tonality value which unfortunately still upholds.
Latin American and North American countries come from different cultural genealogies. These different genealogies are derived from both of their colonizing settlers. That is specifically, Roman Catholic Iberia for Mexico and Germano-Protestant England for the United States of America.
While in the U.S. history, race mixing was seen as an aberration and many segregation strategies were applied, including anti-miscegenation laws, which were ruled unconstitutional until 1967 by the U.S Supreme Court in the famous case Loving v. Virginia. These laws enforced racial segregation by prohibiting and deeming as a felony any sexual intercourse and interracial marriage between different races, particularly those that concerned the mixing of a white person with someone from another racial group.
Similarly, in Mexico’s history many segregation strategies were also applied, though very differently that in the U.S. Mexico embraced an ideology of mestizaje. Meaning, a racial and cultural synthesis from almost the beginning of what I would rightly say a violent conquest. This does not mean, that there was and there is no racism, segregation, and classism in Mexico; but rather that because of the way it was historically handled through its legislation, that way we view race and the way it operates is very different from the Anglo-American perspective. I would even say, that race for Mexicans is a sort of malleable category. For the Mexican, race is and has been historically mixed with classism. During the New Spain era racial classifications were immediately applied with legal rights attached to each where unfortunately the whitest maintained the highest value in the racial hierarchy (see Image 5). Nonetheless, the important distinction I want to make is that though both countries maintained a high value for whiteness and purity, the domination strategies perpetrated by the Roman Imperialism was one of mixed racial classification (which is still one of segregation but allowing interracial marriage to take place as long as there is a hierarchical system supporting, designating, and localizing the origin or mix of each person), while the Germanic strategy implemented in the U.S. was one of segregation accompanied by anti-miscegenation laws that made it very difficult for any interracial mixing to take place. Simply said, race for the Mexican is a sort of grayscale, and historically this was appropriate as long as one could name the kind of "grey" they were born into.
When I say I’m Mexican to another person in the United States, without any explanation, the moment always evolves to a certain expression of suspicion. It is not that they always ask ‘but how come you are white’, it is that you can see it in their faces. Sometimes I get the passive/aggressive question or statement but ‘your English is so good’, or ‘why is your English so good?’ or ‘but you don’t look Mexican.’ Although comments like this have a deeper value system imbedded in them, I sometimes am amused and annoyed by the fact that ontology and phenomenology are still constantly wedded as if they were the same thing. And no, looking and being are not dependent on one another. The fact that I am perceived as white does not invalidate my mexicanness, even if we live in a perceptual world.
In this sense it is as if I am accepted as almost white, as if I have a free pass and an acceptance card into every place that is white and westernized. However, this free pass seems to come with certain conditions like ‘be careful to not have a thick accent that will betray your otherness’ or ‘be cautious to not make too much scandal or show of impropriety.’ Certainly, this kind of passing, as a “pure white” requires vigilance and self-censorship, in which sometimes I am caught feeling as if I belonged to no particular national identity. Neither Mexican, because my skin color betrays me, nor Swiss-German(my dad’s family side) because I don’t speak the language or share the culture, neither European because I speak American English, nor American because I have a thin accent. It seems as if wherever I go I have the ability to pass but encounter a barrier of some sort when the aspects of my otherness comes to light. It is an almost passing, where I can be everything and nothing at the same time.
I am not saying that this tendency of otherness, as something that betrays you and renders you an outsider, is only found in the United States. This tendency for me, started to display itself since early childhood. I remember when I was a kid I used to be teased for what my friends thought of as too-proper language. I would say words like simpático, instead of buena onda, or use the word chaqueta instead of chamarra.[3] My mom used the same words. She was not born in Mexico City but rather 40 minutes away by car in Toluca, Estado de México. She was from a provincial town, and thus the language she used sometimes othered her from the cosmopolitan Mexico City. I inherited this. Recently, while researching the changes of Spanish language, and its clash with English and the resulting Spanglish, I came along Ilan Stavan’s dictionary. This dictionary is a revolutionary text in the sense that it is legitimating what was once thought to be, and in some places still is, a bastard language. While I scrolled through the words, I saw the word Chaqueta as a word that comes from an alteration/modification of the word jacket in English. I was surprised to see this. How did a Spanglish word come to be used at least 40 years ago in my mom’s home?
I became interested in this word, because for me when I was little it was an othering word in the sense that it did not pertain to the colloquial/hip use of language that my childhood friends spoke. Its etymology appeared to be from Old Spanish, a “proper” Spanish that was mostly used by older people, whose Spanish still tried to secure as much of the purity of the Cervantes tongue as possible. The subsuming of such a “bastard” word, into a “pure” Spanish language category interested me. In my conception and understanding of the word chaqueta, I was being teased because of its formality, a certain formality/otherness that was not compliant with the norm of children’s use of language. I loved finding this out. On the most banal level it meant my childhood friends framing of my language and thus myself was wrong all along. They were wrong about me. I was not this uncool, too formal and polite little girl that used the proper Spanish language of her parents. Yes, I was talking in my mother’s tongue at the time, but that language ended up being far away from what is considered the “correct” or “proper” Spanish. It was already “bastardized.” This moment reminded me that the connotation and assumed origin of words varies constantly depending on the place and people you are with. Suggesting that a presumed origin of a word or a persona might be more convoluted that what one might assume it to be.
***
I encounter the switch-code between Spanish and English both to be helpful in some instances but also detrimental. Code-switching is a term in linguistics that designates when a subject alternates within two or more languages, usually requiring the speaker to be fluent in both. Code-switching allows me to understand things through multiple scopes simultaneously, but it creates a gap where I sometimes feel insecure around both languages. This insecurity is not holistic; it depends on my own levels of comfortability of the use of language in certain linguistic spaces or conversations. For instance, it is easier for me to communicate in Spanish when it is related to something emotional. Either a mundane conversation with a friend or a desire that needs to be manifested in the spoken word. In a certain sense, I feel more comfortable expressing myself in Spanish as a day-to-day language.
On the other hand, English for me is established on a more mentally framed platform. For instance, every time I try to explain a theoretical framework, or a thought that exists outside the emotional aspect of language, one that contains a certain distance from my own selfhood, I revert to thinking and speaking in English. To a certain extent, my connection and use of Spanish functions in different spaces. This might be because my learning and experience of such subjects were introduced in English. However, the reality is that it is not only my comfortable levels on a academic environment that are shifted towards English, but also, that I would not be able to have these kind of conversations in Spanish without having to recur to English first as a way of thinking and then translating it into Spanish. The problem here lies when one doesn’t know or there doesn’t exist a translatable word, or conversely, when a word in a certain language has multiple meanings but its translation has only one.
Speaking both languages and having lived in both countries has allowed me the privilege of being able to make swift mental turns from one language into another, pushing my language and its frameworks to its limits, without having to submit to the linguistic and social grid of a particular place. It has shown me that not all things are easy to translate, because no place, language or experience is the same. I have learned that the meanings of words are always changing and that to designate a fixed value to anything or anyone is to prohibit oneself to experience the beauty that exists in the exploration of its multiplicity.
[1] “A type of clause in which a ‘subject’ is talked about or modified in some manner, is observable in every linguistic system. All speech operates with subject–verb–object combinations. Among these, the sequences ‘verb–object–subject,’ ‘object–subject–verb,’ and ‘object–verb–subject’ are exceedingly rare. So rare, as to suggest an almost deliberate violation of a deep-rooted ordering of perception.”
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 174.
[2] Interesting might be to note that English has no official institution that is responsible for its language. For instance in Spanish we have the Real Academia Española, that though it specifically focuses on the Spanish from Spain it is still affiliated with other hispanophone national language academies in order to promote linguistic unity within and between various Spanish speaking territories.
[3] Simpático= a) nice, b) Likeable, c) Pleasant
Buena onda= a) cool, b) having a good vibe
Chaqueta= a) jacket, blazer
Chamarra= jacket