what my mom doesn't understand about growing up brown in a white world
My mother is a brave woman, although she wouldn't think to call herself that. She's just persevering, you know? You do what you have to do, especially if you have kids to raise. You carry on.
And she has.
She's the person I respect most in this world, never mind love like a child loves his mother.
Still, it can be very difficult to really talk with her sometimes.
She's never quite understood what her children's experiences are, growing up in the United States, instead of in México. You see, she came here as a grown woman, in her late twenties. She was all that time a Mexican in México. Her sense of belonging to her culture was always unquestioned and unquestionable, accepted and known and understood.
When she came to the US, she did so as an immigrant, bringing all that she was with her. It's an astonishing thing, really, and no less so for being, in this country, a story commonly told. Those of you whose parents, or grandparents, or foreparents-long-ago came to this country from elsewhere know this tale, and know that while common here--nearly universal in fact--it is still a story of bravery, hope, desperation, and hard work.
In coming here, she faced culture shock, and discrimination, and abuse for her color, her language, her sex. She faced prejudice for her culture.
She faced it all with bravery and perseverance and quiet, humble determination.
But.
But she had nearly thirty years of bedrock certainty in her mexicanidad to be her bulwark. These people here, these gringos, they were different, and odd, and foreign, and you just persevered in the face of them and got on with the business of life. They couldn't touch her deepest understandings of the way the world was--because her defining cultural lens was already in place. She could add a new lens on top of that, and did, in order to adapt, but at heart, she's Mexican.
And, I'm not. Not the way she is.
At heart, my lens is Californian, beyond Mexican or American: this particular insanity that is being born and raised here in California is my defining cultural lens.
And growing up brown, growing up Mexican, in a culture that only acknowledged being primarily shaped by the white experience... well, that's different.
My sense of belonging is a thing of yes and no. It's part of the reason why I strongly identify as Californian instead of American or Mexican (although I do identify as those things as well). The standard American narrative assumes whiteness, and I am very much not white. I mean, I know it, I can play it on TV--but that's because my safety and progress and success depends on my being able to do so.
That's the thing my mom doesn't understand. Her bravery is not useful in this situation. She doesn't know what it's like to be a child, a brown child, in a world that expects you to be white. She doesn't know what it's like to not have the defenses, the bedrock, the bulwark, and the barricade of cultural certainty, of knowing in your bones that you belong.
She doesn't know the awful pressure of trying to fit in when the way you are at home is explicitly not the way the wider world expects you to be. She doesn't know the huge and heavy weight of being a child trying to reconcile Mexican oil and American water. She doesn't know what it's like to be a child and have to know how to put on the proper mask for the biased expectations and assumptions of your white teachers until you demonstrate that no, you do speak English and better than they do. (And I had it so easy compared to my siblings, who where punished--physically hit--if they spoke Spanish at recess.) She doesn't know what it's like to have everything you bring from home weighed and found wanting on the scales of whiteness. She doesn't know what it's like to have a society try to grind the brown out of you.
And she doesn't know what it's like to come through that with a full sense of self that holds all the contradictions in place and creates something good out of that tension.
In that, she's parallel to the vast majority of my white friends. Yes, she knows what it's like to be Other, but she met that as an adult, not as a child with limited defenses and no way to stop the shaping of his self into something not like his parents.
Don't get me wrong: I love who and what I am. I live in the center of the Venn diagram, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But it's a position that is hard for people who do not inhabit it with you to understand. It's being part of multiple worlds, and of always having to find ways to bridge them.
My mother didn't have to bridge those worlds in the same way as we her children did. She did not need to be bridge and traveler, both. We were her bridges, in so many ways. I've been her translator since I can remember.
This affords me (and those like me) a great and heady privilege: I see in color. Irreducibly for me, the world is not black and white. It's not even shades of grey. It's colors rioting in multitudes. I don't have the certainty of one eternal shore: I must always bridge the gap.
Any member of a minority who goes beyond the familiar streets of her enclave into the wider majoritarian world must do the same, really. Whether they can ever fully withdraw into that enclave is a question of how much in those multiple worlds their sense of self is based. I can't do it. I don't think anyone who has had the kind of growing up experience that I had can.
I don't think that it's particular to the children of immigrants, but I do believe that I feel it, the bridging, so keenly because I am the child of immigrants, who actively keeps homes in both worlds.
I think it's a hard blessing, since I can see how cultural certainty, how unquestioned belonging, would make things simpler. That must be nice.
I also believe that being a perpetual bridge may not be possible for someone who has not the living experience of it to understand. At least, I see it as very difficult. You know, I don't think my mom can, nor can my white friends. She grew up brown in a brown world, and they white in a white one. It must have been nice for them.
You know? I don't envy any of them that.
And she has.
She's the person I respect most in this world, never mind love like a child loves his mother.
Still, it can be very difficult to really talk with her sometimes.
She's never quite understood what her children's experiences are, growing up in the United States, instead of in México. You see, she came here as a grown woman, in her late twenties. She was all that time a Mexican in México. Her sense of belonging to her culture was always unquestioned and unquestionable, accepted and known and understood.
When she came to the US, she did so as an immigrant, bringing all that she was with her. It's an astonishing thing, really, and no less so for being, in this country, a story commonly told. Those of you whose parents, or grandparents, or foreparents-long-ago came to this country from elsewhere know this tale, and know that while common here--nearly universal in fact--it is still a story of bravery, hope, desperation, and hard work.
In coming here, she faced culture shock, and discrimination, and abuse for her color, her language, her sex. She faced prejudice for her culture.
She faced it all with bravery and perseverance and quiet, humble determination.
But.
But she had nearly thirty years of bedrock certainty in her mexicanidad to be her bulwark. These people here, these gringos, they were different, and odd, and foreign, and you just persevered in the face of them and got on with the business of life. They couldn't touch her deepest understandings of the way the world was--because her defining cultural lens was already in place. She could add a new lens on top of that, and did, in order to adapt, but at heart, she's Mexican.
And, I'm not. Not the way she is.
At heart, my lens is Californian, beyond Mexican or American: this particular insanity that is being born and raised here in California is my defining cultural lens.
And growing up brown, growing up Mexican, in a culture that only acknowledged being primarily shaped by the white experience... well, that's different.
My sense of belonging is a thing of yes and no. It's part of the reason why I strongly identify as Californian instead of American or Mexican (although I do identify as those things as well). The standard American narrative assumes whiteness, and I am very much not white. I mean, I know it, I can play it on TV--but that's because my safety and progress and success depends on my being able to do so.
That's the thing my mom doesn't understand. Her bravery is not useful in this situation. She doesn't know what it's like to be a child, a brown child, in a world that expects you to be white. She doesn't know what it's like to not have the defenses, the bedrock, the bulwark, and the barricade of cultural certainty, of knowing in your bones that you belong.
She doesn't know the awful pressure of trying to fit in when the way you are at home is explicitly not the way the wider world expects you to be. She doesn't know the huge and heavy weight of being a child trying to reconcile Mexican oil and American water. She doesn't know what it's like to be a child and have to know how to put on the proper mask for the biased expectations and assumptions of your white teachers until you demonstrate that no, you do speak English and better than they do. (And I had it so easy compared to my siblings, who where punished--physically hit--if they spoke Spanish at recess.) She doesn't know what it's like to have everything you bring from home weighed and found wanting on the scales of whiteness. She doesn't know what it's like to have a society try to grind the brown out of you.
And she doesn't know what it's like to come through that with a full sense of self that holds all the contradictions in place and creates something good out of that tension.
In that, she's parallel to the vast majority of my white friends. Yes, she knows what it's like to be Other, but she met that as an adult, not as a child with limited defenses and no way to stop the shaping of his self into something not like his parents.
Don't get me wrong: I love who and what I am. I live in the center of the Venn diagram, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But it's a position that is hard for people who do not inhabit it with you to understand. It's being part of multiple worlds, and of always having to find ways to bridge them.
My mother didn't have to bridge those worlds in the same way as we her children did. She did not need to be bridge and traveler, both. We were her bridges, in so many ways. I've been her translator since I can remember.
This affords me (and those like me) a great and heady privilege: I see in color. Irreducibly for me, the world is not black and white. It's not even shades of grey. It's colors rioting in multitudes. I don't have the certainty of one eternal shore: I must always bridge the gap.
Any member of a minority who goes beyond the familiar streets of her enclave into the wider majoritarian world must do the same, really. Whether they can ever fully withdraw into that enclave is a question of how much in those multiple worlds their sense of self is based. I can't do it. I don't think anyone who has had the kind of growing up experience that I had can.
I don't think that it's particular to the children of immigrants, but I do believe that I feel it, the bridging, so keenly because I am the child of immigrants, who actively keeps homes in both worlds.
I think it's a hard blessing, since I can see how cultural certainty, how unquestioned belonging, would make things simpler. That must be nice.
I also believe that being a perpetual bridge may not be possible for someone who has not the living experience of it to understand. At least, I see it as very difficult. You know, I don't think my mom can, nor can my white friends. She grew up brown in a brown world, and they white in a white one. It must have been nice for them.
You know? I don't envy any of them that.