boomerangs, music, and socioeconomics, and hoping for hybrid vigor
A heads-up: this is a wandering post, but my meanders do have a point. I think. I'm not entirely sure of it, though...
One of the important things I learned back when I worked in ethnographic market research at Cheskin was about Hispanics/Latinos in the United States.
You see, there's this phenomenon that at Cheskin they call the Boomerang of Retro-Acculturation.
Basically, it's a description of how those of us who grow up in this culture (and thus have the experience of bridging that I wrote about earlier) adapt to being of two worlds. First, you start off in the world at home, with lots of Latin cultural influences. Then, you head out into the wider world, where you're exposed to mainstream (which mostly means white) culture. You get tossed into the mainstream and are carried away from the home influences. Sometimes you fight the current, and other times, you go with the flow. In other words, sometimes you resist assimilation, and other times you just blend in. Eventually, you make a decision to start swimming. You take the influences you've picked up from the mainstream and you apply them to your home culture and start swimming back to that show. Only now, you're not just doing a freestyle--you're also incorporating that butterfly you picked up, and maybe some breaststroke, too. Only you're doing it in a way that's distinctly like your home culture.
Shall I give you an example?
Let's talk music.
I heard plenty of Spanish-language music growing up. However, because it was my mom who was making the listening choices, it was all stuff that, while great, did not hold my attention. I mean, there's only so many boleros and rancheras and cumbias I'm prepared to listen to. I wanted to hear stuff like my friends listened to. I wanted rock. And pop. Hell, I would even settle for a little bit of that country if only they'd hold off on the accordions for a bit...
So, I ran off to English music for a while. I mean, hell, I grew up in the Eighties and Nineties. For me, it was New Wave and then grunge. Depeche Mode and Pearl Jam. The Smiths. Surely, you understand.
And then I started reaching for rock en español and música pop. I came back to Spanish-language music with a fierce delight. Maná, Aterciopelados, La Ley, Jaguares, Julieta Venegas, La Oreja de Van Gogh, Mikel Erentxun, and always--almost as far back as Depeche Mode--Mecano.
I started applying my Hispanic cultural lens to wants that I had acquired from the mainstream and finding that to be the most satisfying thing. I'm not sure that I can really articulate the soul-deep satisfaction of a good rock en español song. It hits me just as deep as a great rock song in English does, but it has an additional resonance that's even more fulfilling.
On the journey that's charted by the Boomerang, I'm on the end of the curve that's back to the home shore. I've taken all the cultural artifacts and hispanicized them.
And not just them.
For myself, one of the things I see as how this all plays out is in my class affiliation. I grew up working class--poor, really--and only lower middle class by courtesy because my mom owned our home and I was the smartest kid in school and that was currency with the adults. Today, I'm pretty staunchly settled into a comfortably middle class existence (and I hope to remain so, or better off, life permitting). Given that a lot of my experience of growing up Mexican is that of growing up the child of working class immigrants, and that was the experience of many of the kids I grew up with, and that I very quickly learned that if I wanted more out of life than working in the fields--and god knows, that's the opportunity my mother was determined to give me, although it had meant her working in the fields--I had to learn to be white, in outlook, language, taste, because although I knew plenty of poor white kids, and plenty of well-off brown ones, most of the really well-off ones were white or playing it on TV.
Thus, to aspire socioeconomically was to aspire to whiteness.
And that's all sorts of fucked up.
However, getting back to that smart kid bit: at some point, I started realizing the perversity of the situation and realizing that I wasn't doing myself any favors and really, there had to be a better way of going about things. That's where I learned to swim in the cultural waters.
In a lot of ways, I now feel more akin to the middle class in Mexico than I do to the Mexicans I knew growing up. Much of that is due to the class of the immigrants who came over then--my people were pretty much small farmers and ranchers and artisans. They had very, very basic and limited educations. They aspired to solid roofs, full stomachs, and warm beds.
Unlike me. I got to take all of those things as baseline and want more. My education has been complex and limited only by desire. I aspire to art and arguments over philosophical points and drugs and casual decadence.
Which means I have everything in common with the Mexican middle class. God help me.
And it means that I've embraced another way to aspire.
Now, being me, it isn't quite that simple, either. Because I'm not viewing things through a purely Mexican lens any more than I am through a lens of the white mainstream. I'm viewing through the lens of my experience and fundamentally, that's a hybrid, a synthesis.
I wrote about being Californian earlier, and I am, but I think that even more crucially, I'm mestizo, and that right there explains everything.
Being mestizo is always being something that is new. It's being half all around, and more than the sum. Racially, culturally, and hell, even socioeconomically, I am not just one thing. I'm on that boomerang and arcing back to something original from a journey through foreign territory.
Anyway, here's hoping for hybrid vigor.