Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People

People on the Move 

N° 94,  April 2004, pp. 213-215

“Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past”*

Oscar CASARES

Along with it being diez y seis de septiembre, Mexican Independence Day, today is my father’s 89th birthday. Everardo Issasi Casares was born in 1914, a little more than a hundred years after Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang the church bells of Dolores, summoning his parishioners to rise up against the Spaniards.

This connection has always been important in my family. Though my father was born in the United States, he considers himself a Mexicano. To him, ancestry is what determines your identity. If you have Mexican blood, you are Mexican, whether you were born in Mexico City or New York City. This is not to say he denies his American citizenship - he votes, pays taxes and served in the Army. But his identity is tied to the past. His family came from Mexico, so like them he is Mexicano, punto, end of discussion.

In my hometown, Brownsville, Tex., almost everyone I know is Mexicano: neighbors, teachers, principals, dropouts, doctors, lawyers, drug dealers, priests. Rich and poor, short and tall, fat and skinny, dark- and light-skinned. Every year our Mexican heritage is celebrated in a four-day festival called Charro Days. Men grow beards; mothers draw moustaches on their little boys and dress their little girls like Mexican peasants; the brave compete in a jalapeño-eating contest. But the celebration also commemorates the connection between two neighboring countries, opening with an exchange of gritos (traditional cowboy calls you might hear in a Mexican movie) between a representative from Matamoros, Mexico, standing on one side of the International Bridge and a Brownsville representative standing on the other.

Like many Americans whose families came to this country from somewhere else, many children of Mexican immigrants struggle with their identity, as our push to fully assimilate is met wit an even greater pull to remain anchored to our family’s country of origin. This is especially true when that country is less than a quarter of a mile away - the width of the Rio Grande - from the new one.

We learn both cultures as effortlessly as we do two languages. We learn quickly that we can exist

simultaneously in both worlds, and that our home exists neither here nor there but in the migration between these two forces.

But for Mexican-Americans and other immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries who have been lumped into categories like Latino or Hispanic, this struggle has become even more pronounced over the last few years as we have grown into the largest minority group in the United State. Our culture has been both embraced and exploited by advertisers, politicians and the media. And as we move, individually, from our small communities, where our identity is clear, we enter a world that wants to assign us a label of its choosing.

When I left Brownsville in 1985 to start school at the University of Texas at Austin one of the first things I was asked was, “What are you?” “I’m Mexican,” I told the guy, who was thrown off by my height and light skin. “Really, what part of Mexico are you from?” he asked, which led me to explain I was really from Brownsville, but my parents were Mexican. “Really, what part of Mexico?” Here again I had to admit they weren’t really born in Mexico and neither were my grandparents or great-grandparents. “Oh,” he said, “You’re Mexican-American, is what you are.”

Mexican-American. I imagined a 300-mile-long hyphen that connected Brownsville to Austin, a bridge between my old and new world. Not that I hadn’t seen this word combination, Mexican-American, on school applications, but I couldn’t remember the words being spoken to me directly. In Brownsville, I always thought of myself as being equally Mexican and American.

When I graduated that label was again redefined. One of my first job interviews was at an advertising agency, where I was taken on a tour: the media department, the creative department, the account-service department, the Hispanic department. This last department specialized in marketing products to Spanish-speaking consumers. In the group were men and women from Mexico, Puerto Rico and California, but together they were Hispanic. I was hired to work in another department, but suddenly, everyone was referring to me as Hispanic.

Hispanic? Where was the Mexican in me? Where was the hyphen? I didn’t want to be Hispanic. The word reminded me of those Mexican-Americans who preferred to say their families came from Spain, which they felt somehow increased their social status. Just hearing the word Hispanic reminded me, too, of people who used the word Spanish to refer to Mexicans. “The Spanish like to get wild at their fiestas,” they would say, or “You Spanish people sure do have a lot of babies.”

In this same way, the word Hispanic seemed to want to be more user friendly, especially when someone didn’t want to say the M word: Mexican. Except it did slip out occasionally. I remember standing in my supervisor’s office as he described calling the police after he saw a car full of “Mexicans” drive through his suburban neighborhood.