“The essential point is that we don’t come together in a real way until we set foot on U.S. soil. That’s when our “Latino” experience begins. Latino is an American identity.
It is a word to describe Americans who are drawn to each other by this intangible cultural link, the similarity of the way we run our families, our devotion to faith, the warmth of our personalities and our connection to a history that recognizes no border to the south.” – Soledad O’Brien
Tonight CNN will air its second part of “Latino in America” with Soledad O’Brien. This is a topic close to my heart because like Ms. O’Brien, I am a Latina. Very mixed, but a Latina Americana.
I grew up, in what I consider a multi-racial household. My mother is white and my father has beautiful cocoa sun-kissed skin (picture Ricky & Lucy). Me? I have a lot of freckles from my childhood sunburns because it takes my lily-white skin several days of gradual sun exposure before it will turn brown like my dad’s.
Ms. O’Brien’s account of her upbringing and background, along with Raquel Cepeda’s commentary about her mixed heritage, made me think of my own life. I never really think about my ethnicity until I have to fill in one of those check boxes. I had to do many of them in school, and since I have a career in marketing, I take a lot of surveys. It has always made me confused and mad that I have not fit neatly into one of those boxes. “Caucasian – non-Hispanic”, “Hispanic – non-white”. Or the definition of Caucasian is “of European decent”. Aren’t most of us? But does that mean we’re all white? I got so excited about a year ago when I was filling something out and one of the boxes was “Multi-Racial”. YAY! FINALLY!
I’ve never understood why, when we know how masses of people have criss-crossed this globe and landed in countries far away from their places of origin, that you had to be one thing or another. I don’t think I know anyone that’s 100% of anything. My own friends are representative of the United Nations – Vietnamese/Irish, Lebanese/Armenian, American Indian/German/African-American – and I follow with my own mixed bag of Irish and German on my mom’s side and Spanish, Italian and English via Argentina, Chile and Peru on my dad’s side. I never felt I was being properly counted because I am both Caucasian and Hispanic.
Like many Latinos in America, I straddle a fence. My house was a mix of my parent’s languages, food, music and experiences. When I was 10, my dad took me to Peru for five weeks where I got to experience the language, food, music and people that were familiar to me, but now I was one of them. All these years later, I still vividly remember that trip, and I go out of my way to find Peruvian food in LA. A few months ago, I found a tiny place in Koreatown that serves up the real deal. I ordered the anticucho and the woman behind the counter took one look and me and asked if I knew what I was ordering. “Sí, Señora. Soy Peruana!” (BTW – that is the extent of my very poor Spanish. Thanks, Dad!)
While I was raised with my mother’s Irish/German family, my heart and spirit are in my Latina roots. People don’t quite know what to make of me when they see me because I look very Italian and have the surname to go with it, but my father’s deep Spanish accent, flavorful food, rhythmic Latin music, and the beautiful spirit of Latin people is where I feel at home. It wasn’t always this way, but the older I got, the more I realized how deeply embedded my experience was.
It’ll be interesting to see how things will change as the Latino population increases. Maybe folks will start pronouncing things correctly – it’s YAMA people, not LAMA! The LL in Spanish is a Y! – or maybe the spirit of the Latin people will become contagious to all Americans. I have never met a group of people, like the Latinos, who will give you the shirt off their back, their last dollar and share their food with you because they want to and they don’t expect anything from you. Maybe our true spirit of giving and humanity will be our legacy, and we will be the glue in the name of this country; putting the united in the United States of America.
© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.
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