The Space Between Mexican American

     by Daniel Cano                                                                            

My grandfather meeting his sister after forty years, San Luis Potosi, circa 1960

    There is a scene in the movie Selena where the Tejana singer and her father are driving down the road and the two discuss the cultural difference between Mexicans and Americans. The father said something like (I’m paraphrasing), “You mean when you’re in Mexico you don’t feel like you are Mexican and when you’re in the U.S., you don’t feel like you’re American, that neither side accepts you?” Selena admitted that, yes, that’s exactly how she felt. 

     In 1997, Gregory Nava’s movie was one of the more successful Latino-based films of the period. It put Jennifer Lopez on Hollywood’s map and introduced the world to Selena, the Tejana singer. 

     I was teaching English at Santa Monica Community College, at the time, and, surprisingly, many of my Mexican and Latino students wanted to talk about the movie, and so did other Chicano kids in the community where I lived, hell, including my own adult children. 

     That scene in the movie seemed to be the scene they most wanted to discuss, telling me, as if struck by an epiphany, “That’s exactly how we feel.” 

     Of course, many students in the general Los Angeles area hadn't heard of Selena or Jennifer Lopez, but after the movie, the two became household names. My response to the younger generation was, “Not just you, but many of us, of Mexican descent, bred in the U.S., had felt that way, neither Mexican nor American. 

     When I told my father (RIP), born in Fontana in 1923 about it, he looked at me like that was something all Chicanos and Chicanas understood, the middle ground, neither one nor the other. His generation, Chicanos and Chicanas of the WWII generation, saw themselves as Americans, but they always knew, down deep, America saw them as Mexicans and Mexico saw them as Americans. If they travelled in Mexico, they knew right away, “they were no longer in Kansas, Dorothy.” To Mexicans, they were pochos. 

     I’m a third generation American, my kids fourth, and my grandkids fifth. Since my grandfather arrived in the U.S. from Jalisco in 1918, when he was 17 years-old, and spent some sixty years of his life working here, raising his family, and contributing to this country, I consider him first generation American, even though he never learned to speak English, hung out with friends from Mexico, and lived like a Mexican in the U.S. 

     Still, he was a product of the U.S., in a strange way, a vegetable in the melting pot, the transition, maybe even the point of transubstantiation, as Catholics might say, changing from water to wine and wine to blood, of which he spilled much during a lifetime here. You might say he was reborn into the Matrix, eventually breaking free of his Mexican past and accepting life in the north, more Californio than Mejicano. 

     He only returned to Mexico once, for a quick four-day trip to visit his sister in San Luis Potosi. He cut his trip short, saying, ironically, he felt out of place and wanted return home to Los Angeles, specifically, his little settlement in Sotel, on L.A.'s westside. 

     My father told me my grandfather was always bitter with Mexico, mainly the family dynamics that drove him north during the Mexican Revolution, his story inspiring my first novel Pepe Rios. When I asked my father and my dad's friends about their relationships with their fathers, many said they rarely spoke to their fathers, you know real "heart-to-hearts." Language was a barrier, for some, but, it appeared, culture was the widest chasm. It was right up in their faces, Mexican fathers, American sons. My dad's friends weren't the children of Lydia Mendoza, Las Hermanas Padilla, or Antonio Aguilar but the children of Benny Goodman, Lalo Guerrero, and the Andrew Sisters. So much of this I’ll call a “dichotomy,” no, maybe “dilemma” is better, a problem to be solved. 

     I feel more today than ever before, with the influx of migration into all sides of California, and Los Angeles, not only Mexico and Latin America, but from the Anglo-American East, Midwest, South, outsiders who flood our neighborhoods, their cultural baggage in tow. I am more entrenched now than ever, locked into my neighborhood, with so many outsiders buying up property and homes at extravagant prices, demolishing them, and building enormous monstrosities in their place. Then they want to recreate their new neighborhoods into the neighborhoods they left behind. Go figure!

     Is this how the Californio’s felt in the 1840's as more of the Crown's Mexicans travelled up the Camino Real into Alta California, and from the east, renegade Yankees, with an eye on gold, Mexican women, and land? The Tongva people had to have felt it in 1769 as they watched mestizos in leather jackets take and settle the lands they had roamed for generations? 

     Is this what they call gentrification, or is it, simply put -- progress? 

     Some people like to think Charles Darwin had it right when they quote him as coining the concept “survival of the fittest.” The thing is, he never said it, nor did he believe it. What he wrote about was something more akin to, “those who adapt survive,” and adaptation doesn't always mean the "strongest." 

     Now, that’s an entirely different concept. In his classic novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Oscar Acosta had no qualms equating mestizos and Chicanos with that dastardly insect, the cockroach, maybe because of its ability to adapt and live. After all, cockroaches don’t go back to prehistoric times, as some people think, but barely 150 million years back. That ain’t bad...talk about survival and adapting. So, is that us, mestizos, survivors, cockroaches? Or, as the Mexican song goes, "marijuana pa' fumar."

     I remember I was in Zacatecas, in a rural town Juchipila, sitting in the main zocalo talking to a local, an older man. Of course, no way could I pass for a Mexican, not in 1975, at the height of hippiedom, my hair long and Fu Manchu filling in nicely. Even though I wore a sarape to ward off the cool mountain air, everything about me gave away my pochismo. 

     As we spoke, a cockroach emerged from under the stone bench where we sat. My instinct was to lift my boot to crush it, but the man took hold of my arm. He made that sound with the tongue, the kind grandmothers make when a kid does something wrong, like, “Tsch, tsch, tsch.” 

     “What is it?” I asked. 

      “We don’t kill cockroaches.” 

     I asked, with all the squeamish, cultural stereotypes my gabachado mind carried about cockroaches in the U.S., “Why not?” 

      He told me cockroaches kill scorpions, a plentiful breed in the homes in and around Juchipila. A scorpion’s sting can kill an infant and make adults sick. So, I followed up with the question asking him how a cockroach can kill a scorpion. He described it, a cockroach confronted by a scorpion, something of a face-off, mano a mano. He's got my attention.

     As the scorpion waits to attack, the cockroach touches the scorpion’s back, finding a vulnerable spot, with his antennae. The scorpion reacts, stinging itself, and, eventually, dying. Two kids stepped up to us as the man was talking. The boys both nodded. They said, for fun, they catch scorpions and cockroaches and place them on the ground inside the metal strap from an old wooden barrel. The cockroach always wins, outsmarting the scorpion, just like the man said. 

     Now, I suppose this isn’t scientific proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but it’s a good story. Most people would see the scorpion not only as the stronger and the more dangerous but more lethal. Then I wonder, how many cockroaches have died, down through the ages, until they figured out how to adapt their fighting strategy to survive, kind of like Achilles in the Odyssey, using his sword to kill Hector the same way a cockroach uses its antennae to slay a scorpion. 

     Were the Mexicans pulling this pocho’s leg with the tall tale, or as the say in Spanish tomando el pelo? I have no idea. I never saw a scorpion fight a cockroach, but I do know that the Tongva, and the mestizos in my community have been here since the beginning of history, and no matter how many foreigners enter, or from where, like the cockroach we, and our descendants, continue to adapt. Sometimes, when I leave the house each morning and walk down the street to the boulevard, I hear just as much Spanish as English, sometimes a mix of the two, and, yes, I figure, we are changing with the environment, the space between Mexican American closing a little more with each generation.