Land or Lineage...What is an American?

by Daniel Cano 

                                                                               

After generations, my uncle Francisco Gonzalez, still on the land in Jalisco

     In college, I majored in English because I wanted to learn to write -- short stories and novels. It was 1969, we were the first wave of Chicano and Chicana Baby Boomers entering the hallowed halls of academia. Of course, there were many reasons to go to college. Most of us had graduated high school, unlike earlier generations of raza, where smaller numbers had graduated high school, or not graduated at all. In some cases, liberal teachers had begun encouraging us to apply to college. Also, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and we knew attending college could get us draft deferments. Then, in 1969, just like 1945 and the end of WWII, many returning vets took advantage of the G.I. Bill, so Vietnam veterans did the same. 

     There was no Chicano Studies major, back then, certainly not in community college where many of us started. I do recall one Chicano Studies class. It was attached to the Spanish department, the only department, at the time, that had a Mexican professor, or two, willing to teach the class. 

     I remember quite a few Chicanos declared Spanish as their major, figuring it was the closest they were going to get to learning anything about their culture or ethnicity, which, at the time, was mostly Mexican, way before the 1980s migrations from Mexico and Central America. 

     A few Chicano students were curious and wanted to know why I’d chosen English as a major, the language of the oppressor. It was a time of political awareness. I told them I wanted to be a writer, so how else but to learn English. Besides, I wanted to understand the English-speaking world, since that's where my ancestors had chosen to make their permanent home. I surmised the better I could understand the United States, through its literature, the more opportunities I'd have surviving its complex socio-political structure. 

    I admit, I was far from an academic star in high school. Still, the nuns and brothers had done a decent enough job forcing us to learn, whether we wanted to or not. In college, studying Beowulf to Shakespeare was challenging, like learning a foreign language. Then, moving through the various periods, the renaissance, the classical and romantic ages on through modern times was taxing but rewarding. After all, the entire western world, including Mexico and Spain, had experienced many of those same periods in their literary and cultural histories. 

     When I received a fellowship to live and study in Spain, I changed my major to Spanish, which had been my minor. Immersing myself in the Spanish language and culture opened an entirely new world, not only about Iberia but about Latin America and Mexico, as well. For my master's degree, I chose to return to English, the reason I'd gone to college in the first place. The focus of my studies became: how Mexicans are represented in American literature. 

     So, here I am, fifty-plus years later, still trying to understand the English-speaking world and its relationship to Chicanos/Latinos. My new endeavor, now, is to read the biographies of each so-called “founding father.” I mean, we hear so many politicians refer to the founding fathers, I began to wonder if they really knew what the founding fathers believed. I mean, the first thing I learned was some founding fathers questioned religion rather than embraced it. They were sons of the "enlightenment."  

     I started with Monroe, moved to Jefferson, and I am now on Benjamin Franklin, the working-class founding father. I also learned most of them were not rural, puritan yokels-plantation owners, as many people think, but they were ambassadors to England and France, where they lived for years. They travelled broadly through Italy and Spain, and dined with the aristocracy, as they negotiated trade treaties. Where some supported the British, others supported the French.

     As I read, I began to think: and what was happening in Alta California or Mexico at that time? What was the relationship between the two? Florida was still a province of Spain, and France owned Louisiana. Then, I read a passage in Benjamin Franklin’s biography by Walter Isaacson. The idea got my juices flowing. Isaacson wrote, about trying to understand another person, “…the most important formative element is 'place' (my quotation marks). To appreciate Harry Truman," Isaacson wrote, "you must understand the Missouri frontier of the nineteenth century; likewise, you must delve into the Hill Country of Texas to fathom Lyndon Johnson. But Benjamin Franklin was not so rooted. His heritage was that of a people without a place—the youngest sons of middle-class artisans—most who made their careers in towns different from those of their fathers. He is best understood as a product of lineage rather than the land.” 

     Hmm, I thought, “Of lineage rather than land….” Wasn’t that like my ancestors, the generation of Mexicans who came north to escape the ravages of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, including those who came later, up through 1950s, the “braceros” fleeing unemployment, starvation, and poverty, all of them making homes in a place “different than their fathers"? 

     And what of the migrants who make the same journey to the U.S., today, from all parts of the world, especially the caravans from Central and South America? My grandfather’s generation migrated from Mexico. and as Isaacson argues, lost their ties to the land -- but not their ties to the culture, which ran deep in their veins. They were products of lands, villages, and towns where their families lived and worked for generations.

                                                                                    

Creating their own lineage on a new land

     My father’s generation, though, the first generation born in the U.S., “who made their careers in towns different than their fathers,” would have been like Franklin’s family, “a product of lineage rather than the land.” What does that even mean? Isaacson says, because he was so far removed from his small English town, “…Benjamin Franklin thought so as well.” In the opening lines of his autobiography Franklin wrote, “I have ever had a pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors.” 

     This reminds me of interviews I conducted with men and women of my father's generation, the first Chicanos and Chicanas who created the Pachuco mystique. In their seventies, and thinking back, most admitted to knowing little about their Mexican parents, their towns, or their parents' lives in Mexico. They said their parents never, or rarely, spoke about the past. They didn’t know why all the secrecy. 

     My dad thought his father was bitter with Mexico, a “place” that failed him and his generation, the corruption and loss of lands during the revolution. Even if my grandparents' generation worked hard and suffered discrimination here in the United States, they had a spiritual and cultural connection to "home," in Mexico, their homeland, their memories, their understanding of the stories and culture, but not so my father’s Chicano, WWII generation. 

     They had to create their own culture in the United States, their own stories, and their own ties to the land. Maybe that’s why my father’s generation fought segregation and, instead, chose to assimilate, anathema to the 1960’s college-educated Chicanos. Most of my father’s generation assimilated, because -- they could, where my grandfather’s generation -- could not. My father’s generation integrated the military, the labor unions, and social clubs. Many spoke English better than Spanish, which, for them, was a step closer to financial success and social stability, so they insisted that their own children speak English rather than Spanish, play football instead of soccer, and listen to jazz in place of corridos and mariachis. 

     I remember my father telling me he knew nothing about his dad's life in Mexico, not even the name of the town, but he had no problem recalling how he, and his friends, translated for their parents at the post office, the bank, or in business. When I asked my dad about enrolling in school as a child, he said he went to the elementary school down the street by himself to enroll. Once, an older brother accompanied him in junior high school. When I asked, “Didn’t your parents go with you?” He answered, “For what? They couldn’t speak English. They didn't understand the system. It intimidated them.” 

     Maybe that’s why, as veterans returning from WWII, they started organizations like the G.I. Forum and LULAC, political-social clubs the younger Chicano generation, my generation, saw as “selling out,” because those clubs were more conservative, encouraging the next generation to adopt American values instead of Mexican values, or transitioning to Chicano-American personas. 

     Many didn’t really know or understand the old country. The land didn't run in their veins. It had been taken from them. In Los Angeles, they were urban kids whose parents built the suburbs. They only understood this new land, one they needed to maneuver to avoid the pain of discrimination their parents suffered. Maybe that’s why they saw themselves as Americans first and Mexicans second because it was all they knew. 

     They weren’t children of the “land” but children of “lineage,” a harder concept to grasp, and, even so, like Ben Franklin, they left their mark on society.