Half Breed

“You know I don’t really like hanging out with you and Shannon much”, my friend says to me., “You are both racist.”

I must admit to you that she and I would talk about race a lot and joke about it a lot too.
“I find that peculiar coming from you” I say, “Especially since you are white, I am Chicano and Shannon is black.” I could not help but think to myself that he does not no what racism is having never felt it for himself.

“Well you don’t act Mexican and Shannon does not act black” is his response.
I think that sort of thing is what drew Shannon and I together, the ignorance of not only white people, but the ignorance of people in general. Shannon’s father is black and her mother is white, my father is white European and my mother’s family is of Mexican decent. I have never been black and she has never been Chicano but we felt we were the same because we are mixed. We have spent are lives being told “well you’re not really black” or “you are the whitest Mexican I know”. Sometimes we are the token minority to a group of friends (my how people in Portland love to show off their colored friend) and sometimes we experience an internal struggle that pushes us to prove we are not “just trying to be white”.

When I took my first trip to Mexico last year I believed I was going to find my heritage, the roots of my people. I came home wondering how I had missed it. I went back for a month last December, surely I would find what I was looking for this time.

One day I ventured out to the Expo Center in Guadalajara and I was walking around looking at an exhibition of Chicano art from East Los Angeles. Paintings, chopped cars, and chopped bicycles, so much art I had always equated as being Mexican. Soon after I went to an author’s convention, authors that were from Los Angeles and wrote story’s with Chicanos as their main characters. At the end of the convention they had a band play perform, it was a band from East Los Angeles that represented Chicanos in the USA, the band was Los Lobos.

Upon arriving back in the States my mother asked me if I felt like I gotten in touch with my Mexican heritage. I realized that if I want to find my true heritage and where I come from, it is in Los Angeles county. I grew up hearing Spanish around the house, eating “Mexican food”, and just looking brown. Though I have fallen in love with Mexico and that is the land that my family came from, I am not Mexican, I am Chicano. I love the country I live in and I am proud of the unique culture I have grown up with.

I wrote this poem upon arriving back in the United States in January, it is called Mi Nombre es Chicano
No hablo español igual que tu,
No hablo ingles igual que ellos,
Vengo de grandes personas,
Dije, Mi nombre es Chicano.

Dos países viven en mi corazón
La tierra de mi madre
y la patria de mi padre
Dije, Mi nombre es Chicano

Somos fuertes,
Somos fuertes
Somos fuertes.

Tenemos un hermoso pasado
El tiempo está aquí
Vean nuestro futuro poderoso
Digo, nuestros nombres son Los Chicanos

Dije, Mi nombre es Chicano