Who/What Is a Chicano? Part One

Looking back at one of Ruben Salazar's most important and puzzling questions though my own journey and experience - part of a series on the Chicano experience.

Note: This is part of a series of essays I am writing for a book. It will chronicle my experience as a Chicano and the death of the Chicano Movement in the 21st century

I have not met that many Chicanos in my lifetime.

That might surprise you, but it’s true. That is to say that, I have met plenty of Mexicans, Mexicanos, Mexican-Americans, Hispanics, Latinos, Spanish, Latins, plain old Americans, Natives, Indigenous and more…but few bona fide Chicanos. Turns out, we are few and far between. Who knew?

And of the times that I have met Chicanos, rarely (if ever) do we agree on what it means to be Chicano.

That’s all considered part of the “fun” of the experience. Ha! It’s a close relative to the no true Scotsman fallacy.

I’d never considered the significance of this this until reflecting on the past couple of decades, and more importantly, on my own journey of self-determination and discovery.

I have, in a sense, painted myself into a corner with my identity and I am largely okay with that. I know who I am. It’s taken me a lifetime to arrive at this point. However, it’s not like a leopard can shed its spots - not that I have tried.

I am a Chicano, whether I like it or not.

Please understand that I cannot speak for anyone else. This is purely from my own experience. And I don’t know about you but I haven’t always been a Chicano.

Or maybe I should say, it’s entirely possible that I was born a Chicano but went years without knowing it. It was an awakening for sure.

These points raise several circle-jerking philosophical questions about the Chicano identity and experience. Is one born Chicano? If not, how does one become Chicano? Can anyone be Chicano or is it an exclusive club dictated by race, color, creed and nationality?

How does one know they are Chicano? Is there an official club membership and are there membership dues? Certificates of membership? Plaques? Ceremonies? Secret handshakes?

Ok, yes…there is a secret handshake but don’t tell anyone!

If you want to start a shitstorm of a debate, just ask any large group of so-called Latinos what is a Chicano and then wait for the fireworks. No one ever agrees. Feelings always get hurt and confusion (and anger) always remains. Again, all part of the “fun.”

In regards to these questions, many people (myself included) like to quote martyred journalist, Ruben Salazar:

“A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” - Ruben Salazar, 1970

That sentence cuts through the bullshit with a machete. That is exactly what I am. No matter how many times I question and debate this issue, I usually come back to this quote as a summary of what a Chicano is and/or how I feel about it.

But the explanation is always more complicated. It only takes a couple of footsteps beyond this definition to get entangled in all sorts of other questions.

Is Salazar’s definition oversimplified? Yes and no. It is a complex issue.

Salazar himself knew this, which is why I like this quote by him even more than the previous one:

“What, then, is a Chicano? Chicanos say that if you have to ask you’ll never understand, much less become a Chicano. Actually, the word Chicano is as difficult to define as ‘soul.’” - Ruben Salazar, 1970

Beautiful. I would say that is spot on. However, it is quite hilarious to me that Ruben Salazar is credited with this affirmation when he did not identify as a Chicano himself! Again, ha!

I think he was close, however, to becoming a Chicano shortly before he was murdered. The fact that the government assassinated him tells me that they considered him a Chicano even if he did not.

Have you ever tried to define Chicano to a white person? A black person? A person from another country? To the youth of today who’s only sense of history comes from memes and YouTube and Wikipedia? It is frustrating.

More so if you do not really understand yourself, and this is common among us, especially now.

How then would you expect the media, politicians, corporations, academia, other nations, and anyone outside of our culture to understand what a Chicano is when so few among us understand it ourselves..?

And this is why we see the current bastardization of the word and the culture and why it is we are so lost as a people in this ridiculous era that we live in.

How can you expect others to know you when you don’t know yourself? And many would argue, this was all part of the plan to destroy the Movement. But I digress.

I have never in my lifetime considered myself white.

Let me repeat that again for those who might be sleeping; I have never in my lifetime, not as a little boy, not in adolescence nor teenage years, not as a young adult and certainly not ever in adulthood - have I ever considered myself white! How could I?!

Even if I wanted to identify as white, society refuses to allow it. I am reminded at every turn that I am, in fact, not white. I am not black. I am not considered native. I am “other.”

WE are other to Them.

And so many of us have had the task and struggle of carving out our own identity. It is a torturous as it is fascinating.

This is a rude awakening for many during the course of our lives. You can be going along smoothly, cruising along and trying to fit into Anglo society, not really conscious of your identity, and all of a sudden something gives you a jolt and slaps you back to reality; BAM!

It grabs you and violently shakes you and reminds you: you are not white! “Well, no shit Sherlock! I’d never really considered it until now.”

This has happened to me countless times over the course of my life.

One common experience among us however, is the realization upon reading your own birth certificate that says, in plain English, that you are “white” as far as the government is concerned.

This shocked me the first time I discovered it. To this day it still angers me.

I had no say in this decision. I was “branded” since birth as something I do not identify with!

Again, I am not white! A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself…fuckin’ A, Ruben! But the world does not agree.

And if you try and push this issue with white society and academic eggheads, you will descend down the rabbit hole of “race science” and who qualifies as white/black etc. And you will stumble upon the rude awakening that we are not even considered a “race.” Only an “ethnicity.”

For this very reason, many of us have turned to our indigenous heritage as the answer and we then boldly proclaim: Fuck you, whitey! I am Native! Because Native is considered a race.

But let me just say that for myself, for my own experience, and for many others I suspect, this is of little comfort. Especially for those of us who grew up without a hint of indigenous identity.

Calling myself indigenous is about as foreign to me as calling myself white. And I know many will balk at this. But it’s true.

I did not grow up with a sense of native identity. So, to all of a sudden have it thrust upon me is about as comfortable as trying to pretend that I’m “white.”

I am neither.

Yo soy Chicano. And that’s where the trouble and the debate begin and never end.

There are those who will tell me that if I don’t embrace my indigenous heritage that I am white washed - colonized. Yet, these same people would never embrace their Spanish heritage - to do so would be taboo.

That’s where the never-ending argument and chaos begin. You are expected to fully embrace your Native roots but never acknowledge your Spanish roots but also condemn the colonizer society while ignoring the fact that we are, in fact, part and parcel, all of the above and at the same time none of it.

We are our own identity.

And that’s where I find myself wanting to fit in the most…in that little space that we have carved out all by ourselves. Some have called it life on the hyphen between Mexican and American, or Mexican-American.

I am not white. I am not native. I am not from Mexico. I am a stranger in a strange land here in Amerikkka and not embraced in either nation. I am Chicano. I am all of these things and none of them at the same time.

It’s funny, the litmus tests we put upon ourselves for identity - the stress tests and the high bars we raise for ourselves only to crush each other when we don’t pass the test.

For most of my life I felt like an asshole for not speaking Spanish. I was angry at my parents for not raising me to speak it. I was called a pocho and again, white washed…only to grow up all these years later and get called an asshole for not speaking an indigenous language! I’m now a sellout two times! Once for not knowing the colonizer’s tongue and twice for not knowing the native one…whichever that might be.

It’s fucking exhausting!

This all became a wedge issue with people, especially younger people eager to find themselves, in the last decade+, when there was a huge push by some to start labeling people as “white-passing” and “white-identifying” and others as “black” and “afro-latino” and about a thousand other things.

This troubled me.

It began as a small kindling fire and has progressed to a raging wildfire which has wiped out much of the forest that was once the Chicano Movement and identity. We are, in a word, lost.

As I mentioned, I never once considered myself white. I am fair skinned and so I have dealt with this so-called stigma my whole life of not being darker and not speaking Spanish, but it came from my own, not from white people. At least, not until later.

Some background…

As far back as I can remember, white people always considered me “Mexican.” And so I considered myself simply Mexican for many years. Consider then, that I did not have a strong sense of identity as just an “American,” as some conservatives would have written into law if they could.

Even as small child, I knew I wasn’t white. I also knew I wasn’t black. And, for many years, I knew I wasn’t an Indian either. And I will come back to this experience, but when I first encountered Native Americans in full dress, they were as foreign to me as blacks or Asians. I did not come from any of those tribes.

All of these affirmations came from childhood experiences and interactions with people from those groups.

I had friends who were white and I had interactions with blacks. I also had friends who were Mexican, but their families were Mexicans from Mexico who only spoke Spanish - immigrants. Again, this was not something I could relate to as my family and extended family were not from Mexico.

I have stated this many times in other writings but I will repeat it here: My family is from this land. We were here in the Southwest before the borders and before the U.S. - the territories that were New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado - no one from my family immigrated here. And yet, we were not fully embraced as Americans. So where did that leave me?

How can you be ‘just Mexican’ if you’re not from Mexico? How can you be ‘just American’ if American society does not treat you accordingly, and more importantly, if you do not see yourself that way? What the hell was I then?

I know from experience that neither nation embraces me as one of their own.

And so I come back to Salazar’s definition once more; A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.

I did not question these things as a child. I simply knew, or felt, that I was not like everyone else. We all grow up in our own little microcosm and have our world’s shattered when we venture out into larger society, at least some of us do who are not part of the dominant culture.

My parents, for a time, were part of the Chicano Movement during its peak. My grandparents were successful Mexican-Americans who spoke Spanish at home, but only among themselves, never with us kids. We all cooked Mexican food and also Mexican-American food.

I grew up eating beans and crunchy tacos and sopa and many other dishes and I eventually discovered that my white and black counterparts did not grow up like I did. I was different. I was Mexican. Taking a burrito to school in your lunch pail was not the norm, or so I soon discovered.

My family did not listen to Mexican music or get into any traditional dance or celebrations like dia de los muertos. Most of the stereotypical things that are portrayed as the “Mexican experience” by Hollywood and the media did not occur in my childhood. Nor was my experience like the Waltons or Leave it to Beaver. My experience was uniquely Chicano and I’m proud of that!

It doesn’t fit snugly into many people’s narratives of who or what I am supposed to be and I get a kick out of that.

I remember vividly, still as a child, being called a “beaner” for the first time. This was one of my awakenings to my identity. It would not be the last time I was called names but it would be the last time that I never considered my identity.

I was no longer just me - I had a qualifier now and things would never be the same.

Note: This is part of a series of essays I am writing for a book. It will chronicle my experience as a Chicano and the death of the Chicano Movement in the 21st century. Stay tuned for more.