|
|
|
Jewish World Review July 12, 2005 / 5 Taamuz, 5765 Being both Mexican and American By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
During his recent inauguration, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa offered a vision of where he wants to lead America's second-largest city.
For those who listened closely, he also offered something else: a brief tutorial on what it means to be a Mexican-American. It's about being an integrated part of both countries, and yet, in a way, remaining apart from each country.
It's the second portion that worries the constituency of Americans who complain that Mexican immigrants and their children are stubbornly holding onto their ethnic identity and refusing to blend into American culture.
Sometimes the issue is no more complicated than how people choose to identify themselves. "I find the term Hispanic and Latino — as I do all hyphenated nationality subset labels — offensive," one reader wrote me. "People who have come to America, to become Americans, should be proud to be called Americans."
Or the one who admonished me: "You are not a 'U.S.-born Latino' and describing yourself that way is the major problem with this country. My friend, you are simply an American, period. We are all Americans, not hyphenated Americans. Learn it and live it."
These people don't get it. They think that being an American is a zero-sum game. Tell that to the Irish, or the Italians, or the Jews, or any ethnic group that somehow managed, over the generations, to finesse a balancing act. They became Americans while keeping their ancestry and culture intact. It has been done over and over again. And yet the alarmists don't seem to have much faith that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can do it now.
What many of them do believe in is this wacky notion that, somehow, millions of Mexicans in America are secretly planning some revolt to retake the Southwest and hand it back to Mexico.
That is a paranoid fantasy. In fact, the real revolution is happening in Mexico, where U.S. exports and the parcels of American culture that Mexican immigrants bring with them on visits home — from English-language CDs to Los Angeles Lakers jerseys — are making Mexicans, especially younger Mexicans, more and more like Americans.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Mexican immigrants and their children aren't refusing to blend into American culture. They're simply doing what every generation of immigrants has done before them. They're defining what "American culture" really means.
Apparently what it means for the new mayor of Los Angeles is an adherence to all-American themes such as faith, purpose, ambition, imagination and hard work — with a dash of Spanish tossed in for flavor.
Much of his speech was vague, as inaugural addresses often tend to be.
"We come here to transcend our differences," Villaraigosa told the crowd of about 3,000 people who gathered at City Hall for his swearing-in ceremony, "to meet our collective challenges, and to define our mutual dreams, to take stock of who we are and what we stand for, to remember where we came from, and to decide where we need to go."
He asked Angelenos to "dream" with him, and, in a line he used again and again in the campaign to reassure supporters, he said that he intended to be "a mayor for all the people."
My first thought was: Haven't Californians outlawed those things yet? My second thought was: That fool in the crowd should have waved an American flag. It's not Mexico that deserves the credit for producing Antonio Villaraigosa. This fellow is American-made, as he proved during the remainder of his speech.
Continuing in Spanish, Villaraigosa offered himself as proof that the United States is a country of opportunities and liberty. And, he asked, in what other country could his election have been possible?
Some revolutionary this guy turned out to be. He sounds less like Pancho Villa than he does a brown-skinned Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Or he sounds like any one of the hundreds of Mexican-American kids I grew up with in Central California. They were Mexican and American, and they felt equally comfortable with what was at both ends of the hyphen.
And they say Mexicans aren't blending in. If we blend in any more, we'll be invisible.
Unless, of course, that's what some people really want.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
To comment, please click here.
|
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
