The epiphany came while I was pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
I was about to deliver a speech to a Republican women's group when it occurred to me: This was all my parents' generation of Mexican-Americans ever wanted, to be treated as full citizens of the republic and live in "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
They didn't want to start their own country or reclaim the Southwest for Mexico. They just wanted to be treated as Americans. They wanted it so badly that they tacked on a hyphen.
In the 1940s and '50s, even those born on this side of the border were commonly referred to as Mexicans. By the 1960s, many were identifying themselves as Mexican-Americans as if to say, "This is my country too."
Now things have come full circle. A lot of people want me to drop the hyphen and call myself a plain ol' American.
People like the woman in the audience who took issue with me for referring to myself as a Mexican-American.
"When are we going to get past that?" she asked. "Why don't you just call yourself an American?"
Here we go. Of course, I'm an American, I said. That's a given. I was born in the United States to parents who were born in the United States. But I'm also Mexican. It's the blood in my veins, and the smile on my face at Mexican weddings when mariachis play, and the comfort I feel with a food, a culture and a people I call my own. It's not a question of being either American or Mexican. I'm both.
The woman wouldn't let it go. Her husband's roots were German, she said. But he didn't call himself German-American.
He might, I said, if he lived in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or any other state with a large population of Americans of German ancestry. Or he'd call himself German. This is California. Everyone came here from somewhere else. So it's not the place to gauge ethnic pride. It's one thing to be Irish in Los Angeles, another to be Irish in Boston.
Not persuaded, the woman frowned. But she also let me off the hook, and stopped her questioning.
Other Mexican-Americans may approach the issue of identity differently. In a magazine interview, Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria — who was born and raised in Texas — described herself as "Mexican." She dropped the hyphen all right, and what comes after it.
Personally, I wouldn't go that far. I've gotten used to the hyphen — and to defending it. My readers get furious. Some even call me a racist for using the hyphen. Others quote President Theodore Roosevelt who railed against the idea of a hyphenated American as someone who was "not an American at all."
What the readers forget is that T.R. uttered those words in the early 1900s and that the immigrants to which he was referring were German, Irish and Italian. None of those groups — give or take a Germantown or a St. Patrick's Day — was ever in danger of breaking off from the republic. None deserved to have their loyalty challenged. That means T.R. was paranoid — and maybe a tad ethnocentric.
Here's the thing: using the hyphen isn't about claiming one's nationality. It's about acknowledging one's ethnicity.
What people want me to acknowledge is that I'm an American, first and foremost. I guess I should consider that progress. My parents' generation — as they were being spanked for speaking Spanish in school, tracked into vocational courses, denied access to movie houses except in the balcony, kept out of municipal swimming pools and subjected to other forms of humiliation — would have given anything to have been invited to become full-fledged Americans.
But, the more I think about it, the more I think it's mostly about fear. Consider that the number of Latinos in the United States has now surpassed 40 million, that they are expected to account for one in four Americans by 2050, that they have an annual buying power of more than $800 billion and that both political parties are courting them.
For those who worry that the country is changing in ways that could make them less relevant, it must be tempting to try to neutralize the effect by insisting that those you've always considered different are suddenly not so different after all.
So those folks who grew up being called Mexicans are really Americans. I can't wait to tell my parents. They'll be so relieved.
