Who knows who I might be or feel or how I might act or what I would be writing today if the truth hadn't slowly risen to the surface, helped in part by my personal reaction to the rising level of hostility and racism against Tha Mex in everyday news and media and dialogue around me. I guess some who are not white choose to identify with the power structure, and turn their back on themselves, against their people and their blood in one way or another (see: Ms. Malkin). This is not possible for me. Even if others would let me get away with it. In fact, if you are brown in any way, and feel like knocking your own kind, you will always be allowed by those around you. In this land, that is really the expected line, underneath everything else. That we are all striving to be white because, in all honesty, that is Teh Bestest thing ya could be. So, in the public square, knocking The Mexicans is funny. Knocking white people while Not-White? Not funny at all. Dangerous, even.

I get a little annoyed when people tell me, from time to time, "Oh, you could pass for being white." The words roll off their tongue as easy as pie, as easy as they imagine it would be for me to just "pass." As if I didn't try that all my life. And I think "Oh, really? That simple, hunh?" Because this is my point, again. You are not just what other people see you as. You are what you are. And what you know yourself to be. I mean, I understand what these people literally mean. They mean that in a land of mixed blood, I am not so dark (again, if I stay out of the sun) as to immediately be nailed as a brown person. Historically, the not-white people who say this to me usually mean "I am less white looking than you are." (And as a side note, it is never Latino people who tell me this.) And the white people mean it as a compliment, generally.

If you are a (light) black person or half-black, or half-Asian person, tell me how you sit at a table when white people are slurring your kind? Do you just "pass" then? It is that easy? Even if they don't mean it? Even if they regurgitate racist memes they don't even know are painful to you? Do you laugh at the joke? Is it easy to pass and let it pass? No. It is no easier for me to "pass" than it is a person as dark as night. We both have the same heart inside, and it is pained in both cases to be denied or turn upon itself. And self-denial is not an easy pain. No matter how light you are.

For years, "Spanish" is the nationality that I identified with. Because my name—usually standing out in the areas I lived—was (is) Spanish, it all melded together. "Oh, what kind of name is that?" and I would say "Spanish." Later on, I was trying stuff out and I told someone I was not Spanish, but "Mexican." Told a couple people that. It was not hard to take notice of the face and pauses. And that's where I gauged things. As I've written in many pieces, I've had to be a detective in these areas. Nobody guided me. Among other secret signs, I had to learn the language of ethnic probing, had to learn what the phrases meant Where are you from as well as What nationality are you. ("Nationality" was an early big word for me.) I confused people for years...and they confused me, as they asked me Where Are You From and I would tell them all the states my parents had moved me. It was a long list, and people's faces would tell me that I wasn't answering correctly. So I adjusted in time. I would answer "Where was I born, where did I grow up, or where do I live now?" And they would say "Yeah, all of that." And still end up unsatisfied. But I didn't know what they were asking, often. Because I didn't think of myself that way, you see. I thought I was just like everyone else. Universal. The world taught me otherwise.

I wonder if those coming to la lucha these days understand how long anti-Mexican sentiment has been part of US conversation. I think all of us Mexican Americans understand. And other brown™ folk, as a matter of course. I will tell you, in case it is not immediately easy to infer from what I write: Anti-Mexican sentiment has been part of the background of society's conversation—books, movies, jokes, TV shows—ever since I first learned how to speak and listen. All of my life. It is not new. All this Buchanan talk, all this Tancredo talk, all this white supremacist bullshit that tries to dress itself up in a hundred different ways. It doesn't have to do with HR 4437 or even Prop 187 or the War on Terror. That's one reason why it is so infuriating or insulting. These voices simply have a foothold now. An excuse. But they've always been there. I just lived with it after a while. You learn to duck, to defer.

I've gradually come out of my shell, more and more. And each inch I have moved forward is one I can never move back. As my friend Jose, quoting Cesar Chavez, wrote in his email this morning about the CA dream act being voted down by Ahnold again:

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

—Cesar Chavez

My father wasn't around after I turned five or so, and I could not look to him to tell me what it meant to be what I am. My own family, composed of my actual mother and an adoptive father (And no, not just a "Stepfather," I'm talking about being legally adopted out of your own name and birth certificate) never really talked about my being of Mexican descent. My mother wasn't ashamed of it, I'm sure she enjoyed the fact, and enjoyed who I was. But I don't think she had much to say on it. What could she say? What could she offer, as a white woman? How could she give me my culture? No matter what she did, she would always be someone else, looking in. And not much was really done. Don't get me wrong, I love my mother dearly, and this is not a tirade against her. She is a great mother. Which is a point I make in this conversation about culture and mixed families. Being a great parent or person doesn't mean you can give everything to someone. You can't really give what you don't have.

Once upon a time I wrote a post mocking Angelina Jolie for her Exotic International Adoption Habit, and this post was up in a few places, and I brought down almost the entirety of the world's white Anger down upon me for daring to attack the Poor Rich Beautiful Saintly White Woman...but really, the angry crowd had it wrong. I was not attacking her so much...I was hardly thinking of her. I was thinking of those children, bound for a horde of identity issues. Issues that don't exist to the white mind, here in the land where the white face is the Universal one. Issues that were invisible to those proclaiming how those brown kids from poor lands now were bound for a lovely life that was better in every way.

And this life I've lived—which would be a white one by default—is where my feelings about trying to "blend in" come from. As I've said many times, nobody has tried harder than I to be "white." Nobody knows as well as I that despite how many moments you think you pull it off, unless its what you really are, then in the end, being WHITE means erasing yourself until there's nothing there. A big part of The White Idea is that alternate histories do not matter. And why should they? You now stand upon the greatest mound of story ever invented. Embrace it. Your history and culture and affiliation with any other people doesn't matter. (Especially with brown people.) You are to let that go. And just be in the here and now with America the Beautiful, where everyone is equal racism is dead the dream is arrived etc. etc

And I know for some people this works very well.

But yes, long before everyone was blogging about Mexicans and realizing that people like Lou Dobbs were feeding a loathsome beast of ignorance and hatred against those south of the border, I was aware of this beast, as it crawled behind me, as I zigged and zagged to escape it. With name changes, with deflections and denials, with bleach and contact lenses and every other thing I could do to escape the blood in my veins, the historia in my past, the tint of my skin, the lay of my hair, the truth of my genetic affiliation in any way it presented itself.

And so (before the days I'd shift it over to Italy) for many years, I was "Spanish," and I have to tell you, it has taken some time getting used to the idea that I am not. I used "Spanish" far more often than "Mexican" and to this day, some people use "Spanish" for "Mexican" or basically anything "Spanish-speaking," which is where you get "Hispanic" from. Which, of course, is why these days it's a point of pride that I highlight Mexico, O, most dear and slandered of countries! O, ghetto of the U.S.A. Many may try to crush the Indio out of existence with all the talk of First World and Economy and Western Civilization, but they will not crush you from my mind and my heart. The Indian lives here, lives on. It is not a romantic affectation that inspires this in me, it is not some escapist affiliation. It is my stand against a long tide of oppression and erasure. I am the masses of my people, the man said. And I will not be absorbed.

I remember the first time I hung out with who I ended up thinking of as my "half-sister," which...isn't really true now that I stop and think about it. She is my father's wife's daughter, but not his daughter. So she is in no way related to me by blood that anybody is aware of or could possibly assume. But my family is a patchwork of pathways...and sometimes I gather people in if I can. Gestures of a vagabond, family tree planted by homeless hands.

She was cool beans. Marlene is her name. And maybe my affection for her was in part because of the knowledge and absence of my real half-sister, Almasol. A picture here and there, not much more.

We would hang out in Iowa, or California when she lived in Fresno. But I think it was in Iowa City when we were chilling. Out at a restaurant or something, we asked to use someone's lighter, and they acted weirdly, didn't want to let us. They seemed suspicious. Anyway, we got a light and went outside and smoked our cigarettes. (I don't smoke anymore.) Marlene laughed, smiling at me and darting her eyes over to the (white) woman who had not trusted us.

"They don't trust us 'cuz we're Mexican," she said.

"Really?" I said to her. Because I had no real awareness of being "Mexican" at all. As I said, I spent most of time not being Mexican. To my mind, all indicators were absent. I spoke better English than just about anyone in my classes, if not everyone. I always had, was a natural with language, and the only language I could speak was English (except for the counting I've been able to do in Spanish, French, and German since I was a kid). So I learned it well. I didn't admit I was Mexican. By eight I had already changed my first name on my own (to "Jack," the brightest, cleanest, whitest, sharpest, shortest name I could think of) and had my Spanish last name wiped clean by the legal means of the adoption process.

I took on that name in Bethesda, Maryland. There was a lot of resistance to my name, and it made itself clear through my peer groups and my school, from teachers and students alike. I had no real reinforcement for being "Mexican American" aside from one time I remember my mom taking me out to some fair and buying me what I felt were very bright, tacky, straw toys. They made me ashamed only more to be associated with such crude crafts. To tell you the truth, it was hardly an authentic "Mexican" setting. This was a little "ethnic" fair perhaps in Maryland, maybe as part of a special school night and other displays. I wouldn't be surprised if there had been little "Made in China" stickers on those "mexican" crafts. Other than that, and the "your papi says you are Mayan Indian," what did "Mexican" mean to me? It meant weird pauses. Wrinkled brows. Forced smiles. Awkward transitions that even as a child I was very aware of.

And that was most of my young life. But on that hot day in Iowa, in the parking lot defiant and unapologetic, Marlene and I stood there smoking and we were Mexicans. I liked that feeling.

I went with her to the jail so she could see her boyfriend. I was 19, she was not old enough to see him herself. I cruised the loop with her and her friends, drinking Mad Dog and cranking GNR. I was new in town, new in the state. She showed me the ropes of the Iowa City nightlife.

One night, I gave her a tattoo. This made her mom, my father's wife very angry at me. Very, very pissed off. She may be pissed off to this day. But I was...I was not a kid who thought to ask a mother when a peer wanted a tattoo. I grew up out of step, eventually, with any kind of parental guidance. I grew up in opposition to what posed as parental guidance in my life, ultimately. I wish I hadn't offended her mother like that. But honestly, I can't say I wouldn't take Marlene's permission again, though, given the chance to go back. I just always saw things that way. It was her foot, and that's what she wanted. It's hard to see how my views on that could have been different. But I got everyone mad at me that year. That whole household.

It was strange being with my father's family. When I met him again, that is. At 19. I remember the first time I met him...again. The strongest memory I had of my Papi before then was him and his yellow writing tablets. A writer. Unable to be interrupted. Married to his muse. I still more or less see him more devoted to his work than anything else. I don't really think he can help it.

But you don't even know how I met my father again. Because as far as I knew, at 19 or so, he was history. And then one day, my mother told me she had found him. Hunted him down through his social security number. They contacted him to see if he wanted to see me. He did.

You see, my mother never told me she was looking for my father. And I didn't really think I cared. I realized one day that wasn't true, when I was about 16. I was in the bathroom, I'll always remember it. I was looking in the mirror and I suddenly realized how much I looked like certain pictures of my biological father. You see, that mirror was no friend in my Great Forgetting. Even if ten people tell me You Are Not Like THEM, or You Can Pass For Being White, the mirror laughs them all off. And it's a caustic bout of laughter. The mirror says I know what you are. Run as long and far as you want. You'll have to come back to me sooner or later. And that one day when I looked in the mirror—and those were some of the most painful days of NotWhiteness, high school—I felt I was looking at my father's face.

And it suddenly made me very sad. It made me realize I had missed something in my life. And maybe that I still was. This was, maybe, an early part of my awareness that there was more to me than I was admitting in terms of ethnicity.

I was always glad my mother didn't raise me on bitterness for my biological father, that she gave me the power to make up my own mind. It is one of the things, the big things, I respect and admire about her choices in raising me. I don't agree with all of them. But some of them are really admirable. And this was one. I see nothing grosser than a parent using a child to shore up their own bitterness against one of their own past mistakes. This is refusing to learn a lesson and whipping your kid for the failure. My mother knew enough not to instill hate in me. She knew that no matter how far your father or mother are from you, they are still a part of you. And if you encourage a child to hate a parent who made them, you encourage that child to destroy itself.

She let me make up my own mind. This was very important. Now, my conclusions are my own and I do not hesitate to stand behind them.

When I met up with my biological father finally, it was a shock to the system in a few ways. Mostly racial, or ethnic. As I've said, I thought I was "white." That means both when Marlene counted me in as "mexican' I was surprised to be included, and when my father and his familia talked about "white people" at the table, I felt insulted. It was a hard time, figuring out who I was. It's been a hard time, between now and then. With people who can either treat me as if I am Xicano, or as if I am white. And you can never tell which will be which. Like Jessica Alba, I feel as if neither world fully accepts me. Although the acceptance I get from the brown world is always nourishing, always empowering. And the acceptance from the white world, when it thinks I am not brown, is always degrading, debasing. If you can understand that, then you understand a lot.

My father asked me a year or two after he met me, "Why are all your girlfriends white?" Which seemed a very strange question to me. (Aside from not completely true, as the second girl I was ever with was black.) It took me a few years to answer. At which point I said "How can you ask me that? You picked my mother, and she was white!" But I hadn't yet realized that my mother was but a brief foray into a world that my father did not really feel part of, nor want to, nor would he again enter in such a way. He was young, less sure of who he was and what he wanted, and he only stayed long enough to make my existence in that world (as well as my brother, five years younger than me) a reality. And then he stepped out.

It's not a secret to me what the taint of whiteness means to my father. Even if he never says it out loud, and even if he refuses to admit it. I am too old to be fooling myself with other peoples' personally-fashioned illusions. I understand that he, as a person who wants to be decent and kind, cannot tell me these things outright. Perhaps he is even ashamed of his own feelings. Perhaps he even thinks he is (or actually is) past that, and now sees everyone equally. It doesn't matter. And I don't want to guess at his reality too much, nor psychoanalyze him. But his actions and words over the years spoke their own truth.

Nor can my my mother fully understand this path. Nor can most of my friends. Not the white ones. And not all the "brown" ones. Not the ones who don't deal with a "mixed" identity.

But this is my path, and this is for me to be at peace with. Or not. Like all the difficult battles in my life, this is for me to come to understand in my own way. Many people online and well-versed in academia and alternative-to-Western theory rail against the individualist stance, the whole "did it on my own" tale. And it's true that those "did it on my own" tales tend to de-emphasize the help we get from others. And a real warrior does not need to lie about melee. Ever since I've come online and engaged this journey, I've had so much help from blogmig@s like XP, and Kai, and Blackamazon, and Sylvia, and Tony Herrera, and lots of gente who have given me hope or help or education or solidarity when I really needed it. That will never be forgotten.

I've also had waves of antagonism and hate and energy that attempts to shut me down and shut me up. It's all been very helpful, you know. Really. Those antagonists often enable me to recommit myself to this struggle. Because nothing gives me more energy to keep on going than the thought that those eternal hateful voices would be happy to see me finally sink in and forget who I am.

All instructive and helpful. The good and the bad. But here in my life, in this early morning moment, and in the narrow parts of the path, I am alone. In that space where you decide to either be true to who you feel you are or to what others want you to be, you are all alone. And it is okay and good to note that. To draw back and turn inward for strength. To touch that part of you that is true, and unwavering, and always full of love and acceptance for yourself and what you are, even in the face of public derision. Even then, some may say you are not doing it on your own. But despite what you draw on inside yourself for strength, you do have to be ready to find yourself standing by yourself, and you do have to be able to call upon your own resolve and knowledge during such efforts as this. And then you have to know who to stand with. And then you stand by them, and in so doing further define your self.

I don't have many more answers than I did at the start. But I know what I'm not. I won't pretend to be something that makes others happy. I am happy to be what I am.

Soy Xicano, con mucho orgullo.

Part of the blood that is mine
has labored endlessly four hundred
years under the heel of lustful
Europeans.
I am still here!
I have endured in the rugged mountains
Of our country
I have survived the toils and slavery of the fields.
I have existed
In the barrios of the city
In the suburbs of bigotry
In the mines of social snobbery
In the prisons of dejection
In the muck of exploitation
And
In the fierce heat of racial hatred.
And now the trumpet sounds,
The music of the people stirs the
Revolution.
Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.
And in all the fertile farmlands,
the barren plains,
the mountain villages,
smoke-smeared cities,
we start to MOVE.

La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
Latino!
Chicano!

Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
And
Sing the same.
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
But my spirit is strong,
My faith unbreakable,
My blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!

—Yo Soy Joaquín, Corky Gonzales