Cultural Purgatory

Growing up I have always been considered Mexican. Though I am Mexican by race, culturally, nothing could be farther from the truth. I'm the product of an American culture. Yes, I have Mexican cultural tendencies, but the truth remains, I am an American. Though, I prefer Chicagoan. At age 14 my parents decided that it was in my best interest for the family to move to the suburbs. During my first week of school my classmates were kind enough to educate me about racist terms I had never heard before. That was when I first became conscious of my cultural purgatory. More problems arose once I became one of the few Mexican kids in my school who listened to punk. I was no longer acting Mexican, according to my Mexican friends, now I was acting "white." The white kids called me Mexican and the Mexicans called me white. Identity crisis? Luckily, I never really felt alone in my cultural purgatory. On more than one occasion, my uncle, an immigrant who is now a US citizen, has always said something to the extent of "the Spanish that we know, we are forgetting. While the English that we're learning, we can barely speak."The Mexican Immigrant who returns home, no longer feels completely at home, and from what I have seen, is at times treated as a tourist. This mostly applies to the Mexican-immigrant that has established a life in the United States, the immigrant that has been gone for a considerable amount of time. Regardless, there's still an interest in the Mexican-immigrant to retain and nurture this "long-distance nationalism." I love having conversations with Mexicans about their "Mexican brothers" once removed: the Mexican-Immigrant, and their "Mexican cousins:" the Chicanos. The Mexicans perception of the returning Mexican-Immigrant is one filled with curiousity and a sense of detachment. Mexican-immigrants are sometimes seen as exaggerated versions of Mexican culture, caricatures of their cultural identity: big belt buckles, rare leather boots, big trucks, etc. El Mexicanismo that was once natural, second nature, has now become deliberate. A sort of "we will live in your country out of necessity, but not like you." A conscious, defining, defiant act. This seems like a very natural response considering the risk posed to the culture by living in a foreign country. Growing up a Chicano my parents have made no illusions about me being an American, they too are very aware of this fact. Yet, it hasn't discouraged them from instilling a certain level of pride or an awareness of our cultural past. They are my direct link to a world that very much has the potential to be lost. My grandfather is Mexican, my father a Mexican-Immigrant, and I'm an American. Each one of us worlds away from the other. It's amazing to meet Mexicans and observe them trying to figure me out. I'm brown, tattooed and obviously from a city, but Mexican or American? I'm fluent in English, yet fluent in Spanish. And not only fluent in the languages, but in their idioms as well. There's something in the way that I speak Spanish that doesn't quite make sense, I don't have a Chicano accent, an American accent. I have a rural accent. I inherited that from my parents. Instead of saying "para usted?" (for you?) I'll say, "pa' usted." Think the equivalent of "y'all," a slight Mexican drawl. A lot Mexicans I've met are perplexed by this, but I feel like it makes perfect sense. I'm somewhere in the middle.

Patrick Oster- Mexicans: A personal portrait of a people.
Mariano Azuela- The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution