A resource for you

RESOURCE for your USE:

1. Please use this reading to further your understanding of the cultural identity issues in BWLOW
At the Crossroads:Latinos in the New Millennium
by Rubén Martínez

It is the blessing and bane of my life as a writer that I am often called upon to explain – to others, to “my” community, to myself – just what is means to be “Latino.” Such an endeavor would be unnecessary in my mother’s El Salvador or my father’s Mexico; Salvadorans and Mexicans don’t have to explain themselves to anyone – they’re Salvadorans and Mexicans, period; they’ve got other things to worry about, like general strikes and monetary devaluations.

But I was born and raised in Los Angeles of immigrant parents and my family’s sense of place, somewhere in between the Old World and the New, has become the narrative of my life. Living in-between tacos and pupusas, rock and merengue, and Spanish and English has been an exhilarating journey. The problem is that living in-between also means that you can be misunderstood by people on either side of you.

Hollywood always had me pegged as a Mexican…a greaser…a bandit…a Latin Lover…a Ricky Ricardo. Even in polite, literary circles, my ethnicity comes before any other intellectual or cultural identifiers. There is a canon of “Western” literature in the United States, but I am not considered a Western writer. I’m not a “California” writer, either, not even an American writer. I am a Latino writer, a mantle that I embrace and reject at the same time, because I feel that I’m as influenced by Walt Whitman as I am by Pablo Neruda.

In Latin America, ironically, I am not seen as a “Latino” or Latin American at all. I am, to my Mexican and Central American colleagues, just another “American” writer. No matter that I speak Spanish, have brown skin and parents from the Old World. So I’m branded a gringo where I don’t want to be one, and where I want to be one, I’m rejected. Denied my in-between-ness by both sides, as it were.

(originally appears on PBS)
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