Mexican & Mexican American Are Not The Same Thing
You know what really gets my goat? When I either hear or read or receive comments equating Latinos with Mexico. Or when something I write about my experience as a pocha, bicultural, Latina (or whatever) somehow get magically transformed into me being from Mexico, with the only solution to whatever “ails” me being to “go back” there.
What do I mean? I mean the assumption that all DREAM activists are actually undocumented themselves. Or that all Latinos are somehow in favor of undocumented immigration. Or that because I have accents on my name I can’t speak English. Or that all Latinos are wholly loyal to all other Latinos (side note: not all Latinos come from Mexico). These are the types of assumptions I’m talking about.
Excuse me for splitting hairs, but there is a world of difference between being a Mexican in Mexico and making the transition — be in through culture or physical movement — to Mexican-American. For those of us who’ve managed to get this far without noticing, there are hundreds of years’ worth of history documenting this fact. What kills me the most, perhaps, about the seemingly “easy” connection between being a Latino in the U.S. and the automatic assumption that you have somewhere to “go back” to is that it’s simply lazy, not to mention ignorant.
I’ve written about this before, yet, I am beginning to suspect I will be writing about this for many years to come. Let me try to be precise this time. Mexicans are from Mexico. Mexican-Americans live here — that’s the United States. When anonymous commenters or feckless politicians somehow manage to confuse the two — to insinuate that someone born in the United States (think Paul Ryan saying “anchor babies,” as in U.S. citizens, are a “problem”) needs to leave for the betterment of, um, the United States — the only appropriate response should be disdain.
Not only disdain for that person’s blatant prejudice against his own countrymen (or women), but disdain for the intellectual sloth that accompanies such sloppy and misguided “reasoning.” Let me say this again: just because I’m a Latina/Mexican-American/pocha/Hispanic/different than you, that does not give you the logic/reasoning/right/excuse to make the decision that people like you get to stay and people like me have to go. Because, the fact of the matter is, that I like many other Latinos, was born here.
This is just as much my country as it is yours.
Perhaps the most telling sign of just how bad the “argument” for sending us all “back” is that there’s never any actual logic attached to it. We’re just supposed to take it as a natural fact, like the sky being blue, that since we are different, we need “go back” to somewhere we are not from. This is more a confirmation of your own prejudices and ignorance than an actual fact in the real world.
You know, growing up in this country, one thing I heard a lot was that anything was possible here. Anything. Say, even managing to be both American and something else? Latino? Mexican-American, perhaps? Well, they did say “anything.”
Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD
