It’s Cinco de Mayo. I proudly watch the band Maná play their hits at the White House on Telemundo. Later, I talk to my mom in Spanish about the latest chismes — or gossip — regarding Mexican celebrities. I have watched more melodramatic telenovelas than I care to admit and sung at the top of my lungs to any song by Selena. I am a Latina who was born and raised in San Francisco. But I am not Mexican.
How is this possible, you say? You see, I am Colombian, on my mother’s side. There are so few of us in the Bay Area, let alone San Francisco, that I jump for joy whenever I come across another Colombian. It’s like the proverbial San Francisco native unicorn, bathed in a rare layer of some kind of super-exclusive, glow-in-the-dark glitter. The drawn-out melody of our accent hits like the drums on a cumbia beat, signaling to me that I’m not alone in a sea of people whose homelands are miles and miles closer to here.
I get it. It’s easy to automatically assume a Latino in San Francisco is Mexican. After all, according to an An Equity Profile of the San Francisco Bay Area Region, conducted in April 2015, 21% of the people in the Bay Area are Latinos (from 2008–2012), and 69% of those Latinos are of Mexican ancestry.
Because of this — and let’s not forget — also because we are living in what was once Mexico, Mexican culture is understandably tightly woven into the fabric of San Francisco. There are more taquerias in San Francisco than you can throw a tortilla at. Cinco de Mayo is celebrated citywide by residents with margaritas and micheladas in hand, and most people here have likely heard the bravado-laced trumpets of a mariachi band. Latino television here leans heavily toward Mexican story lines, Mexican music, Mexican news and Mexican everything else. If you’re Latino here, you’re going to grow up around a lot of Mexicanismo — and I think that’s great. But like anything glimpsed at from a distance, there is so much more that makes up the San Franciscan Latino experience.
Here’s the breakdown. Most of my friends from my high school clique are Salvadorian. I have “adopted” family whom I consider tios and tias and cousins who are Peruvian, Nicaraguan and Argentinean. My best friend, who is also like my sister, is even fairer than me, naturally blonde and proudly both Nicoya and Mexican. We bond gregariously over the head scratching we elicit among Latinos and non-Latinos alike when we lift up the veil of surprise and reveal that we are, in fact, Latina. There are Puerto Ricans and Hondurans and Guatemalans and Cubans. We are all here, in every skin shade, with every last name you could think of, every income bracket, and in fashions that range from preppy to punk to chola to everything in between. Some of us speak fluent Spanish, while some of us just smile and nod at elders when they talk.
In some circumstances, this clumping together of all Latinos creates a divide between non-Mexican Latinos and Mexicans in San Francisco. Some are so tired of being called Mexican that they resent the Mexican community. They may think their culture is so drastically different from that of Mexican-Americans that they don’t see the need to celebrate the similarities and instead stomp out the differences. When people protesting for the rights of brown people talk about uniting with other people of color to increase our power to create change, we often forget that we have to have solidarity first among all brown people and all places where that brownness comes from so we can present a truly unified front.
That’s another thing. Just like the ’90s rap group A Lighter Shade of Brown (who are Mexican), I’m a very lighter shade of brown — maybe the lightest shade of yellowy beige brown that also tans dark. I’m also 5'7" with green eyes and a last name that couldn’t be more Hungarian. But I am Latina, and we have to expand our mindset to what this looks like. I spent my junior-high and high-school years experimenting with dark makeup, huge hoop earrings and hair at Cher-like lengths, and talking with some kind of accent that sounded like it came straight out of the film Mi Vida Loca so I could come across as “Latina.” I felt I had to be a chola or adopt an over-the-top Latina stereotype.
Add to that being seen as “only half Latina” or shocking people when I spoke Spanish, and it became an ongoing identity crisis and a constant need to prove myself to some invisible Latina council.
San Francisco is filled with Latinos who are Mexican and many who are not. I love Mexican culture, was raised around it and consider it a duty to fight for all Latinos and our issues and rights, and not just for those of my country, which sits so far away on the top of South America. I will forever love certain chola things, like those big hoops and a sumptuous shade of burgundy lipstick, and using a resting bitch face when necessary. But it’s not my culture. I can just wake up, be me and be Latina; dye my hair blonde tomorrow and still be Latina; and forget Spanish tomorrow and still be Latina. After all, as I was recently reminded by another “half Latina” Latina friend, Selena didn’t speak fluent Spanish, and she was still Mexican. But I am not.
