This month has been brought to you by
the letter of love, a little beauty, and a whole lot of anger.
don't worry, we are all always between who we are and who we could be and that is just fine all the time...
and here is the paper to prove it, written for a class about multicultural issues and though not all of us will take it, all of us have them. try not to get bogged down in the evidence of my research, just watch for story, that is the good part.
What is a past status you clearly remember being in?
I can tell you a small story that sums up my many days in disintegration status perfectly, according to Helms' model: I was suppressing and ambivalent. I was afraid but unaware of alternatives. I was also, in the moment I will describe, according to A.S. Ruiz, in the cognitive stage of identity development: I was working from negative/distorted messages, believing that poverty and prejudice were the only alternative to assimilation and that assimilation was my only means of avoiding the confusion I was responsible for bringing when I entered a room.
I remember sitting at a table in the library of the first high school I went to. It was called El Molino, after a conquistador's mill that once stood in its place. I was 14 years old, fresh from a small junior high with one half black student, two Mexican students, me the latent hispanic and an otherwise hippie-flavored, rebellious white population--teachers, students, aids--they were all white faces (just like mine).
My mother was there to help me register and another mother, the mother of a white girl I had envied for years. Her name was Cindy, her daughter's name was Shelby. My mother slid my copy of the form toward me and sat silently and smiling. I knew she was happy that we were together. She had probably taken the day off work to come down to the high school and that meant she was being an extra good mother today, the kind of mother that takes the day off work for her daughter's education. She knew I would get into the difficult classes, the highest level courses because I was smart. She also knew that if my registration was done improperly she could just march into the principal's office and set the record straight because she was a powerful mother, and advocate. She had seen my sister do well at that school and registered her for her senior year earlier that week.
I heard the other mother complaining to my mother as Shelby and I both, like good girls, set about writing in our names and birthdates--I, in the graffiti style hand my friends from the city had taught me in our correspondence and her in bubbly rounded letters with hearts over the little i's. I wrote in my last name, two last names really, "Abigail unpronouncable white blah-Mexico's version of Smith" and longed for the day I would marry a man whose last name was Smith.
I hated having both last names. I had been told so many times already that I wasn't really a Mexican version of Smith, I was only half MexiSmith and half unpronouncable white blah mutt. I was an inconvenience to the dentist's receptionist and an enigma to the phone tree mothers. It seemed I was inconsiderate to punctuate my surname, especially with a hyphen. I knew what a hyphen was when I was seven and I remember explaining it to people over the phone. To this day I have no idea why someone so little was on the phone explaining my last name but I know I did and it speaks to the neglect I experienced and the exposure I suffered. It also evinces to my need to please my mother by insisting on both names at all times, at all costs.
I hoped to marry a nice, normal man with a nice, normal, white last name but with black, curly hair. See if he had dark hair, my children would come out with brown hair like mine, not dirty blonde hair, that was wavy or curly rather than mixed up, confused hair. I was working on a strategy even at 14 that would give my children everything I never had: straight, predictable, manageable, if not dred-lock prone genes.
I came out of my thoughts for a moment when I heard Shelby ask her mother which race box to check. Cindy was quick to answer, she told her daughter, "just check next to other, it isn't any of the government's business what your race is. Neglect the question in protest; if all of us check other, they'll stop asking that question and working things out according to race." She spoke over my head and told my mother she was glad Shelby wasn't there alone because questions like this always arise and they take advantage of children--they want to expose children.
My pulse began to race. I looked at my mother's face. She was knee deep in Cindy's complaints and seemed to agree with her. I looked at the box next to the word, white and thought, let's be honest, my skin is white. But if I check the box next to Latino or Hispanic they might reconcile my grades with my blood and see that we are not stupid and lazy like they think we are. They will see that we don't all have brown skin and straight dark hair, they will learn from me. I thought to myself, I will teach them about all the millions of people just like me who are brilliant and Hispanic. And then I remembered my grandfather had told us not to answer to the label "Latina". He said we might answer to Chicana, or Hispanic or better yet, to Mexican or Basque! But Latino was a term from white men, to oppress us, it was Napoleonic and old and why wouldn't anyone just ask me to my face so I could proudly tell them who I really am? So I thought, about checking the Other box in hopes that they would have to come speak to me about myself.
Then I had another memory. Once, in fifth grade, a mysterious letter was sent home. I carried it home and when she read it my mother began laughing. She was shocked that they would put my in an ESL class based on my last name. She said, "Do they not know who you are? You have been at that school for six years! You just go back to your teacher and tell her that she can take your name off the list of Spanish speaking kids." And I thought of all the confusion it would cause if I were sorted into that group again.
I couldn't ask my mother what to do; she would have to agree with Cindy, the white woman just across the library table or suffer looking the fool in front of this rich, white, popular and powerful woman. I knew that if I asked, my mother would tell me to do whatever I wanted. She wouldn't dare say, in front of Cindy, or anyone else that I could go ahead and check the Hispanic box. That would mean admitting, and then, perhaps, explaining that I was conceived, that she had had sex, with a Mexican man. The story would conjure images of dark-skinned, cowboy booted drunks waiting on the street corners for work. She would blush if she had to tell the story that she was married to my father and that there were interracial tensions that eventually led to the shame of divorce and nothing to show for all her shame except two white-looking, but dangerously ambiguous daughters who browned up in the summer and returned home with Spanish accents, and craving food she could never cook from weekend visits to their grandparents house.
Essentially, I knew she wouldn't be of any help. She wouldn't understand all the thoughts I couldn't explain to her, she wouldn't know what to do and wouldn't do what would be needed even if she did understand because she couldn't empathize with me. I looked over at Shelby's form, nearly complete. If I didn't hurry up and make a decision I would be left holding my form longer than everyone else, as if I were too dumb to write my own name, and check one or two boxes.
Needless to say, I was in a panic. I wanted so badly to be like Shelby, for Cindy to be my mother. She was an artist: expressive and creative and never too busy to boss Shelby around... So I put a big X over the box next to the word Other and I felt more lost than ever. I knew, against all hope, that that would be the end of the conversation. I knew I wanted to choose Hispanic and for years afterward I would choose Hispanic, with a giant X, as if I could somehow undo that day I chose Cindy over my mother, the day I chose not to be counted.
What state of ethnic identity development are you currently in/working through? Why do you see yourself in that particular status? What experiences led up to your being in that stage?
I am currently in the "Working Through" stage of Ruiz' model. I am "unable to cope with the psychological distress of ethnic identity conflict." I can no longer pretend or pass. And I am also working through a stage of resistance and immersion according to Sue and Sue's R/CID model. I am finally appreciative of those like me but also conflicted about others of a different minority and definitely group depreciating of the dominant group.
When I hear white people tell about their problems, all the Chicana in my lineage, as well as the Basque in my blood, the gun-toting, bomb planting women I come from, who blow up bridges and train tracks and then go home to make rabbit stew, rise up and I want to stand over them and let them have it.
I'm just so angry these last few days and I'm falling back into my anorexic patterns and yelling at my husband and I keep hearing people say 'this is what the multicultural issues class does' but I don't believe that. I think everyone deals with the class differently, that this isn't what the class does. The way I feel, the patterns I am falling into are what I do to myself to tell myself I need to ask for help.
I have been in this stage for quite some time. It began in 2003, when I began working toward my Cultural and Linguistic Academic Diversity Credential at San Francisco State University. Dr. Deborah Luna was piloting a class that was very much like Multicultural Issues at MHGS. She encouraged me to lean hard into my biracial identity. She valued my perspective and when I wrote a letter (I never intended to send) to the author of the book Uprooting Racism she encouraged me to send it to him. I had only written the paper as part of an assignment and she had found in me a burgeoning ability to ask for help, to correct or rebuke, to gently enter the confusion that I see in the faces of my colleagues when I bring myself just as I am. But I didn't feel there was a place for my anger in her class.
I took jobs working in San Francisco's Mission District. I taught English at two different Spanish/English bilingual schools. I began to see how the children suffered because of the public education system. In my position, was loved or hated, there was no in-between response to me.
The white teachers were either appreciative or suspecting, but they didn't attempt to get to know me. The teachers of color were the same. I took their abuse and accolades in turn then went home and cried. I used my angry energy to stay up late working on credential class work. I couldn't sleep when I went to bed so I rose early, wide awake with fury, to write lesson plans for teaching math to English Language Learners. Early on it became clear to me that in spite of the adults' ambivalence toward me, the children offered me grace. We listened well to one another and I knew that my anger would be redeemed if I were to use it to work for them and no amount of grown-up confusion was going to stop that.
Explain in detail what your future status would be and what you believe it will take for you to move on to the next status? What steps will you need to take in your life? What ill that look like for you professionally and personally? How will you be different from who you are today? What will be most difficult for you in transitioning? What barriers might you experience in moving forward?
Listening to the people of color in our class has taught me that their experience matches my own because I am a woman of color.
I am a powerful woman of color. I come from a place where houses are painted turquoise, where tissue paper flags shine in red and pink and yellow,
where murals of civil wars share space with gang war graffiti,
posters for protest marches form a mosaic for airplane passengers to see upon arrival, bottle caps stuck in the tar of the street shine like sequins in the cross walks,
lemons and limes hang like earrings in the sweet green ears of the plaza trees, where the subway schedule speaks in pictures of canons, shrimp and snakes,
where the trees are greener and the ocean is bluer,
the meat is fresher, pinker, browner,
and the faces are more ornate
and the blood that runs in the streets after the daily murders is red
and the anger that moves in the veins is black and blue
from having dealt with all these issues.
"Of color" doesn't mean "of dark skin" all the time. It means the moving pictures of my memory are bright and different from the pictures we see on television in the US. When I say I am of color I mean I know how to tell you stories about myself, in technicolor, because the black and white version of my story is not enough for you to understand my story so different from yours. My color is brighter and stronger than the red, white and blue of the American flag. It is a vivid experience of the red of hate, the white of seemingly innocent lies and oppression and the blue of intense sadness, it is the brown of the dirt my father digs, now that he chooses to do so, even while his cousins work the same fields he escaped, the green of envy that I move freely when I so choose between cultures. My story of my color is bold with the emotion I feel about all the places I belong and don't belong; it is ripe with tales I tell that refuse to be matched with the dominant stories.
I see that Sue and Sue are right to back Roots' manifesto. Finding my voice means making my own vocabulary for my situation and I know I am up to that task. God has gifted me with a large self to discover and a way with language that will serve me well on the journey. It will continue to be difficult, and I am not sure where to start, which is why I am so hesitant and afraid but I know much of it will happen accidentally on purpose as I unwrap the bandages around my hurting heart.
Today is Pentecost and I work for a white man in a white church but he preached this morning a sermon about languages. He said not to focus on the occurrence of each man speaking in his own language--of course, given the opportunity we all speak in our own languages, and rightly so! What is special about Pentecost was that each one was understood. There was no need to assimilate, no need to deny the beauty of a native tongue and yet all those present at the miracle were assured of God's presence in a word that reached down through their ears and into their hearts.
It was under his guidance that I confidently gave the Pentecost children's word. I told the congregation that it wasn't until I was seven, eight or nine (I don't remember) that I realized my grandmother was speaking to me in Spanish. It was all one language until then. Aunt was just another word for Tia and both were usable, even at once or interchangably, if need be. Adios was another way to say goodbye, we all understand that and the way you and I say no, though one sounds longer than the other, they mean the same thing, and isn't that funny? Heart was just another word for Corazon and I had a piece of hers in mine.
Pentecost, I told them, is a day to remember that God is like that too, that God knows our heart. That when God tells us that we are loved it may not sound the way it sounds when our friends or mothers say it. But we know it just the same because we aren't hearing with our ears, we are listening with our hearts. And then we all bowed our heads to pray and I spoke Spanish into a microphone for the first time. I prayed in Spanish, Dios Santo, conoces bien el Corazon de tu gente y todos los dias les di, <
My husband told me after that he was proud of me. He said that all the white people in our gospel choir held their breath and many of them whispered that they had goose bumps as their minds made the shift into the mystery of my prayer. Three women afterward were crying and held my hands in theirs, grateful for giving them a new understanding. I saw genuine gratitude in their blue eyes and I think that if they could teach me more gratitude I could learn grace.
Today I took off one of the wrong-colored band-aids over my battered heart and let the wound breathe, let the fear of repeated injury, of salty tears burning the sore, I let the fear stand alone, I chose not to feed it when I chose not to cover over the ambiguity of my identity, not to deny it or explain it away. I had given them a gift and they said thank you and they had not asked me for clarification or excuses and that felt like growth.
I think I have been angry for a long time, confused even longer. When I finally move into an integrative awareness, marked by appreciation--even selective appreciation I think it will be after a long-lived, hard-earned sabbatical from denial. I will exercise a right to be scared, but also to be fearless, I will exercise my right to be myself, but also to move freely around in all that that means, in all that I am and will discover about myself.
