Identity and the Latino Identity

“Since childhood, I have struggled with my identity.

My elementary school’s ethnic composition was evenly split between Asian (mostly Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian) and Mexican/Mexican-American. During my time there, I met about 3 non-Mexican/Mexican-American Latinos, no joke. So for a long time I was always conscious of the fact that I had no one to really culturally identify with. There were linguistic differences that I noticed when speaking in Spanish with them, like accent, vocabulary and slang differences: ‘popote’ versus my ‘pajilla’ or “chocomil’ versus my “leche con chocolate’ and Central Americans’ and certain South Americans’ predominant usage of the 2nd-person singular form ‘Vos’ instead of “TÚ”. Also, differences in tradition mattered: ‘Dí de los Muertos’ is strictly a Mexican thing; Dí de los Difuntos is observed in El Salvador, where a family goes to a dead loved one’s grave and brings flowers, just like what the rest of Latin America and Latin Europe and the Philippines observe. Furthermore, the usage of Spanglish common among some of my peers (very much part of Mexican-American culture, ifI’m not mistaken) was very foreign to me. Because it is important to speak Spanish properly in my family, having a bad accent and poor grammar and vocabulary meant you were subject to being mocked. Speaking in Spanglish was seen as something of poor taste, as my family, though it had been poor and largely uneducated in El Salvador–and somehow arrogant and classist, interestingly enough””was not a campesina one. An example: I did not know my great-aunt was illiterate until a few years ago, when she asked me to read something for her. She, a very dignified woman in her early 70s, speaks Spanish very, very well and I would never in a million YEARS have guessed she were illiterate.”

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