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12/19/2006: "How I Became a Mexican"

You Can Too

The first Mexican (who wasn’t really a Mexican) that I became friends with was my junior high classmate Lou G. He dressed and talked just like I did, so the only reason I learned he was Mexican was via his haircut. One Monday he came to school with what in those days was quite the radical cut, with the front of his hair combed over and the top and back sheared off in a crew cut. It was the damnedest thing.

“Where’d you get that haircut?”

“Mexicali,” he told me.

Mexicali, wow. He said it like it was no big thing, just normal life to get a strange haircut in a strange place. I got all my haircuts at the Schultz barber shop on Main Street. Mexicali, that was kind of like going to Bulgaria for a haircut.

I realized then that Lou had another life, a Mexican life separate from our American life together as students and as adolescents. That intrigued me.

It was much later that I learned that on top of being American and Mexican, Lou was also a pocho. This was explained to me by Mexican-Mexicans (who are not pochos). We had gone camping at Guadalupe Canyon with Fred P. (a Mexican-American). Arturo, the Mexican who owned the camp, immediately bristled when Fred entered our conversation. I was puzzled by his reaction because to me Fred was about as American as I was. (In those days, I had no notion that I was really a Czech-Polish-Irish American.) When I asked Arturo the problem, he just spat out, “He’s a pocho!” which meant to Arturo that Fred, as a Mexican from “el otro lado,” felt himself superior and treated Arturo disrespectfully.

That was another dimension to being Mexican and American that I didn’t know about.

Around the same time, I began to date Julie from Mexicali. Julie’s mother was from Kansas and her father was from Veracruz, which is kind of like a librarian marrying a rock guitarist. Julie was an American-Mexican. From her I got to meet a whole pack of middle class folks in Mexicali, people who valued the good life of music, art, travel, and an important ingredient for Mexicans everywhere: a good party. Unlike most of the Mexican-Americans I had gone to school with (most of whom were blue collar) and the Mexican-Mexicans that I met in the rough bars I frequented (drunk), my new friends were just like me—only a lot more relaxed about enjoying life–and Mexican.

That’s when I decided that I wanted to become Mexican too. It apparently was so easy—since Mexicans came in just about any color or lifestyle you might want. The language wasn’t a barrier. Some of the Mexican-Americans I knew didn’t speak Spanish as well as I did, so I figured I had a leg up already. And though my vocabulary was a little bookish and I missed some of the slang, I made up for that defect with a good accent.

What did I have to change to become more Mexican?

I stopped wearing short pants and t-shirts and took to upgrading my wardrobe to meet the Mexican requirement for a more careful regard to appearance. I learned to kiss my female acquaintances casually on the cheek and to greet my compañeros with a manly handshake, embrace, two slaps on the back, and another handshake. I cultivated a higher awareness of introductions and acknowledgements of guests and made an effort at a prouder posture instead of slouching in a corner like the malcriado surfer dude that I had been before.

At the time, I had a low-slung 1967 Ford Ranchero painted blue with turquoise upholstery (Mexicali workmanship). In the rear window I placed a small Mexican flag decal. One day I had it parked at Mission Beach when a Chicano vato saw it. “This isn’t your car,” he told me as I climbed aboard. “This car belongs to a Mexican!”

Exactly.

I became more Mexican but not Mexican-American like Lou or Fred, not a pocho, not an American-Mexican like Julie. In the end, I suppose I’m one of a growing number of border anglos who have adopted some of the stylish cariño (caring) that is Mexican. I don’t say that this was all done with cold calculation; it was more of a tectonic drift.

I was made aware of this drift this past summer when I joined a group of rather intense cyclists for a 35 mile ride through San Diego. As I rolled up to the crowd of intimidating athletes, I had to quickly decide who I would approach to meet to get the lay of the land. I surveyed the group and spied a Latino astride his bike under a tree at the edge of the milling crowd. Ah, that’s who I’ll meet. He’s Mexican–like me.