TIO october Op-ed
¿Conflating Identities?: Warriors or Not!
by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, PhD
Although I prefer Chicana, call me Mexican, Latina, Mexican-American… My identity comes from struggle and work. An identity marker like “Chicana,” “Chicanx,” possibly tells you about my ancestors, my social class, social status, so do my languages and cultural values.
If you call me “Hispanic” you are saying that I speak Spanish, defining me by my Spanish ancestors, which I do possess, and I do speak Spanish but other “Hispanics” don’t. My rural Mexican parents revered the earth, as “mother earth, la madre tierra.” We also hold indigenous values and beliefs very close to our hearts, my ancestral ties are with the Tarahumara people from the mountains of Durango, Mexico.
My DNA is a polyglot, and a large percentage of me is native, so if you call me “Hispanic” you are diluting my other racial identities into one that I have never fully unpacked, given the amount of time that has passed since colonial times. There are many Latinos, who, however do not speak Spanish but their parents or grandparents migrated from the Americas. We call them “Latinos” not because they speak Latin, (conflating the two definitions is problematic) but because their ancestors came from somewhere in Latin America, including the Caribbean. A compilation of countries from the Americas were clustered together by the US Government officials for practical reasons, as were Asian Americans in the 1970’s. People from many countries condensed into one identity, in the interest of making things simpler for government workers. It is impossible to truly understand and embrace difference if we don’t look at all these identities and people intersectionally.
In the poem “So Not to be Mottled” by Bernice Zamora, a Chicana poet who also received her PHD from Stanford, states: “You insult me/when you say I’m/ Schizophrenic/ My divisions are/ Infinite.”
¿What? ¿Qué?
By GGM/ bilingual poem about identity and in-betweenness
Where is your ¿Dónde está
In-between-ness? tu interpolación de movimiento?
your Nepantla, tu Nepantla,
your no-man’s land, tu tierra de nadie,
your ancestral heart? tu corazón ancestral?
What is perhaps most important about all this is that there is a togetherness that allows us, Chicanx/Latinx individuals to feel a certain kinship, connection, that is impossible to disintegrate or unsee.
