—JOHN TRUDELL
A week after the national elections in November of 2016, a muscle-bound, tattooed white man stood outside a large room at San Bernardino Valley College in California, berating the mostly brown-skinned students trying to get inside. He lashed out about how they didn’t belong and were criminals and job stealers—you know, the usual corrosive anti-Mexican rants that have soared in number since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The college had invited Xicanx spoken-word artist Matt Sedillo and me to speak and read poems. A few people wanted to chase off the dude. Security had already been called. I said I’d prefer for him to come in and listen. If he still wanted to rant, we’d handle it. Sure enough, he found a seat among the standing-room-only crowd in attendance, about four hundred people.
I told the group that even though I’m of Mexican descent I’m no immigrant. My mother had roots with the Tarahumara people from the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, also known as the Rarámuri. This tribe is associated linguistically, and in other ways, with the Hopi, Shoshone, Paiute, Tohono O’odham, and Pueblo peoples, all the way down to the Mexica of central Mexico, the Pipil of El Salvador, and Nahuatl-speaking tribes in Nicaragua. In fact, they have ties in many ways with tribes throughout the hemisphere. The Rarámuri are also linked to the so-called Mogollon peoples of prehistoric times.
Just before I was born, my mother crossed an international bridge from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico to El Paso, Texas. The year was 1954. I’m an “anchor baby”—and so what? Migrants from Europe included many pregnant women lining up at Ellis Island, some ready to burst—more than 350 babies were born there in its sixty-year history. Those migrants knew, because of law, that a US-born child helped their petition for residency and, later, citizenship. Demeaning anyone for making the best case they can for themselves is ridiculous.
More notably, the Chihuahuan Desert cuts a large swathe through the US Southwest and northern Mexico. The Rarámuri have resided in the Chihuahua desert for at least eight thousand years of the desert’s existence—way before the Spanish, Portuguese, English, or French; before borders; before “legal” documents. El Paso is within the confines of this desert, which intersects two nations and several states. When my mother gave birth to me across the border, we went from our land to our land.
During our reading and talk, the white dude who had been heckling students on the way in didn’t say a word. Slowly, and quietly, he eventually left the room.
I’m writing as a Native person. I’m writing as a poet. I’m writing as a revolutionary working-class organizer and thinker who has traversed life journeys along which incredible experiences, missteps, plights, and victories have marked the way.
My trajectories have been primarily in the United States but also across countries, beyond seas, through many languages. In spirit, I’m borderless. Nonetheless, I acknowledge the fabricated reality of passports, borders, race, and social classes. I’ve lived in particular areas of this earth, including where my immediate ancestors have long strode, abiding by natural law, but also man-made laws, some of which align with nature, most of which don’t.
I also know this: I belong anywhere.
I belong wherever the earth accepts my footsteps, welcoming my blood, my tears, my presence, as it does anyone’s regardless of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or personal and societal traumas. This is Mother Earth, after all. While we may each have our own particular mothers, she’s mother to everyone. I’m not talking about the fatherland—the patria, where the word “patriot” comes from—or the nationhood that men created to bring together those with shared history, language, economy, and culture for home markets, governance, and identity.
I’m talking about the ecosystem of a blue, green, and cloud-speckled planet that photographs from space have revealed to be singular—without country or state lines, unlike many school maps, without areas designated for certain religions or ethnicities. In some religious views, it’s the way God would see us. In fact, this system includes Father Sky—with sunlight, air, and rain. All this reminds us we are one species, related to all life, varied as any species can be, but still home on one planet that no person, group of persons, corporation, or country should own or control, even if rulers have tried to do so across history.
Unfortunately, with all this jockeying for land, ownership, and power, most people sense an end to belonging. Millions have been driven out from land, but also from their stories and ancestral knowledge. Uprooted migrants around the world have struggled to be welcomed, to feel they have a place to rest and rise. As Mexican migrants say, they feel ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor from there.
Today there is a widespread craving to belong.
Most US commentators, particularly in the media but also in government, have no clue what Mexicans are. We’re called “Hispanics,” “foreigners,” “aliens,” or “illegals,” but few recognize our myriad heritages, in particular those that go back ages on this land. Identity is also not just about having “papers.” One’s humanity cannot be determined by documents, and even with them far too many people end up as second-class citizens anyway. Papers don’t guarantee anything. It’s about full and total recognition and dignity as human birthright.
I understand that to be Native American is to be acknowledged as such by an established First Nation. That’s important-for established Native nations this is about sovereignty. Xicanx, after five hundred years of historical trauma, are a people remade to increasingly embody colonial identities. While I don’t have direct ties to my Native roots, I’ve reached back to all of them. Still, what makes me indigenous has more to do with calling on the ancestors; protecting land, water, and planet; and practicing ways that connect me to nature and spirit.
I’m Native because I follow Native ways. I study the Mexica/Rarámuri/Diné as much as I can, including language, rituals, and world views. But being Xicanx is as “tribal” as I can get. Even though I use the word “tribe” here and there, it’s not what Natives originally called themselves—in their languages, the names for themselves mostly mean “the people” or “human beings.” I also don’t seek government recognition. Mother Earth’s unconditional embrace is the only recognition I need—she recognizes me, and all peoples, every day I walk, breathe, dance. I’m Native in how I think and live, as a truth-bound human being carrying and contributing my medicine through art, writing, speaking, healing, and organizing.
My grandson Ricardo was born and raised in Orlando, Florida. His parents are good Christians who provided a loving home for Ricky when the world around him seemed bleak, including during the years his father, my son Ramiro, spent in prison.
When he was a child, I’d visit him whenever possible. Once I was privileged to speak at his high school while he was a student there. In 2011, he graduated with honors. Now Ricky’s a graphic designer, living in North Carolina, having graduated from the University of Central Florida.
In the summer of 2018, closing in on his twenty-sixth birthday later that year, Ricky arrived in Los Angeles to officially receive a Mexica indigenous name, divined from the tonalamatl, based on the 260-day tonalpohualli calendar. In this system, every thirteen years of one’s life come threshold times, when doors open, the psyche can make big changes, and the body is qualitatively developing. Among many indigenous communities, people would get new names every thirteen years—they were “born again” not just once but many times. Our teachers from the Kalpulli Tloque Nahuaque (a Mexica danza and teaching group), Huitzi and Meztli, taught us how to recover the energies and characteristics for anyone born on particular days and at particular times using this powerful and extraordinary calendar system.
That same day, my wife, Trini, was given the name Tlazohteotl—a healer, a weaver, one who transforms what has been thrown away into something new and necessary. I also received my third indigenous name, Mixcoatl Itzlacuiloh—the energy of the spiral or vortex, as well as sharpness: “one who scribes with obsidian.”
While many names could have been selected, Ricardo received the name of Yei Iztcuintli—“three dog.” The number and nagual (guardian spirit) both have important meanings and qualities; in this case, the dog represents loyalty, protection, commitment. In a major ceremony, with family and community present, we recognized Ricky on his path along the Red Road with Native dancers, Native songs (including in Nahuatl and Lakota), powerful words, and a meal, honoring his Mexica and Taino roots (from peoples of Mexico and Puerto Rico).
My grandson is why there is a Puerto Rican side to my family. For fifteen years, I lived in mostly Puerto Rican communities of Chicago, where Ricky’s mother grew up. I loved the Humboldt Park, West Town, and Logan Square neighborhoods where I made my home, although now there’s been heavy displacement due to gentrification.
Boricuas are mi gente.
Besides Ricky, Trini and I also have four other grandchildren—one is half German, the others are half Scotch-Irish, half Hungarian, and half Irish. My great-grandchildren, of whom there are four, include one who’s Mexican–Scotch-Irish–Puerto Rican–African American. Who can deny me, or my descendants, a place in America? My extended family is complex and vibrant, consisting of all skin colors and ethnicities, and as American as burritos.
Purportedly, I’m a Latino—or Latinx, as is being used nowadays—although I rarely call myself this. I mean, the original Latinos are Italians, right? Yet Italian Americans are not considered Latinos in this country. And so-called Latinx people have Native American, African, European, and Asian origins, and a vast array of mixtures thereof—not just ties to Spain or Portugal, the biggest colonizers of the hemisphere. Latinx people are known as the largest “minority” group in the United States, yet we do not constitute a monolithic ethnicity.
Let me put it this way: Despite the umbrella of “Latino” above our heads, Puerto Ricans are not the same as Dominicans. And most Salvadorans or Brazilians or Colombians don’t want to be confused with Mexicans.
“Hispanic” is out of the question for me. This term originates with the Spanish conquistadors. They were Europeans; the brown-red indigenous Mexicans have different origins. The Spanish language, which I love and speak, as I do English, is still an invader’s language. My name—Luis Javier Rodriguez—is only 530 years or so old on the continent. I have a deeper name, in my bones, intrinsic to this land, which I may not know in my head but is still part of my cellular makeup.
Just the same, there are many things that tie together Latinx people regardless of what country they may have come from. In the United States we celebrate Latino or Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15, largely to coincide with the independence days of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, Guatemala, and other countries. While Columbus Day is still officially recognized, a growing number of municipalities and counties have changed this day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Of course, people originally from “Latin America” celebrate their own existence every day (these holidays and months are meant to elicit a measure of appreciation from non-Latinx people). We are also into the Fourth of July, Christmas, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Hanukkah, Native American sun dance ceremonies . . . you name it. So-called Latinos are central to the American soul and deeply enmeshed in the social fabric.
Despite this, we remain a rumor in the country, neither strictly black nor white, hardly in the popular culture. A 2017 University of Southern California (USC) study of inequality in film showed only slightly more than 3 percent of speaking characters in the films studied were Latinx, although we are almost 18 percent of the US population.
We are mostly shadows—and shouts in the distance.
The fact is we are black and white and all shades in between. We include all so-called races, most ethnicities, and many of the world’s cultures. Latin America is an ever-evolving reality—as are Latinx people in this country.
In February 2018, I attended the one-man Broadway theater show of renowned actor John Leguizamo. Called Latin History for Morons, the show offered important historical and social commentary made palatable with comedy, dance, stage presence, and a familial story line. Leguizamo made the point that it’s time to celebrate the richness and expansiveness of all Latinx people.
Let’s start by recognizing and honoring how we’ve bled and sweat for this country. Hundreds of people from the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and other Latin American countries, many undocumented, died during the 9/11 attacks. In fact, a fifth of those killed were born outside the United States. Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada paid homage to them and others in his 2003 poem “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100.” An excerpt:
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient
aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from thekitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chantof nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by
frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the
kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
Leguizamo, quoting historians like Howard Zinn, pointed out that people with Spanish surnames garnered many Medals of Honor during World War II; around 500,000 Mexicans and 65,000 Puerto Ricans served. They suffered a disproportionate number of deaths and injuries during the Vietnam War. One of the first known US deaths from the 2003 Iraq War was an undocumented young man born in Guatemala.
We should also celebrate our work in the auto plants of Detroit, steel mills of Chicago, cotton fields of Texas, textile centers of Massachusetts, and fruit and vegetable fields of California. We are among the best players in sports—we’ve been some of the world’s greatest in boxing, baseball, football, golf, and tennis, as well as soccer.
Let’s celebrate that we’ve been in the forefront of labor organizing and fought alongside African Americans against slavery and for civil rights. Let’s celebrate that we are among the oldest residents of the hemisphere, as indigenous people from places like Mexico, Central America, or Peru, and we are the majority of this country’s most recent arrivals.
Let’s grant that Latinx people can now be found among scientists, professors, astronauts, doctors, politicians, and judges; among actors, artists, musicians, and writers. Our ancestors were former slaveholders and former slaves, nobles and peons, conquistadors and poets, rulers and rebels. They include practitioners of Santeria going back to African Yoruba spiritual practices. They include dancers of flamenco and canto hondo, linked to the Roma people (the misnamed “Gypsies”). They include Muslims from the Umayyad Caliphate, which first ruled Spain, and later other Muslims, for close to eight hundred years. And Latinx people still use words, herbs, dance, and clothing from the civilizations anthropologically named (though these are not necessarily their real names) the Olmec, Toltec, Maya, Aztec, and Inca.
And what about those burritos? Mexican migrants created burritos and dishes like chimichangas in the United States at a time when they only had access to cheap white flour instead of corn with lime and water ground with a mano on a metate from the old country.
The fact is, whatever is considered Latinx heritage is US heritage. Without Latinx people, you wouldn’t have such “American” phenomena as guitars, gold mining, horses, cows, corn, the concept of zero, and even various forms of jazz, rock and roll, and hip-hop (the “Latin tinge” is evident in all these genres).
Once, in the 1990s, I brought a white professor to a Mexican quebradita dance at a club in Chicago. The best dancers require intense skill, flawless timing, and strong bodies since the dance can be remarkably acrobatic. Many of them wore woven “cowboy” hats, embroidered shirts, and carved-and-burned-leather boots. The professor smugly stated, “Oh, these Mexicans, they’re mimicking American cowboys.”
“Where do you think American cowboys got those traditions from?” I quickly responded. “They learned from Native peoples, who were taught by Spaniards, who first brought the horses and cows, how to be cowboys. The first cowboys were actually Indians. European Americans also took from them rodeos, bull riding, and even strumming guitars while singing around campfires. Who’s mimicking who?”
As we contemplate our place in this country and hemisphere, I have to remind the reader that Latinx people have been among the most scapegoated in US history, certainly during financial and political crises. They are among the poorest, least healthy, and most neglected Americans. Spanish-surnamed people have an incarceration rate almost triple that of whites in the United States, and they are easily found among this country’s homeless and drug-addicted populations.
Most recently, states have established laws against brown-skinned undocumented migrants, including in 2010 when Arizona outlawed teachings on ethnic history and culture in response to a high school Mexican American studies program (a judge in 2017 declared such bans to be unconstitutional). Today, Salvadorans and other Central Americans (as well as Haitians) once permitted to remain in the US have lost their Temporary Protected Status—with the swipe of a pen, they became “undocumented” again. And there’s that travesty on the border, where human beings are treated like animals.
This practice, unfortunately, has a long history: Mexicans have been widely discriminated against and attacked for some 170 years since the US invasion of Mexico that ended in 1848. At that time, the United States obtained 500,000 square miles of terrain at the loss of 13,271 US and 25,000 Mexican lives. Even though the United States also paid $15 million for the land, this was around $30 per square mile. Thereafter, Mexicans and their progeny were more frequently lynched than any group except African Americans—this fate befell upwards of a thousand people, mostly in Texas. Mexicans were also the most subject to segregation after Blacks; they won court cases to help end school segregation, like 1947’s Mendez vs. Westminster. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, around a million Mexicans were repatriated to Mexico even though 60 percent were reportedly US citizens. After US Blacks, police have killed disproportionally more Mexicans and their descendants, as well as Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and Dominicans, than any other demographic.
US Border Patrol officers alone have shot more than fifty people along the US-Mexico border since 2010. On May 23, 2018, a Border Patrol officer near Laredo, Texas, shot and killed an unarmed twenty-year-old Guatemalan Maya woman, Claudia Patricia Gómez González, who couldn’t find work in her village and was coming to the United States to seek an education and a better life. Beyond these atrocities, some ten thousand migrants since 1994 have died from heat, drowning, and other calamities crossing the border.
There’s no justification for this hatred, no biblical or literary root. The hate comes from US history, at least the shadow of that history: racism and classism. So while all Americans have much to celebrate in Latinx heritage, like most Americans, we Latinx also have a long way to go.
Whatever one thinks of Latinx people, one thing is for sure: we have given much to this country and have much more to give. We are integral to the nation’s past, present, and future.
Alabanza.
The much-bandied-about “making place, keeping place,” is mostly to help migrant/refugee/displaced communities get anchored, as deep-seated upheavals drive people away from origins, group identity, and land. We have to take into account the global immensity of the destruction tied to climate change and the poisoning of land and water—as well as that of place, culture, and individual authority. This displacement also happens within cities as gentrification deracinates whole neighborhoods.
Even still, all of us, whatever cultures, ethnicities, or belief systems we may have, have common links, not the least of which is that we are all residents of this spectacular and stunning planet, the only one we know of with all the conditions perfect for our existence.
I once mentioned to a Samoan elder during an indigenous elders’ gathering in October 2008, on Hilo, Hawai‘i, that my mother had just died. He gave his condolences—everyone has only one biological mother. But he assured me that “we always have our mother,” Mother Earth. We should remember in our darkest times that we are never orphaned, that we are cherished just as we are, and that to our common mother, we always belong.