RECLAIMING CHICANO/A: YOU DON’T GET TO TELL ME WHO I AM
What box do you check? And why do you check that box if you are _________ or why don’t you check ________ instead? I do not identify as a white person. I know people do not identify me as a white person. I am Chicana. Period. In drafting this piece, I first dived into racial complexities by asking my family and close friends what they identify as racially. Their choices were limited to choosing among the racial categories the U.S. has defined on the census categories. Their responses prompted a long, convoluted conversation on what race we each identified as, which varied within my friend group and within my family as well. “Race is different in Mexico,” explains my mother. She says she considers herself “a little white” since she has lighter skin. Yet, when I probe about her family history, she recognizes that she has Indigenous grandparents. My father, however, readily identifies as being mixed-race: Indigenous and white. I asked him why he had a different response than my mother, and he replied that growing up with a Nahuatl surname and a more Indigenous look, in addition to his father repeatedly telling him he is not white and no white person would accept him as such, made him identify more readily with being mixed-race. Given the complexity of racial self-identification within my own Mexican family, and the fact that I have never been considered nor considered myself as white, I was furious that the law has legally defined us as ethnic whites. Finding out about this imposed definition, I wanted to get to the root of how this came to be and why it persists.
Since 1790, the U.S. government has had a national census to keep track of how many people of different races were in the nation.[1] Since the first census, the “racial boxes” have drastically changed, influenced by the what benefited the U.S. government at that time.[2] In the 2010 census, the racial categories included White, Black/African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, Asian, and Some Other Race.[3] The Asian and the Other Pacific Islander categories were broken down further.[4] Within this flux, mixed-race peoples of Mexican descent in particular, have had a complex history with the census, the law, and what race(s) they identify themselves as. This complexity of racial identification within mixed-race Mexican-Americans has impacted the legal sphere of how the law considers what race we are in terms of our civil rights. As of date, people of Mexican descent are legally defined as being white.[5] This troubling definition wipes away the complexity of racial identities that exist within the Mexican-American community and derives from a strategy working within the framework the U.S. legal system established, which Mexican-Americans attempted to assert to assure rights within the United States.[6] Yet, this definition has been and will continue to be used as a tool by the colonialist American legal society to ensure Mexican-Americans do not get to protect their civil rights within the U.S.
The U.S. has legally defined Mexican-Americans as whites due to two things: 1. Mexican-Americans labeling themselves as white to achieve equal opportunity to that what white people enjoyed in the U.S. and 2. The courts using that definition against Mexican-Americans and preventing them from enjoying the benefits conferred to whites in this society.
Associating with whiteness, or assimilating into Anglo-white culture, has long been considered as a way out of oppression and into economic and social privilege. This can derive from the fact that subordinated groups needed to work within a framework laid out by white society that did not exactly square with the group and their own self-determination.[7] For a vast period of time, people could not become U.S. citizens unless they were white.[8] In In re Rodriguez, the court decided that Mexicans were white due to the treaties entered into by the U.S. and Mexico.[9] Mexican-Americans have also argued that they ought to be considered white in order to gain access to whites-only schooling.[10] In fact, the Mexican government and the League of the United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) petitioned the Census Bureau to remove Mexicans as a separate racial category in the 1930 census and by the following census in 1940, Mexicans as a race was removed.[11] In 1952 Texas, an all-white jury convicted a Mexican-American criminal defendant. [12] The defendant argued that his due process and equal protection rights were violated because there were no Mexican-Americans in the jury, but the Court relied on the legal definition that Mexicans were white, and denied the defendant’s argument — and his rights.[13]
But we are not white, and white people do not treat us as white people (The Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s). In spite of the legal and federally imposed definition of Mexicans as white, Mexican-Americans across the country do not enjoy the full benefits and privileges that white people do on a daily basis. The majority Mexican-Americans were never white to begin with. Rather, this legally imposed definition upon our people has subordinated us, stripping us from asserting our due process and equal protection rights, which is rather convenient for the government and the legal system to continue to abide by their definition for us. This imposed definition pains me because it strips us of our ancestry, our cuentos and cultura.
How do we ensure we protect our civil rights while surviving the hostilities of white society? My personal answer is to not assimilate — it is to take pride in my culture, to respect my ancestors, and to fight for my humanity. Mexican-Americans need to challenge whiteness wherever it creeps up, especially at home. We cannot ascribe to assimilate to white culture and ideals when that culture and set of ideals do not encompass us and exclude other subordinated minority groups. While continuously outwardly advocating for a right to self-determination will take a long time to get into effect, we as Mexican-Americans need to work within our own communities to ask our families and friends to reject colonialism and stop idealizing whiteness. We cannot continue this fight without decolonizing our own mindsets as we take on the structures of power and whiteness that is continuously subordinating us.
Citations:
[1] What Census Calls Us: A Historical Timeline, Pew Research Center (June 10, 2015), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-timeline/.
[2] Gene Demby, On the Census, Who Checks ‘Hispanic,’ Who Checks ‘White,’ And Why, NPR: Code Switch (June 16, 2014, 9:18 AM ET), https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/16/321819185/on-the-census-who-checks-hispanic-who-checks-white-and-why.
[3] What Census Calls Us, supra note [1].
[4] Id.
[5] See In re Rodriguez, 81 F. 337 (W.D. Tex. 1897); Hernandez v. State, 251 S.W.2d 531 (Tex. 1952); Independent School District v. Salvatierra, 33 S.W.2d 790 (Tex. Civ. App. 1930).
[6] Compare In re Rodriguez, 81 F. 337 (noting that because the U.S. entered into treaty agreements with Mexico that Mexican-Americans, under immigration laws, are considered white), with Salvatierra, 33 S.W.2d 790 (plaintiffs arguing that Mexican-American students should not be segregated from white schools because they are ethnic whites).
[7] George A. Martinez, The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican-Americans and Whiteness, 3 Harvard L.R. 321, 326–27 (1997).
[8] In re Rodriguez, 81 F. 337.
[9] Id.
[10] Salvatierra, 33 S.W.2d 790.
[11] Demby, supra note 2.
[12] Hernandez, 251 S.W.2d 531.
[13] Id.
