The Dilemma of Identifying as Chicanx When You Love Pop Culture
Unraveling a cultural identity gets complicated when you feel pressured to associate with the stereotypical elements and unwelcoming perceptions of influence from outside cultures
As the daughter of two Mexican immigrants, Spanish is my first language. My childhood revolved around weekend gatherings with my tios and tias in the inner city neighborhoods of Southeast Los Angeles. These adult and kid birthday parties, Sunday carne asadas, and random celebrations were where I began to embrace my Mexican ancestry.
The speakers would nearly burst at the screws blasting Los Tigres del Norte, a Norteno band from Mexico, which merely served as background noise to the fast-paced, laugh inducing Spanish conversations going on around 5-year-old me. Even after adapting to the English-speaking dominant suburbs, those evenings surrounded by la cultura remain the building blocks of my bilingual identity.
Coming to the United States in the late 1980s from their native Mexicali, Baja California, my relatives and parents were completely new to the United States, despite living relatively close the U.S.-Mexico border. The few combined English phrases they heard in American songs, films and television helped them figure out how to effectively communicate with non-Spanish speakers along their way to a so-called “better life.”
Once they arrived in the states, all seven to eight family members moved to tiny, cramped one-bedroom apartments in Watts and Long Beach, relocating continuously for the first few years. Eventually, the family disbanded, raising enough money from working long hours at low paying, under-the-table jobs in the city to move to their own confined apartments in rough neighborhoods.
After my maternal grandmother, the family matriarch, passed in 1992 (the year in which I was born), the family both physically and emotionally grew further apart. My tios and tias focused on growing families of their own and designing better futures for their children. My parents had my older sister Nadine and me at this point, more than enough to motivate them to do the same.
My mama learned chunks of English through kitchen jargon, conversing with American customers, and accessing even more American popular culture through cable TV and the wide range of radio stations common in L.A. She set out to learn as much English as she could, accepting that learning the basics of a new language would be more beneficial than hindering it in the long run.
We would sit up in bed after dropping Nadine off at South Gate’s Montara Elementary School, watching early morning episodes of “Sailor Moon,” “Arthur,” and whichever cartoon was airing on PBS that morning. These lazy, overcast mornings in bed is how both my mother and I learned English, by listening and imitating Arthur the Aardvark and D.W.
After I successfully completed kindergarten and after the birth of my little sister Samantha, my family moved 60 miles north to the Antelope Valley in 1998, a less culturally diverse region in the outskirts of Los Angeles County. The mountainous views and predominantly white, suburban community of Lancaster promised new cultural and linguistic opportunities for all of us, where I spent most of my childhood and which was the beginning of me discovering my personal identity outside of my Mexican roots.
Moving away from my extended familia and the inner city was an adjustment for our growing family of five. My parents took on full-time jobs as prep and line cooks, this time working in restaurants with blonder haired, bluer eyed gueros as coworkers, who admired their work ethic and fluent Spanish.
Meanwhile, Nadine and I attended Linda Verde Elementary School, where we quickly made friends after being placed in bilingual classes. We were taught in English and Spanish by similarly tan and dark-haired bilingual schoolteachers, who reinforced the linguistic and cultural aspects of my heritage through lesson plans.
Being surrounded by Latinos at home and school 24/7 was where we felt most comfortable. But coming home to watch cable accessible channels like MTV, Cartoon Network, VH1, and Nickelodeon in the afternoon was my sister’s and my escape into a culturally new way of life. With both of our parents working through most of the day, TV practically raised me and my sisters for a brief period of our childhood.
Watching music videos of gueras like Avril Lavigne and Gwen Stefani from No Doubt while getting dressed for school at 7 a.m. was an unspoken rule during my transitional years into middle school.
My mom worked diligently to assimilate to American life and enjoy the romcoms she wished she understood as a young adult herself, while my dad ensured that we remained fluent in our native tongue. One at a time, my dad would seat my sisters and me beside him to read La Opinion, a Spanish written newspaper, before driving us to Blockbuster where we would pick out a Spanish subtitled action movie for us to watch together.
I grew up eating the same homemade enchiladas, ceviche, and chiles rellenos my Mexican American grade school friends did, but while their parents listened to Vicente Fernandez, mine listened to Men at Work.
While I did not encounter many criticisms about my taste in music, TV, or films in elementary school, my preteen years were filled with judgmental whispers from my Latinx friends and even my primos who still resided in Southeast L.A.
I would be teased for prioritizing English popular culture over the telenovelas on Univision and corridos that were much more common in Mexican American households in the early 2000s. The girls I considered my best friends started to exclude me from their circle when I began listening to music more aligned with the pop punk I heard in video games than the bubblegum pop we bonded over as young Chicanas in white neighborhoods. My cousins who introduced me to 90s West Coast hip-hop called me “white-washed” for playing Green Day’s “American Idiot” on repeat.
The feedback I would get by those I loved most on the things that meant the most to me weighed heavily on my mind. I spent middle school and freshman year wasting my academic potential trying to befriend the popular Latinas in my class, never successful in relating to them to as much as they related to each other.
At home, my family grew from five to seven, straining our already scarce finances and resources. The addition of another sister and brother always overshadowed the economic struggles, but it felt inescapable when trying to connect with the upper middle-class white kids who liked the things that I liked. My mom’s all-American coworkers would donate garbage bags stuffed with their kids’ hand-me-downs to our family with sincerity. My sisters and I would sift through the garments to find a blouse or a pair of shoes that fit, especially if the garment was from a brand I recognized.
I remember thinking about how different, or “better,” my life would be if I had been born white. I thought about how easy it would be to make friends who liked watching tacky horror movies and listening to Blink-182, about how I probably would be able to afford new clothes from Hot Topic with allowance from my rich, white parents, and about how those white parents would probably never make me clean the bathroom I shared with my four siblings.
I blamed my ethnicity for a lot of the disadvantages I personally faced, ignoring the fact that while mainstream society culturally appropriates Mexican food and music for profit, systemic racism in the U.S. has historically rejected foreign heritage and traditions. From this perspective, I can understand why so many Latinx households are persistent in preserving as many parts of their culture they can, proudly and loudly.
It wasn’t until my family was able to afford the internet during my sophomore year of high school that I finally began to embrace my bicultural interests. I spent hours online downloading the alternative rock songs I heard on the local radio station, as well as the catchy cumbias I enjoyed dancing to at my cousins’ quinceneras. On YouTube, I laughed at English videos goofily dubbed in Spanish and I watched music videos in both languages. The hours I spent in front of a computer comforted me the way MTV did when I was 12.
Online I found people like me; Mexican American teenagers who struggled to maintain a strong connection to their Latin identity while enjoying the “white people” media our own raza urged us to deny. It was within that community that I realized we all had similar experiences, trying to stay loyal to the truth that raised us while being unashamed of exploring interests outside of our specific backgrounds.
When I learned about my family’s background and our history migrating across Mexico, I clearly understood that my identity runs steadily through my veins. I understood that regardless of what others think they know about me, I am the only one who knows how dearly I embrace my cultura. And while it’s not always apparent that I am bilingual based on my interests, I take advantage to express that gratitude by speaking Spanish as often as possible, rolling my rr’s and translating for those who need it.
As an adult who is proud of identifying herself as a Spanish speaking Chicana, I also recognize the privileges I have experienced over darker skinned Latinos like my father, whose heavy accent distinguishes him as an immigrant. My voice, whether in English or Spanish, serves to defend and speak for those who are incapable or unwilling to speak up for themselves out of fear, and that to me is the only identity worth defending.
The imaginary barriers of interests dictated by one’s racial background and native language are just that, imaginary, created by a system that seeks to divide communities.
I have fully embraced my role as a bilingual voice for the voiceless, proud of it as I am of my heritage which raised me to stand strong and stay true to who I am, through every success and every failure.
No matter if I’m listening to Selena or the Spice Girls, those communities, those culturas that I feel inside of me every minute of every day, will never be silenced or repressed.
