I was born and raised in the United States of America, spending most of my life within its borders. Yet, though I was not able to articulate it cogently at the time, much about this country chafed me intensely even as a child: its materialism, worship of avarice, arrogance, treatment of culture as just another marketplace commodity, and conformist collective “individualism”. Paradoxically, I was also sometimes prone to bouts of wild patriotism only a child, the first-born of immigrants to boot, could be capable of, avidly collecting cards commemorating the troops and weaponry of Operation Desert Storm, and being suspended from school for beating up classmates who profaned the national anthem with improvised bawdy lyrics.
Though I “pass” for white (a double-edged sword that) and my English diction bears no trace of the friction, the effortful straining, the residual savor of the ancestral language so often apparent in first generation American children, Spanish shall remain to my dying breath the realm of my innermost thoughts and feelings. Because of this intimacy with a language which was fed to me from earliest consciousness like mother’s milk, a permanent sense of apartness and even estrangement from mainstream American culture was fostered; of being an outsider edging along the periphery, gazing cooly at the panoply of life jostling inside.
Somewhat in the manner of Mahler’s famous “thrice homeless” remark, I have neither ever quite experienced a seamless feeling of “belonging” amongst my immigrant-descent peers. My parents came from a nation with virtually no representation in mainstream America or even within the resident Hispanophone community, thereby creating a distance between myself from the Mexicans and Central Americans ubiquitous in my hometown. Because of my family’s peculiar Spanish dialect—to say nothing of how peculiar I found the dialects of my peers—I was regarded as something of a foreigner among them. At the same time, I pined for my family’s homeland, my ardor stoked ever more so by how distant it was. In the end, that country—my parents’ homeland—no longer exists, probably never did; it remains solely as an ineffable ideal residing within the chambers of my heart. “German culture is wherever I am”, Thomas Mann proudly proclaimed. In my infinitely smaller way, perhaps, I feel that my existence helps to do the same for what once was the cradle of my parents’ youthful dreams.
“You’re not really Latino,” I was told in high school by a flesh globule with a thick, oily ponytail that rested upon one side of a cheap, 1990s imitation guayabera. “Your people are not like ours.” Had he a semblance of a neck, then it may have been possible for him to crook his head in thought and contemplate the root significance of the term “Latino”. Of course, he still would have had to stimulate thought in order to accomplish this, a feat that with or without neck would remain forever elusive.
Some time ago I was startled to discover a diary entry by H. L. Mencken which seemed to speak to me directly from across the chasm of time and space, so profoundly did I sympathize with him:
My grandfather, I believe, made a mistake when he came to this country[...] I believe my chances in Germany would have been at least as good as they have been in America, and maybe a great deal better[...] I have spent my entire 62 years here, but I still find it impossible to fit myself into the accepted patterns of American life and thought. After all these years, I remain a foreigner.
I conserve a small hope that some stray reader may come across my doggerel screeds, discover that their peculiar thoughts were shared by another, and find themselves thinking: “Here, too, is a kindred soul.”
