Sangre Latina
I have a face that compels strangers to ask me what I am, as if I were an exotic type of plant that resists botanical classification, or a new, hybrid breed of dog. I am white, that much seems to be clear, but not white-white. Not the kind of white you'd find on the Mayflower, or competing in a regatta, or participating in any type of watersport, for that matter. I have olive skin. Dark eyebrows. Perhaps the barest hint of a mustache, which, were I less attentive, were my face left to its own devices, might blossom into Kahlo-esque pilosity. With my kind of face, one must remain vigilant. The eyebrows tend to creep. The mustache yearns to bloom. Once, at a mall in San Francisco, I went into a nail salon for a manicure. The woman painting my nails studied me, frowning, and asked if I wouldn't also like a face wax. This is not the type of thing asked of plain-white, white-white people, I suppose.
What are you? People want to know. Strangers have hazarded guesses about my heritage: Persian Jewish. Arab. Latin. Portuguese. Italian. Puerto Rican.
When I was nine, a classmate asked me if I was Jewish. She and I went to the same Catholic church. Her mother was my Confraternity of Christian Doctrine teacher. When I told her I wasn't Jewish, she raised an eyebrow. “Hmm,” she said. “You look it.”
Decades later, a cab driver in Buenos Aires, upon hearing my yanquí accent as I told him my destination, asked where I was from. I told him I was from the United States.
“Yes, okay,” he said, waving a hand, “but where are your parents from?”
“The United States.”
He shook his head, as if rejecting my answer. “But you have Latin blood,” he said. “Tenés sangre latina.” This was not a question.
§
At least one-quarter of the blood pumping through my veins is, in fact, “Latin.” Ethnically speaking, I am one-quarter Mexican, one-quarter Irish, one-quarter Italian, and one-quarter white. Plain-white. Wonder Bread white. Methodist white. “Scotch Irish” white. White-white. This quarter of my heritage I know the least about. My father's family, the Italians and the white-whites alike, are mysterious, closed-off, old school, their coats buttoned to the throat. My mother's family, the Irish Mexicans, on the other hand, are a book flung open, their secrets hurled across the page.
My Irish grandmother and my Mexican San Franciscan grandfather had nine Mexican Irish San Franciscan children with names like Bridget and Margaret, all of whom have complained, at one point, about their thick arm hair and scant head hair. The ratio hardly seems fair.
I, for one, have a good amount of head hair and a manageable amount of arm hair. My particular genetic mix could have yielded much hairier results. I consider myself fortunate.
My mother's mother, Josephine, emigrated from Galway City to San Francisco in 1946. She'd barely stepped off the plane when she met a local boy: my grandfather, Mark Rivero. We, his many grandchildren, called him Pop. He was a fifth-generation San Franciscan on his mother's side; their family had been in northern California since the territory was part of Mexico and called Alta California. Pop's father, on the other hand, had immigrated to San Francisco from Mazatlán, Mexico. His name was Silverio and he had a resplendent, black mustache. Mustaches, you see, are embedded in my genetic code.
Pop was born in San Francisco in July 1920, the twentieth of twenty-one children. Mary-Celsa-Alice-Victoria-Silverio-Stella-Martin-Frances-John-Peter-Julius-Theodora-Luis-Nicholas-Ernest-Anita-Rupert-Catherine-Carmelita-Mark-Virginia. No twins, no multiples. One mother, one father. We are a fertile people. We are fruitful; we multiplied.
Pop’s family was poor. How could they not have been, with so many mouths to feed? In November 1918, two years before Pop was born, his family––two parents and thirteen children under the age of fifteen––all contracted the Spanish flu, and the San Francisco Red Cross dispatched a nurse to aid them. After they were returned to health, my great-grandmother was interviewed by the Chronicle, and she thanked the Red Cross for saving their lives. The reporter described my great-grandparents' house as “two small rooms, set back behind a clump of angry-looking bushes in the sand dunes,” and noted, somewhat unnecessarily, that my family were “among the city’s very poor.”
When Pop was thirteen months old, in September 1921, his family won Largest Family in San Francisco and received a $100 cash prize from the Chronicle. My great-grandmother was quoted in the paper, noting that the $100 would come in “decidedly useful.” The article lauding my family’s achievement, its human abundance, gushed, “What do you think of this family of native sons and daughters, San Franciscans. Aren’t you proud of fellow citizens who can bring up a family like this?” This unwieldy family sprawled across the outskirts of San Francisco when large tracts of the city were still dunes, wild with seagrass, bathed in fog.
My grandfather was seventeen when the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. He and five of his brothers, the sole members of the Sunset Athletic Club, ran a relay race across the shining new bridge, from Marin to San Francisco. They posed for a photo for the paper wearing matching white singlets and shorts, their arms folded behind their backs, at ease. My grandfather and his siblings moved through the arteries of their city like blood, were bound to its muscle like bone. They were San Franciscans, Americans. This, for them, was enough.
§
In the lily-white Detroit suburb where I was raised, my ethnic background didn't come up, except occasionally, as a fun fact. In my fourth-grade class, we each had to present a report on a country. I chose Mexico. I wrote to the Mexican embassy and they sent me a print-out of an Aztec carving and a thick pamphlet filled with facts and figures. For my presentation to my class, I wore an embroidered huipil that we'd gotten on a vacation to Cancun. I was the only child I knew in my school who could claim any Mexican heritage, and I liked being different, in this small way.
Because my mother's family lived in California, I only saw them once a year, if that, and so my experience of my Mexican heritage was lived in short bursts: listening to Pop's aged mariachi cassettes as he slathered tortillas with butter, examining a drawer full of photos of my Mexican forefathers, including the famed bandit (later General) and Pop’s great-great-grandfather, Manuel Lozada. Based on my observations of my own family, there were certain traits that I associated with Mexicanness. Mexican women, for example, were shaped like my mother and her seven sisters: gracious behinds, flattish chests, a tendency to bloat. (The “Mexican starch bomb,” my aunts called this phenomenon). Mexicans cleared the table too fast, while people were still eating. Pop couldn't stand a lingering plate. He'd sweep the food out from under you and would be washing the dish in the sink before you could protest that you were still eating, that you were going to finish that crust. Mexicans liked to sit around the table and gossip while picking the carcasses of roasted birds. My grandfather was ingenious at stripping a chicken down to its barest bones, finding the last vestiges of meat like a tracking hound sniffing out a truffle. Mexicans were strict parents. Mexicans were staunch conservatives and devout Catholics. Mexicans always told you to say your prayers before you left the house, crossed themselves if they walked past a church. This is what I believed until I went to college and met other Mexicans.
For three years of college, I had a Mexican roommate. She was from Cuernavaca, a forested city south of Mexico City. Her side of our dorm room was littered with beautiful, grown-up things: a lacquered mirror, an unframed piece of art on canvas, a delicate, shaded lamp. My side was pedestrian, my extra-long twin bed festooned with Christmas lights, my desk crowded with paper plates of food pilfered from the dining hall. My roommate owned a floor-length suede coat that she never wore; she couldn't find a suitably fancy occasion on campus. She wore Chanel perfume and high heels and dated much older men. Often, she would disappear for days at a time, put up in a hotel by whatever gentleman she was courting. Once, our sophomore year, she returned from a weekend away and described how a man had eaten fresh mango off of her naked body. I nodded, pretending I’d ever had a sexual experience that had involved lighting bright enough to allow for the arrangement of tropical fruit on skin.
That year, my roommate invited me to come to her hometown for spring break, to stay with her family. Her parents lived in a terracotta-roofed manse in a walled compound populated by wandering peacocks. One of Mexico's former presidents lived in the same complex. My roommate's family had a live-in cook and maid. Their house was gracious, hushed, full of polished, dark wood. My roommate’s mother was an art dealer. Her father was a high-powered consultant. He was friends with multiple former presidents of Mexico, not just the one who lived next-door. Everyone in the family spoke flawless English. They belonged to a country club where members drank only bottled water, never tap. Even the ice cubes were made from bottled water.
“The locals can drink the tap water,” my roommate's father explained, swirling his drink in his glass, “but it’ll make you very sick.”
Aren't you locals? I thought, but did not say, because I knew that by “locals,” he meant the poor.
It was on this trip that I began to wonder if the traits I'd believed to be Mexican were simply quirks of my own family. There were so many of us that the things that we did seemed universal. But in my roommate’s Mexico, no one whipped a plate out from under you before you were done eating. No one picked the meat off a chicken with greasy fingers. No one told you to say your prayers. My roommate's family didn't go to church. Her friends from her private girls’ high school drove Audis and had gotten abortions. Pop would have crossed himself, muttering prayers to Our Lady, if he knew.
I'd been to Mexico before, on trips with my parents to Cancun, where we stayed in hastily built hotels whose beaches were still littered with construction detritus. We ate at restaurants where, on the hour, greased-up men in loincloths blew on conch shells, pantomiming the sacred rituals of Mayan culture while red-faced tourists swilled margaritas and wiped melted cheese from the corners of their mouths. My father would cringe when the conch shell would inevitably come out. “You've heard one conch,” he liked to say, “you’ve heard them all.”
This neon-flashing slice of Mexico was across the country from where my family had originated. We’d come from the west coast of Mexico, descendants of Aztecs. Nonetheless, while we were in Cancun, my mother would point out the distinguished noses of our waiters with fondness, remarking that their strong profiles reminded her of her father and uncles. A few years ago, my mother sent away a DNA kit and found that 17% of her DNA is Native Mexican. Pop’s blood, then, was probably closer to 35%. Like most Mexican Americans, he was mestizo. Of course, he considered himself to be white. Mexican, sure, okay, but white. People thought about things differently back when Pop was still forming ideas about himself. If you tried to tell him he was Latino, or Chicano, or anything other than a San Franciscan, an American, he would have waved a hand at such nonsense.
§
My grandfather was deeply conservative, stalwart in his insistence on right and wrong. Smoking was Wrong; going to church was Right. Being on the dole was Wrong; working hard was Right. His views were black and white, unshakable. He didn’t stand for waffling or uncertainty. When my mother was young, he brought her along to meetings of the San Francisco chapter of the John Birch Society. He kept copies of books by right-wing polemicists—Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly—on the shelf above his toilet. He once said that he respected Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, because he kept the trains running on time. Pop was a World War II veteran who'd worked his tail off at multiple, unforgiving jobs to provide for his family. He entertained no excuses about why others couldn't achieve the same success.
Pop's conservatism was not an anomaly. As Geraldo Cadava points out in The Hispanic Republican, before the 1930s, most Hispanics were Republicans. Although many switched to the Democratic party between the 1930s and 1960s, thanks to the New Deal, in the late 1960s, a growing number of Hispanics began to vote Republican once again. People like my great-grandfather, Silverio, who had immigrated to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, sought stability and freedom. While Mexico was plunged into decades of violence and uncertainty following the Mexican Revolution, Silverio put his hope in the United States, “the best hope for order, peace, and prosperity.” The stated values of the Republican party aligned with my ancestors' most fervent wishes and dreams.
This, I remind myself, is why Pop thought the way he did.
In college and in law school, I devoted myself to Latin American human rights work. I worked at a human rights NGO in Buenos Aires. I met with victims of state-sponsored torture in El Salvador. I studied autopsy reports from prisoners summarily executed in Brazil. But for the years that I was immersed in Latin American politics and constitutional law, I rarely mentioned to colleagues my family background, my Latin blood. My Mexican American heritage felt too unwieldy, too ragged at the edges, to summarize. And I feared the well-meaning liberals I worked with would make assumptions about why I’d gone into this work, what my sweet Mexican American grandfather would think. Wouldn’t he be so proud?
I never spoke to Pop about the human rights work I did. He loved me and was proud of me, even if we disagreed. Why complicate things?
Pop was warm, loving, generous. But his notions of how the world should work—to the victor go the spoils, every man for himself, teach a man to fish—were misaligned with everything I’d come to believe about how the world should work, particularly in the context of Latin America, a region saddled by long histories of oppression, tyrants dominating the weak, generals executing dissidents, families being cut down in fields like corn. But this is easy for me to say, a person who has never been poor, a person who does not have twenty brothers and sisters, a person who is barely Mexican at all. One thing is clear: one hundred years after my grandfather's birth, my job is not to square up his beliefs with mine.
Manuel Lozada, my most famous ancestor, may have helped usher in the agrarian reform movement in Mexico. He fought for Indigenous rights. He was also a bandit, a general, and a skilled political operator. Lozada has been variously described as liberal, conservative, imperialist, neutral, and Republican. Like his forefather, perhaps Pop’s politics were not so simple to pin down.
§
Pop never learned Spanish. When his father immigrated from Mexico to California, around the turn of the last century, to teach your children the language of the country you left was not done. Silverio wanted to give his twenty-one children a better life, and the way to do that was to ensure those children spoke English, only English. Back then, people thought you couldn't speak good English if you also spoke Spanish, that you couldn't hold two languages in your head at once, that they'd crowd each other out, tangle together, confuse you. The goal was to fit in. To fit in, one must speak perfect, unaccented English. One must be as simple and sweet as apple pie. One must cut one's ties to the old country, like excising a dead tooth.
Pop and his father built the house that my mother and her siblings grew up in, on Lawton Street in the Sunset District. The Sunset is the foggiest part of San Francisco, where the air is damp and cold, and the faces of buildings are scrubbed raw by salt. I've seen the plans for the house that Silverio drafted by hand. Each room was carefully labeled in his neat handwriting, including a telephone nook, which he labeled “telefone”—impossible to keep the Spanish from creeping in, despite his efforts.
The house had three bedrooms, four if you got creative, and when my mother was growing up, eleven people lived there. Two parents, plus eight girls and a boy, all of whom spoke perfect English, drilled into them by the nuns at St. Anne of the Sunset and my Irish grandmother, who had a thing about grammar. She would correct people on television, snorting with indignation when news anchors would mix up “lay” and “lie,” or use the phrase “due to” when they meant “because of.” She was a smart woman who never got a college degree; she’d been waylaid by too many children. Other people's careless English bothered her. If she could learn proper English, growing up poor in Ireland, why couldn't they, these Americans who had the whole world at their feet?
§
I first learned Spanish in college. Maybe all the terracotta roofs and palm trees swaying in the wind stirred my Latin blood to life. My first Spanish teacher was an enthusiastic American with a glossy brown bob, Señora Molitoris. She had endless patience with us beginners and our clumsy tongues, as we learned to describe the world in the present tense, like babies. This shirt is blue. Today the weather is hot. He is very tall. It didn't take long for Spanish to hook me: the lurid rr’s, the bitten v’s, the swallowed vowels. Spanish gulped me down.
I wanted to see Latin America once I understood Spanish. Forget the conch shells and the Macarena: I wanted to see the real stuff.
I started with Chile. Santiago was crowded with purple mountains, glossy office buildings, wheezing buses, donkeys covered in flower garlands. My host mother was a short blonde who smoked like a chimney. In the months that I lived in her apartment, I only ever saw her eat raw cherries. She was proud of her light hair and blue eyes, her pale, pale skin. She told me she was a hundred percent Spanish. Cien por ciento. Not one drop of Indian blood. I smiled, as if this were an achievement. She was related to Augusto Pinochet, a cousin. When he staged a military coup in 1973, bathing Santiago in blood, my host mother and Pinochet's own daughter were whisked away on a skiing trip to the Andes. A nice getaway. When she came back, everything was better. No more lines for bread. She thought Pinochet was a great man. She thought my Spanish was funny, my yanquí accent curious. I found her Spanish hard to follow; all the words ran together. When she pronounced my name, it lost all of its esses and ens. In her mouth, my name transformed into something softer, easier.
After Chile, I went to Cuba. I spent a summer there, ten long weeks, during which time a hurricane struck the island and all of my money, a wad of carefully folded twenty-dollar bills tucked into a sock, was stolen from the room I was renting in a family's house in Vedado. I was lonely and anxious in Havana and spent the interminable, sweaty afternoons when the power was cut off wandering the streets, going on walks that led nowhere. I stood at the seawall and stared out to sea. I bought peanuts at the agromercado and ate them as I walked. My skin turned brown in the sun. People would speak to me on the street, and I’d avoid opening my mouth, not wanting to give away that I was a gringa. I'd learned, in my previous travels, that people did not like Americans. But, I found out, Cubans were generous. They liked Americans, and why not? They knew the score. People don’t get to choose their governments, not really.
Next, I went to Argentina. My Latin blood never ran so cold as in Buenos Aires. I spent a summer there, too, freezing, the tips of my fingers turning white in my drafty apartment. It was their winter, of course, one of the coldest on record: it snowed in Buenos Aires for the first time in almost a century. I was on the bottom of the world, everything topsy-turvy. I never felt at home there.
Maybe I was prejudiced. My family had had an Argentine exchange student for a year when I was in high school. She was a serious, withdrawn girl who seemed disappointed to have been sent somewhere as pedestrian as suburban Michigan. She told us her first choice had been Australia. Then New Zealand. Then Ireland. Then England. My mother sensed she was disdainful of us, that she looked down on Americans, and Mexican Americans, in particular. She was unhappy. She gained weight. In our Detroit suburb, there were no dance clubs, no polo fields. She didn't approve of the white-bread teenage pastimes that I enjoyed: cross-country running, shopping at the mall, going to the movies. She liked math and dancing and Argentine barbecue. She hung a giant Argentine flag in her bedroom and spent most of her time in there, gazing up at the morose, jaundiced face of the sun, her door locked. Years later, I visited her when I was in Buenos Aires. We met up in a steak restaurant and she was expansive, as if to say, Isn't this so much better than your home country? I had to admit, the Argentine steak was far superior to the gelatinous New York Strips we used to get from Kroger.
A few years later, I moved to São Paulo to work at a law firm as a severely underpaid paralegal. Brazil seemed like another planet, a dazzling blue globe, freewheeling, unconstrained, spangled by its own constellations of celebrities, musicians, sports stars, heroes. I had to learn Portuguese. Once my ears adjusted to the nasal song of the language, the shushing consonants, the joyful uplift of its interrogatories, Spanish began to play second-fiddle in my heart. Bit by bit, my Spanish wore away, eroded by disuse.
Now, I hardly ever speak Spanish, except a few words to the women who come once every other week to clean our house. They are from Central America. I don't know where, exactly; I'm too embarrassed of my rusty Spanish to ask. I don't want to expose myself as a dumb American, a woman who can hardly conjugate a verb without stumbling, and so I keep quiet, and smile, and say gracias. How embarrassing, to have strangers scrubbing my toilets, and I am too shy to speak to them. But better to keep my mouth shut than to reveal how inadequate I am, how weak my Latin blood.
§
I only feel comfortable claiming a small piece of my heritage. I do not check the “Hispanic/Latinx” box on the form. That would feel like an exaggeration, an overstepping of bounds. Instead, I check the box that says “white” or “prefer not to respond.” My mother, for her part, used to refer to herself as “Hispanic.” She may still. We don't talk about labels, as these discussions can devolve into fights about politics. As a teenager, I lectured her about how the Nixon administration had come up with the term “Hispanic” as a bureaucratic sorting mechanism, that it didn't mean anything. And besides, I added, how can you say you're Hispanic if you don't even speak Spanish? Never mind that my mother's maiden name is Rivero. Never mind that my mother and her siblings had grown up being called “n***ers” by their Irish cousins. Never mind the fact that segregation of Mexican American and white children in California was still legal a year before my mother's birth. But, like so many internal crises do, my inability to define myself, to land on an identity that felt right and true, bled out onto my mother.
§
I wrote a short story, once, in a writing workshop. It was about a gay teenager whose last name was something Mexican. Sanchez, maybe. I can't remember. The teacher told me I was not allowed to write this story. She said I'd get slaughtered by the Latino community, the gay community. It was not my story to tell. I was very embarrassed. I ripped the pages out of my notebook and crumpled them, destroying the evidence. The teacher didn't know the origin of the blood in my veins, but her comment cut me to the quick. I felt unmasked, revealed as the pretender I was. One-quarter Mexican. Never learned Spanish in the home. Not entirely clear on what constitutes an enchilada. What had I been thinking, writing a story about a boy named Sanchez?
Here is what I'd been thinking: maybe this boy named Sanchez is also one-quarter Mexican. Maybe all of his sharpest memories of his grandfather take place in a crowded kitchen that smelled of buttered toast and fried chorizo. Maybe when he looks in the mirror and studies his nose, the long arc it traces down the center of his shy face, he is put in mind of ancient carvings, of feathered warriors eating the hearts of their enemies, of forbidding, bug-eyed gods. Maybe his tongue hesitates when asked to roll an r. Maybe his tongue hesitates over his own name.
The memoirist and novelist Alexander Chee writes about the experience of searching literature for stories about someone like himself, half-Korean, half-white, and finding nothing. He writes, “I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.” I wanted to write that story about the boy named Sanchez because I have never come across a story about a person like me, a quarter-Mexican white girl who doesn't feel entitled to claim her own heritage, who feels embarrassed that she speaks yanqui Spanish learned in a classroom, who inherited freckles and an Irish tendency toward fatalism. Chee writes, “I didn't feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity—any identity, really—was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.” I, too, struggle to make my own identity. I sift through my own history, deciding which bits to keep, and which to discard, which to flaunt, which to hide.
§
One night, my husband carried his laptop into the bedroom, where I was reading.
“Look at this,” he said, handing me the laptop.
I blinked at a series of photos of my own ethnically ambiguous face. My husband had stumbled upon a forum on a website where people try to guess other people's ethnic makeup based on photos. A stranger had posted a series of photos of me––all taken from my personal blog––and had invited other users on the forum to guess at my ethnic makeup: “Classify and guess (will post DNA results in the end).” He’d lifted my 23andMe results from my blog, as well.
People guessed at my ethnicity.
“Med. Southwestern European,” one user ventured.
“Possibly small amount Amerindian.”
Another guessed “Castiza.”
“This,” agreed another.
Castiza: a racial category, “widely recognized by the eighteenth century in colonial Mexico,” according to Wikipedia, referring to people with one-quarter Amerindian blood, three-quarters Spanish.
“Well,” said my husband, peering over my shoulder, “close enough.”
§
I am a mother of three. I look at my children and wonder if my mixed heritage—the tangled threads of Mexican, Irish, Italian, and white-otherwise-not-specified—will matter to them. My offspring are undeniably white, not an Aztec nose among them. My son has blond hair and hazel eyes. No one will ever ask him where his parents are from. Funny: I never thought I'd have a blond child. I was born with a full head of dark hair. My mother says this is a Mexican thing; my father insists it's an Italian thing. Also funny: my children were all born with Mongolian spots on their backsides, pale blue splotches like faded ink stains on their tiny bottoms. These spots are common in Black, Hispanic, and Asian babies, but affect only 10% of white babies. Perhaps these spots are a fluke of nature, but I chalk them up to my children’s Latin blood.
STEPHANIE EARLY GREEN’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Chicago Tribune, New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Virginia with her family, and is at work on a novel.