Remember my post unscathed and alive whereby i related a blogsphere incident regards Tijuana identity? What i failed to take into account and just dawned upon me to tell my Xicana/o readership (is one allowed to use indiscriminately the suffix –ship when one but speaks of two? you’re damn right one can!) is how ignorant and prejudist seven headed eels reared their ugly electronic binary assumptions in monolingual and monocultural Mexico.
The assumptions ran from feeling pity for uprooted mexicans who found themselves in a cultural limbo (the link leads to a text in spanish written by Burgues) to people who radically complained about the constant memorabilia shopping spree we engage once on mexican soil like local Tijuana writer Rafa Saavedra says: Pochos who never learn to speak spanish y que vienen a comer tacos with mucho guacamole and to buy some galletas and cobijas pa’ taparse del frío racial en su home.
Inded, there is a belief that mexican natives have of Xicana/os that teeters on the border of despise. For local boys and gals in Tijuana all chicana/os and Xicana/os are nothing but pochos. Unlike we who like to distinguish between a pocho and a Ch/Xicana/o, local folk on mexican soil fail to differentiate the latter by any means. There is a common thinking best expressed succinctly by another blogsphere intellectual from Hermosillo Sonora named, after the blog, Humphrey Bloggart according to him Xicana/os romanticize México and long after the motherland. The conclusion is that we are basically bastards whose father constantly denies our existence and nothing more.
But that wasn’t really what i wanted to write about today though be that as it may it did spring out of another thought that just dawned upon me, yeah, it dawns like crazy today!
i sudddenly realized a parallell betweeen the mexican culture and our Xicana/o culture: we both deny an integral part of our reason for being; this thought also, by the bye’s, came into being due to my cuatro de julio post from yesterday.
We deny, in as much as we can, our American aspect in the same manner Mexicans deny Cortes.
Ain’t that something now?