The Joy of Being Nueva Latina, Part 2

The Latina's Bible
by Sandra Guzmán

(Page 2 of 4)

As a Nueva Latina I am a combination of all of the Latinos I came of age with: Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Tejanas, Chicanas, Dominicans, and Central and South Americans, as well as the African Americans, Asian Americans, and Anglos who I call friends. As a Nueva Latina, I am three languages: English, Spanish, and Spanglish. I embrace fast food as well as (and more often than) home-cooked feasts. My opinion counts — within my family and outside it. I stand up to authority when I need to, with my eyes firmly planted on those I challenge. I refuse to look away in shame or fear. I never walk with my head bowed, like those campesinos made so famous by the great painter Diego Rivera. Blood is sacred. I honor it by honoring me. I own my body; as much as I believe in God, it is not his place to tell me when and with whom I shall share it. I am neither a martyr nor a sirvienta. I refuse to be defined solely by how well I cook a plate of arroz con pollo or how nicely I can keep house. My Latina femaleness is beyond the walls of my casa and womb. Are you feeling me yet? I am — we are — indeed a new breed. We are new women. Calling myself Latina (instead of, say, "Puerto Rican" or — no lo quiera Dios — "Puerto Rican American") means validating and celebrating the fact that I feel closer kinship with a Chicana raised in Los Angeles or a Tejana raised in San Antonio than I do with a Puerto Rican woman raised in Ponce, where I was born. Everything, from our survival in America's schools to Univision and The Brady Bunch, has made us comadres. Not long ago my son reminded me of this powerful reality experienced by so many of us.

He was watching a kids' show on television and started screaming that the Puerto Rican kid had won a pie-eating contest. I rushed to the living room and saw that a boy named Luis Jiménez, draped in a Mexican flag, had devoured fifteen pies in two minutes.

I said, "Listen, baby, this kid isn't Puerto Rican. He has the Mexican flag draped over him, so I think we can safely assume that he's Mexican American."

My son looked at me with a cocked eye, as only a little kid can, and said, "It's the same thing, Mom!" He understood the difference — he knows the colors of both the Cuban flag (his dad's side) and the Puerto Rican flag — but he saw parts of himself in that other little brown boy, and could celebrate the boy's victory as his own. This is what has happened to us, the sons and daughters of Latin America's immigrants — a feeling of Pan-Latino consciousness and kinship. We are an hecho en América reality.

So sure, as I said at the get-go, Latinas in the United States battle racism, discrimination, border harassment, racial profiling, police brutality, invisibility, and exploitation. We battle old-country traditions that sometimes stifle us. Yet despite — or maybe because of — all the external and internal luchas, U.S. Latinas are among the fiercest and strongest women I know. We or our foremothers crossed oceans, rivers, and time zones and survived nightmares to get to America, and we continue to survive and thrive en América. We raise families in homes and neighborhoods deemed dysfunctional by society, and look great while we're doing it. We've made up a new language, Spanglish. We've made up a new culture with a synergy of rhythms old and new. We've made up new rules that combine Mom and Abuela's old ways with new and more modern ones. We are true survivors. And that is because U.S. Latinas — those of us who speak Spanish and those of us who don't — are a new breed, and the diversity of our faces, values, and traditions is at the heart of the American future.

As a Nueva Latina I pledge allegiance to both parts of my soul, the "American" and the Latin American within. But no matter how warmly I embrace my inner Anglo or African American chica, there are some things that I can do only in my native tongue: I curse, dream, and make love in español. And it's physical, too — I can go only so many days before my body craves pasteles, arroz con habichuelas, mole chicken, and anything with chiles; or my soul yearns for an Ismael "Maelo" Rivera salsa or Juan Gabriel ballad.

Coming to terms with my cultural identity — and feeling comfortable with the different parts of me that make me who I am — has been an emotional roller-coaster ride. During my adolescence, surrounded by my very Latino neighborhood and family, identity was a nonissue; my struggles then were around acculturation. I was not allowed to date, unlike my non-Latina friends; I was expected to stay a virgin until I married. And even if I went to college and embarked on some fabulous career, if I ever hoped to be a complete woman I'd have to marry, have kids, and cook a mean arroz con gandules.

It wasn't until I got to college, when I encountered a larger America, that being a Latina came to feel like a burden. I continually had to explain myself to strangers. I often felt that I had to choose sides: white or black. This country's obsession with race and nationality didn't allow me to celebrate the joy of being Latina.

Many of us go around unaware that we carry baggage that prevents us from being proud of la raza and feeling entitled to the riches this country has to offer. Too many of us adopt a form of cultural denial — for instance, by not using an accent on our name, either because we never knew it carried one or because "it doesn't look right." We even go to lengths to Americanize our Latino surnames: Garcia becomes something that sounds more like Garsha, or Jiménez is pronounced "JIM-uh-nez." We are quick to claim our Spaniard abuela and deny the india or africana one. And for those of us who grow up in the suburbs with very few Latino families around, the burden to fit in, the discomfort that sometimes we are made to feel because we are Latino, is even greater.

I understand why some of us have trouble being proud of our heritage. We've grown up in an America that sees us in terms of negative stereotypes or doesn't see us at all. And it doesn't matter how much our familias hammer on about "raza pride" either. At some point or another, we start to doubt that our heritage is all that great.

I have a friend who grew up in a border town in Texas, the state we all know was once part of Mexico. When she was growing up her parents did not want her to speak Spanish outside the home. They didn't want her to be a victim of the vicious discrimination that they had to endure, so Spanish became a secret family language that no one besides la familia should know about. Ultimately, she was taught to forget her people's language, but her parents' good intentions didn't spare her anything. Gringos assumed she could speak Spanish; Latinos questioned her identity because she couldn't roll her r's. Today my amiga is in Spanish-language immersion classes, trying to claim a heritage that was denied her. And what happened to her is far from unique.

Copyright © 2002 by Sandra Guzman. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Sandra Guzmán, an Emmy Award-winning television journalist, is the former editor-in-chief of Latina magazine. A popular speaker, Sandra also worked as a producer at Telemundo and at the Fox television network.