Mexican Dad

It's Not Easy Being Brown.

Actually, it isn't that it's hard, but it can be confusing.  We Hispanics of Mexican descent have an ingrained culture that's hard to fight against.  And it starts off with having to define ourselves as "Hispanics of Mexican Descent".  Not only is it a mouth-full, it makes my fingers tired from typing it and it has already turned my attention away to more fun things.  Yet I plod on.  Do you really need anymore background on me?  You probably do, but you're already bored so I'll skip it.

Here's the main point, we Mexican-Americans are a complex bunch, not a simple monolithic group, but we do share some common characteristics, which are almost entirely negative.  Isn't that sad?  We don't share the good stuff, we keep that closed in within our families or people we know, but the bad stuff that we struggle against is all over.  I actually was raised in Mexico, and I went to public schools in a poor part of the Third World.  I wasn't poor, thanks to my Dad's hard work, but the places where we lived were definitely not nice.  Lots of dirt and dirty children and shacks made of scrounged materials with dirt floors.  My schools had no AC's, libraries, cafeterias, or playgrounds.  But we always had desks for everyone and real glass windows.  I bet you hadn't thought of that as a luxury!  And yet, when I compare the education I received down there with what I see other kids getting here in the good ol' USA, I thank my lucky stars for my schooling.  Seriously. And I'm not knocking American schools, they're not bad, it's just that my schools were so much better.  And why is that?  To me, it's because I received an education grounded in the classics.  We read the Iliad in junior high, we covered Jules Verne in elementary.  We discussed political theory more deeply in seventh grade than my college professors would dare to try.  We had no school band, no senior trips to Italy or the Caribbean.  There was only school all the time.  We received a mixture of lecture and discussion, with lots of thought provoking questions thrown into all classes.  And there is the point.  We were forced to think all the time.  We weren't given answers, but we were expected to come up with them on our own.  I think that the greatest difference, though, as far as basic schooling went, was the level of "culture" we were exposed too.  And I mean culture in the sense of Art, not in some ethnocentric way.  We were exposed to paintings by different artists, lots and lots poetry, and the occasional piece of music on an old record player.

But, and here's the cultural problem that is a "cultural" item with an ethnocentric view, we Mexican boys we're also taught to be the strong ones, to be aggressive, to be "macho".  Macho, by the way, simply means male in Spanish.  We were taught good manners right along with disrespect.  We should open doors for ladies, but only because they're too weak to do it on their own.  You must pull our chairs at dinner, but only because women are clumsy and can't sit on properly.  On and on.  So it's hard to get past the sexist and racist and classist ideals that were drummed into our heads systematically.  I want to pass on the good bits to my kids, but how can I tell the good bits apart from the bad bits?  They're all mashed together all the time.  It's not hard to separate them when I can sit and consider, but teaching them good, moral behavior on the fly is tough.  And I've not even touched on teaching them the language yet.  Spanish is tough to learn without a whole lot of early exposure.  And we don't speak enough of it at home for it to be natural to the boys.

But being aware of the problems is the first step to solving them.  Or at least to ameliorating them.