This Experience

I can't help but feel more in my skin when I wear my Mexicaness, including my mother's maiden name Martinez, and my Latina pride on my shoulder for all to see. I hug my babies tighter and run faster when I hear their cries. I fight my husband more passionately and love him fiercer when I believe Yo Soy Latina. I laugh louder, dance with more abandon, find greater loyalty with friends, and I walk straighter.

I am half a bean - my mother is Mexican and my dad is Anglo. He split when I was three so really I only got one heritage. I was born on a rainy day two days before Christmas in Santa Ana, California amongst a sea of brown faces. My birthday is the Horus's Birthday (child of Isis and Osiris) and Day of the Lare, which is the day ancestors are born to their descendents according to Streghe Witchcraft. My maternal grandmother, I'm told I would have called her Nana, died one month before I was born leaving the faint scent of old photographs to piece together her legacy. When we lived in S.A. ("essaaay" with a pronounced accent), I wasn't brown enough. I tried to gather Latin pride but my grandfather had preached assimilation years before. It made sense in the 40s. Hell, he flew more missions than the Memphis Belle and couldn't get a job anywhere after the war 'cept as a janitor. But in the 70s, I just didn't understand. We moved to Orange, Ca, to a sea of white faces. I wore my Latina-ness like a chip on my shoulder - willing to fight anyone who put my people down. I was a regular Helen Reddy meets Pancho Villa poster child.

"You are the good kind of Mexican - not the kind that walked over - the kind that came on a boat," announced my new blond haired, blue-eyed friend. I was insulted beyond words. But the funny thing was, at least for part of my lineage, she was right. A week later I stood on the balcony of a large hacienda overlooking hundreds of people at my great grandfather's 94th birthday. There I learned our family had once owned 72,000 acres, equivalent to 7 cities, the largest and first land grant given in Orange County. But the lawyers stole it during the "Greaser Act" of 1848. First I'm not brown enough, and then I'm too brown. Now I'm a Spanish land heiress cheated out of her legacy? Who makes up these rules anyway?

I grabbed at wisps trying to be Mexican. It was the only culture I wanted to want me. I ate Mexican bread, but couldn't choke down chorizo, much less menudo. I ate the habanero chilis and fried my own tacos and taquitos - no premade shells please. And yet, I didn't learn the language. Maybe I was embarrassed that for all my Chicana pride I still had to learn it in school with the rest of the gringos. Maybe I was rebelling against "them" for not teaching me what I so desperately wanted to know. The scent of the old photograph wafts passed and I feel I must press on.

I know that underneath this personality I am neither Mexican, nor even a woman. I am a light being experiencing the third dimension on a planet called Earth. I know this logically. But the fact remains that I am having a human experience. I have a cultural lens that colors my world brown. When I see brown faces and identify with them I breathe deeper. The deeper I breathe, the more able I am to hear the words in the wind and, everything modern goes away. I am a Californio rancher with a huge hacienda, wisteria and bougainvillea creating archways, an over protective father with lots of horses. There is dust in my throat. If I let myself go deeper I am a young Spanish padre ringing the Mission bells or chanting as I walk the open corridors. I am scared, incensed, hand cuffed, and confused how the love of God made prisoners out of gentle "heathens." If I really feel safe I have very little clothes on - perhaps a tule skirt and a seashell necklace. Life is simple and the mysteries are just that - mysteries I love to be in, but I do not seek to dissect them. The sky is blue and vast, and that is that. When I bring myself to present, I am four years old, a flower girl at a wedding where the men wear powder blue ruffled tuxes and there are carnations everywhere - on the car, in the church, on the people. Their heady scent locking in the memory of being chosen. Chosen by brown faces and mariachis. I love those old photographs, they are the only ones in which I am pictured with other brown faces. My family is more beige toned, and the motto has long been, "if you walk fast enough they won't notice you are brown."

Time marches on, and I forgot to how or why to put that chip on my shoulder. I married a sweet gringo and had blond haired babies. I thought I had abandoned my people when I wrote the Wicca books. Really white washed, not even chocolate chip. Grandpa still doesn't know what I write about - I don't want him to fear for my soul since I'm not going to "the" church (meaning Catholic). Everyone else knows in the family, and that's just fine. I pulled on mostly my 1/16th Celtic blood - the size of my pinky for inspiration. Then like a ghost rising from some hidden closet, my Latiness chooses me again, a book to write about Latino/a authors and their journeys. And what do you know! Magic is quite prevalent in the Latin world. Their journeys, so like mine in some ways - except they speak the language, maybe even eat menudo, remind me that each experience while personal is a beautiful facet of the rainbow of human experience.

My soul's journey will not compromised by my identification with my Latina-ness. I do not segregate nor exclude when I find pride in my family's journey. I find a place to begin.