Xicana Ph.D.
No one has called me a no sabo kid (or adult). If anyone has they’ve never said it to my face. I would sometimes joke my Spanish was pocha style with people who knew me, but no one ever called me a pocha either. I was unsure if it was the same thing. I was laughed at once in middle school, but I shrugged my shoulders at the handful of girls who made fun of me after they asked me to say a word I didn’t know or understand and after they laughed, I looked at them serious and I don’t remember who they were or if I talked to them again.
I had to ask my husband last year what it was, am I understanding this correctly? After he told me I said I’m unsure how I went nearly 40 years without being called one. I’ve been called other things. My identity has been questioned rarely by other Mexicans/Latinos, but the worse was when it was put down badly (understatement) by my first son’s father (Latino, but not Mexican), and other rare times by other Chicanos, but I never paid it much attention because they were the types who always want to out-Chicano you to prove how “down” they are, but I knew where I was from and that was that. Now I am never around anyone who would disrespect me like that again anyway.
My husband, an immigrant, born in Mexico who came to the U.S. undocumented at the age of 9, and later became a citizen while he was in graduate school completing his Ph.D. in Microbiology explained to me last year when I saw it trending on social media how it was in reference to people who were born here and supposedly mess up grammatically when they attempt to speak the language.
As a Chicana, Xicana, Mexican American, I’m not going to get into Spanish being a colonizer language because for me that’s not why I struggled so hard to learn it as older teen/young adult or why I wanted to speak it to begin with.
To me Spanish was, is, and will always be my grandparents language. My grandmother in particular because my grandfather Julio passed when I was younger, but would go back and forth in both languages around us due to years of working in the produce district in downtown LA after coming to the U.S. from Jalisco with my grandmother and 5 of my moms 10 siblings in the 1950s. I mainly learned Spanish or tried to, keeping in mind my mother’s mother who couldn’t speak English or so I thought until one day when I was an older teen I heard her at a party being asked by my white aunt who married into my dads side “How are you?” And just as I was about to tell my aunt, my grandmother doesn’t speak English, I heard a voice I had never heard before respond “Very well thank you”. I later went to my mom and asked why didn’t anybody ever say grandma could speak English this WHOLE TIME. My mom just said oh she doesn’t like it and my mom didn’t even have to tell me not to talk to her in English. I understood.
Respect grandma. Respect.
I heard some family say once in a while my grandmother asked why didn’t my mother and one other aunt (my grandmother had 10 children), didn’t teach their kids Spanish. I asked my mom a couple times and she sometimes blamed my dad and his broken Spanish. Sometimes she didn’t have a reason, eventually I stopped asking as she went to work as a Spanish speaking bilingual aide in an elementary school most of my childhood. Thing is as I grew older I couldn’t blame my dad (or my mom) either. Him and my mom grew up in the 1960s and 70s attending East LA schools. Both of them born and raised in East LA. Both of them experiencing discrimination all around them on the streets and in the schools.
As years passed and I became a better researcher, I dug deeper into my family history. I learned that on my fathers side, his parents, my grandparents entered the U.S. around the end of the Mexican Revolution. This is during a time of forced gasoline baths and other dehumanizing procedures at the El Paso/Juarez border where their families entered and many other families crossed many times. According to census records my family lived in one of two predominantly Mexican communities in El Paso before moving west to California to housing projects in Boyle Heights before settling permanently in East LA. They were poor, hardworking, and had 16 children. I learned that when they came to the U.S., they also wanted to fit in, perhaps to avoid the inevitable discrimination during the mid 1900’s when Americanization was also a program of the U.S. government.
My father told me a story recently how my grandmother would still speak Spanish and on her hospital bed she whispered to him in it so the hospital staff wouldn’t hear. She died when he was 14 years old in 1968. Maybe her Spanish went with her and my dad picked up whatever he could like he told me from the other folks in the neighborhood. My grandfather never spoke Spanish around me, until one day after a stroke I heard him and it was all he spoke thereafter. It was as if he forgot English. He died when I was 8 or 9 in the early 1990’s.
As a former Ethnic Studies high school teacher and now Ethnic Studies professor, Americanization era policies have been something I have researched and studied extensively. As an educator fellow for California Revealed and the CA History and Social Science Project (UC Davis) this year I developed two inquiry sets that teachers can use in the classroom. One of the inquiry sets is on how Mexican women, often the target of these Americanization policies, resisted giving up their culture.
Through this research I gathered materials including a pamphlet I had found years ago while teaching high school that outlines the types of things Mexican women were taught in these classes. The women in these programs were also expected to teach these things to their children, things like cooking more “American” speaking more “American” dressing more “American”.
The assumption under White Supremacy and this systemic racism was always that our culture and other cultures were wrong and inferior to “American” or “White” culture. But the thing I learned from my family is that no matter how much you give up, you sometimes will never be accepted as a real “American”. This has always been the danger of assimilation and its’ empty promises. I’ve known that from a young age. It is also why I like to imagine that the women in my family to a large extent have resisted it in their own way like many other Mexican and Latina women.
I moved out of my parents home when I was 18. I entered the world of my first husband’s family whose parents were immigrants from Mexico and primarily spoke Spanish. I had to try. No really I had to. As I worked in my former in-laws donut shop while in community college customers came in and I had to figure it out. Thankfully I did enough to get by and then my Spanish became good enough that when it came time to visit my grandmother, my mother’s mother while she was bedridden when I was in my early 20s I was able to have my first and last conversation alone with her in Spanish. It was brief, but in it I received her blessing and encouragement to continue my education. She passed away two weeks later, but this time, the language didn’t go with her.
Spanish stays with me, broken, pieced together, sometimes grammatically incorrect, it’s with me written as a laugh in a text to my best friend from UC Santa Cruz who asked me in 2005 that same year my grandmother passed why was it that she just had a whole conversation with me and said everything to me in Spanish and I understood and I responded in English. I don’t remember what excuse I gave or if I even gave one, but my new friend shrugged her shoulders and continued to speak in Spanish and I responded in mostly English as we sat in our Intro to Latin American/Latino Studies class as transfer students. I still write jajaja to her in our almost daily messages and meme exchanges and I know she loves me just the same even if I still respond in English most of the time.
Spanish stays with me when I speak to people, parents, students, and sometimes I am surprised when I have apologized in Spanish and say I’m sorry Spanish is my second language and sometimes when people respond they laugh, say it’s ok, then tell me, it’s my second language too.
Spanish stays with me when a person asks me for directions, if I can help them, greets me as I walked into schools as a high school teacher, and on graduation day when parents thank me in Spanish, I say the honor to teach your children about our culture is mine.
Spanish has stayed with me when I met my husband. Sometimes hesitant, but never embarrassed. Spanish has stayed with me when we sing in the car to songs I listened to in college and now when I attempt to talk to his parents and now our new baby. Spanish was there when he took me to see Julieta Venegas for my birthday one year. When my older son wanted to download duolingo after losing what little I taught him or mostly what he learned from his parental grandparents, his abuelitos before Covid took his occasional weekend visits away and then took his abuelito. Spanish stayed with me when I downloaded duolingo too. When I realized I placed higher than I though I should just like I did in high school 9th grade Spanish and begged them to put me in Spanish 1 instead. I told my husband. He’s like you’re fine. Just stay at that level.
Spanish is always with me because I’m the granddaughter of immigrants and I have the knowledge that not even when forces of the government, systemic racism, or white supremacy tried to force us to change for generations and even into our present day, we refused and we will continue to refuse right here where we are in our homes, our homes that our ancestors sacrificed so much for perhaps with the hope we would come back home to ourselves, our whole selves generations into the future.
If you like what you’re reading, please support this Xicana, Mama, Teacher & Writer. Share, like, follow me on social media, and drop some support here. I am currently one of two inaugural educator fellows with California Revealed and the CA History Social Science Project where I am digging in archives to make inquiry sets I researched on Latino history accessible to K-12 teachers. I am serving on the Huntington Library’s Teacher Advisory Panel for 2022-2023. I am also currently working with UCLA History Geography Project on curriculum related to Latino history for the IE Stories Project (Inland Empire-Riverside and San Bernardino region of Southern California). I have previously been a teaching fellow with the Pulitzer Center and a member of the Teacher Advisory Council with the National Humanities Center. For more information see http://www.irenesanchezphd.com
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Xicana Ph.D. 