My Latino Identity

To define latino identity is very difficult, because I have mixed latino roots and to adapt to living in a country such Canada. I know who I am, but it's very hard to explain. The only thing I can be sure of is that I am a working progress

In my country the majority of the population is metis (a mixture of aboriginal and Spanish/European), but most people of middle and upper class tend to ignore the aboriginal background and acknowledge more their European roots. Therefore, in the cozy moments of my family conversation during dinner I learned through listening to ‘whispers’ how appropriate it is to identify myself with our European background rather than our native backgrounds. That was one whisper during the conversation but there were more. Another one was to respect power, and to protect things that eventually were going to benefit myself, my friends and my group. Yes, I learned that I could dream, but only because I was part of the system. I also learned for myself that there was another group of people who didn’t have enough time to sleep, let alone dream; those others were peasants and servants.

In my country I was taught another false lesson: that everybody is the same. The system (the schools, the church, the government) said that we all have one God and all of us are his children, we are all one big family. But during dinner I learned that there was another family too, the family of the class you were born into, the family in which you know the right people, the family that makes you who you are and helps you to go as far as you want.

But the most terrible lesson that I learned in those dinner times was that while we are working hard to get as much we can from the system, we should not worry about the people who don’t have those contacts, those friends or those opportunities. Their problems are not our fault. Too bad! I think that was the way that my family and other families justified unfairness; that was their response. But that was the worst lesson that I ever learned within my home. I couldn’t accept that lesson that I can call a survival lesson, from my mother, from the rest of my family, the idea that there were others who didn’t matter. And I couldn’t understand how power allows people who are taking control of things that are going to benefit their own interests to put more disadvantaged people in a worse situation.

So, my identity in El Salvador was based on class. And in my personal view I decided to commit myself to make things fair for everybody. I wanted to ensure that everybody had the right to use the system. This eventually became a dream in my life, my perfect love. And I worked in order to make the difference for all of us.

When I came to Canada I found myself in the other side, the same side as the underprivileged people in my country. I found that I belonged to a visible minority, that I didn’t speak English as a first language or without an accent. Taking into consideration that language is a very important thing in this society, since it can open or close doors and can help you to have better opportunities, I was part of the invisible group. As part of this group, I didn’t have recognition or respect, and I had to face a lot of misconceptions, prejudices and racist attitudes. Perhaps surprisingly, I was very happy because, to prove myself, I had to learn how to be strong and humble and to get things by myself.

I knew that this should have been the moment to apply the dinner lessons, to master and to test the creed that says that working hard can solve your problems (Amen!). I knew that I had to make the right connections, to make friends, to find a job and to take control of my life in a new country. I also had to make a choice either to help others or to forget my beliefs and to work just for myself; I had to decide on which side I would stand, alone in a new country. Although my situation was temporarily bad, I knew that if I worked hard things would be okay again. But there were things that couldn’t change my dreams and my perfect love, because of all the underprivileged people who were here, living in a big country but being discriminated against, alone, without being able to use the system and without the right support for them; they were facing the same challenge as me but they did not have the knowledge in order to learn how to read or write a new language, or to obtain and keep jobs, while some people who knew their background were taking advantage of their fear and inequality. And my heart again stood for fairness. I do not know who I am but I know what I believe and love. My belief and my love make me be myself. A very simple equation.

I feel that Canada could be my home 100% if I didn’t experience racism . When I go back to my original country, because of the new things I have learned here I cannot be 100% at home there. It is as if I have one foot in Canada & the other in my country.

I do not have enough information about my own roots because as a metis I carry the blood of the conquistador (victor) and the conquistado (vanquished). The conquistadors took from me the right to learn about my native roots, my language, my traditions, and my religions. All of these were buried in history and that part is missing in my personal life as well as missing in my own country. It was destroyed and replaced by a social class system, and when I came here with my beliefs I found that we were exporting the same social class system here.

For that reason those immigrants who in their own country had the power, the privilege, the language, and the knowledge cannot understand people such as the former peasants and servants who were marginalized in their own country and who are at risk of being marginalized here. Sometimes some of them feel ashamed to have those peasants living in Canada, they just want to have doctors, engineers, etc, but here we have peasants as well as doctors, servants as well as engineers. I reject these attitudes. Although I came from this group, I have chosen to work with the marginalized people. For me to learn to live in Canada was very difficult but at the same time I felt very proud of myself.

I feel happy to be a Latina because of all the people doing good things in our community: the sociologists, the writers, the artists. I am proud of our political struggles, our accomplishments in politics, and our contributions (successful & otherwise) to history. I feel part of all that.

But I cannot feel happy with the image of ourselves that we have in the community, the image that others project onto us. I think that the mass media has a responsibility for this because they show us through meringue, through salsa, the ‘Latin’ roles in movies and on TV. When I tell people where I’m from, they react to “Latina” in a sexually-charged way because of the media image that we have. I have to control myself to stop myself from punching them in the face!

One thing I have discovered is that for me, because I was a political activist in my own country, to be a Latin American woman in Canada means that I need to learn more from political activists and others in this country about racism, sexism, homophobia, and about becoming more tolerant. One reason for this need is that in Canada people have learned from the time they were in school about the values and principles embodied in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The amount of knowledge in this field in Canada can be overwhelming. Human Rights is an idea primarily found in developed nations, such as Canada; therefore my experience in this field is very different from the experience of those born in Canada. Therefore, in Canada I need to challenge my own political experience, assess it and improve it, in order to eradicate some preconceptions that I discovered in the inner core of myself. If I am really honest with my own ideas, I have to learn new things in order to become a more effective person in the political area. Here I need to work harder in order to challenge all my ‘isms’ and to learn so many things that I did not need when I was in my own country, in order to live with my own political principles in a situation where I appear to have many options but really have no options. There is not a map or set of instructions. This is a challenge without theories or explanations, and is like being a blind person trying to find an answer so as to solve the internal impulse to answer the question about what I am, when I am living in a foreign country where I have to start a new life, looking for new friends who will become my new ‘family’ in order to integrate in a new land. One result of this is that I feel guilt because I am not sharing these experiences with my real family. In this new life, I lose my sense of self, and there is nobody to assure me that I am who I am, nobody to recognize who I am, and I am in a new life, with no past but with a present in which we can learn to work together in order to make a difference to ourselves and to our communities.

We have many challenges in this country, and I think it is very important that Latino women meet each other and work together because union creates strength. But we are working under so much stress trying to find funding, to deal with problems in our own communities, that we have no time or energy to create the links that we need in order to share the experience, the knowledge and the information that can make us stronger. This is true not just in Canada. The same needs exist in the USA, where many Latinas are doing a great job, such as the woman in the PBS program “Farmingville” who unified the Mexican men.

It is very important to have links with our communities throughout the Americas because we need the feedback. We need to know what programs they are implementing, such as workshops, co-ops and farming groups. At same time we need to tell about the job we are doing here so that all of us can learn from the experience of others. We should be creating mutual feedback so that we can get funding from the various organizations, profit or non-profit, which will allow us to strengthen programs both in Latin America and here. In this way, we will be able to create models throughout the length and width of the American Continent. From my experience looking for funding I think there are many organizations interested in the situations in Latin America, but because we are not well organized in that area we are missing opportunities.

As a Latino woman in Canada I feel a hybrid. I was a hybrid in El Salvador because of my mixed roots; I am a hybrid here because I have characteristics from my own community but also Canadian characteristics. I am trying to understand how to put things together in myself but meanwhile I am having fun with the whole situation because I took from my community in El Salvador traditions and things that I needed for myself, and I have taken from my new community in Canada things that are not in conflict with my own political ideas. So I took things that I liked from both cultures, but I am still having problems putting things together. Therefore I decided to enjoy myself by simply taking the things that I wanted, as if from a supermarket.

Toronto is a very cosmopolitan city. Here I can see other immigrant groups with very strong identities, such as the Chinese, the Indians, the Somalis. These people have an identity as a country, as a people. This is something that I lack in myself. What I do is to learn from these other communities in order to understand myself better. What I try to do is to talk to people at first hand about their traditions, their ideas, their beliefs, their rituals and what I try to reach is the collective unconscious that is in all of us that enables us to ‘speak the same language’. I am trying to learn more about my own roots as a human being, our origins, and who we are, to try to read the past in the history that is carried in the souls and hearts of all those people who are living here in Toronto. This makes me a more complete human being; all of us are inter-related and we all have responsibilities in this web of relationship. I am not one unit separated from the rest; I am part of that web, or family. All of us are one family. As result I honour and respect all beliefs and all traditions, and I want to learn more about my roots, that are not in conflict with my political ideas. This validates both the conqueror and the conquered. Both of them make me me.