Cosmic Quest

[dedalus_1947]

"The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,

are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors.

Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world,

they themselves have set, without knowing it,

the basis for the new period:

the period of the fusion and the mixing of all peoples."

(The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos)

 

“Kathy”, I called out towards the family room, “did you read Toñito’s blog?”

“Yes” she said. The emotional blandness of her reply, and the utter silence that followed, confused me.

“Then why didn’t you say something about it after you finished?” I called back, shaking my head as I looked again at the glowing document on the screen before me.

“Because”, she said quietly, miraculously materializing by my side, “I read it while you were writing, and there is no point trying to interrupt when you’re in that zone. I figured you’d read it soon enough”.

“You’re right”, I admitted, knowing how I tune out the world when writing a crucial paragraph or phrase; “but I can’t believe this!” I pointed at the blog I had just read by my son, titled IBARW: Red and Green and Mostly White (International Blog against Racism Week).

“I know; I’m stunned too” she added. “Obviously he sees huge gaps in his upbringing, especially about his ethnicity. What are you going to do?” That was an interesting question; not ‘what do you think?’, but ‘what are you going to do?’ I looked up at her, searching for a hint of accusation on her face, but her expression conveyed only uncertainty and confusion, not anger or impatience.

“I don’t know” I said, stalling for more time as I tried making sense out of the blog. “Let me read it again”. Accepting my delay, Kathy left me alone in the computer room. I stared at the screen for a long time, but the words did not register in my brain. I did not want to read it a second time; I did not want to re-experience the jolts of guilt and disillusion that first rocked me. I needed to sort out my thoughts and feelings before I reacted. What was I to do? My first impulse was to ignore the article and pretend that I never read it. That won’t work, I said to myself. Kathy read it and she won’t rest until it is resolved in some way. Something had to be done. If Tony’s blog WAS a parental indictment for past omissions, there were more counts against me than Kathy. Although this was OUR problem, I had to decide on my own course of action. I got up from my chair and left the computer room with the blog still shining on the screen. Following Kathy into the family room, I said “I’m not going to do anything right now. There is too much stuff going though my head. I’m not sure what I feel, or what Tony is saying. I’m going to sleep on it for now, and read it again tomorrow. What about you; what are you going to do?”

“I’d like to talk to him right now”, she replied, “but I don’t know what to say; I just know I have to respond. Maybe your right; I’ll wait too”.

With our immediate responses postponed, we surrendered into our confusion for a moment and verbalized some random thoughts.

“Kath”, I said, “I can’t believe we blew it with the kids. I thought we talked about these things all through their childhood. Do you remember the incident he mentions in the blog?”

“No I don’t” she replied, “but I’m sure that the comment Tony remembers making would have received a clear response from me or you. We could not have allowed those remarks to go by unchallenged”.

“It’s a scene at the periphery of my memory”, I mused; “but it feels so familiar. I’m positive we said something, too. Let’s sleep on it; it may make more sense tomorrow”.

 
Writing in my daily journal the next morning gave me a chance to spontaneously reflect on Tony’s blog, without the emotional barriers of the night before. I just wrote, not attempting to analyze, filter, or edit my thoughts. I would make sense of these spontaneous notations later; but it was important that I take action and put my reactions on paper before I got stuck over-thinking the proper course. As I wrote, it became apparent that Toñito’s blog revolved around three questions: 1) why don’t I have a clear awareness and knowledge of my Mexican family’s ethnic heritage? 2) Why weren’t my sister and I raised bilingually? 3) What happened when as a child I made a thoughtless, pejorative remark about Mexicans in the car? I answered these questions as honestly as I could, knowing they would require further rewriting and editing (I don’t often write formal pieces in my journal, but it does act as an effective device to jump-start stories, essays, and speeches that I develop later). The act of writing released my guarded feelings over Tony’s public airing of his personal questions and helped me detect a hint of anguish in them. Kathy and I were his only source for answers and relief. I expanded on these morning reflections during my lunch break at a principals’ meeting, and produced a fairly complete draft by evening. That night, when Kathy brought up the topic of how we might respond to Toñito’s blog, I asked her to read my initial composition. She was satisfied with the results, telling me that it seemed to address all the main points. While talking more about it, I also explained my idea that his blog was not an indictment of our parenting practices, but, rather, a plea to help him clarify his own ethnic self-identity. I believed that Tony, at the age of 30, was embarking on an Identity Quest, and we were instrumental in his first steps. Over the course of the next 24 hours, Kathy helped me craft a final “comment” to Tony’s article that we posted the evening of the Opening Ceremonies of the China Olympics. A few days later, I received an email notice that a new comment to Tony’s IBARW posting had appeared. I was surprised to see that Prisa, without any prompting from us, had taken the unusual step of reading and responding to Tony blog as well (I wasn’t aware that she even read his blog). We heard nothing further, until Tony posted a new entry on his blog, in which he mentioned our two responses, and linked the reader to the original IBARW piece (see IBARWRAGAMW). A week later, we finally had the chance to discuss this matter face to face.
 

To our delight, Tony continues to participate in the Liturgy of the Word at Sunday mass by reading one or both of the two scripture selections. Dramatic interpretation had always been his special talent since children’s theatre, so it was natural for Kathy to suggest that he volunteer as a Lector at our parish church. He has been reading once a month since his college days. We make a point of attending that mass and then treating him and Jonaya to breakfast; it’s a great way to keep in touch and up-to-date on family news. He was reading on August 17^th, but I went alone that day, because Kathy had come down with a severe cold and Jonaya, his fiancé, was unable to attend. The Readings were a little disappointing, and even Tony’s dramatic energy could not breathe meaning into Paul’s short scolding in Romans 11:13. The Gospel, on the other hand, got my full attention. The selection from Mathew 15:21, described a pagan Canaanite parent who persisted in beseeching the assistance of Christ in saving her child from demonic torments. The parent would not give up, despite the rejections and insults from the Galilean disciples, until Jesus finally relented, declaring “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done as you wish”. And the child was healed. The messages I gained from the gospel were that prayers are ALWAYS answered (even if we can’t see their obvious manifestations), and that Christ’s compassion IS guaranteed; God, the all-loving parent, will ALWAYS heed and assist the pleas and needs of his children. This is a recurring theme in the gospels; God, the loving father, the compassionate parent, who will ALWAYS listen, accept, help, love, and forgive his children. I’ve always wondered if Jesus used the metaphor of a loving parent as a sign of God’s covenant of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness, or as a model for all parents and people to emulate and practice. I suppose it works on both levels, as metaphors should. At the conclusion of mass, I met Tony by the Baptismal Font and we agreed to go to the Deli for breakfast. Oddly enough, despite the tensions and drama caused by Tony’s blog and our crafted response, it did not occur to me until I drove there that I finally had a chance to talk about it. Approaching the entrance doorway, I suddenly became nervous and thought, how will I bring it up? Should we first chat about other things, or do I just get to the point? After I gave him a hug by the side of our table, I suddenly erupted with “So Tony that was quite a blog, would you like to talk about it?”

“Sure” he replied.

 

We circled around the topic at first, not knowing just where to begin. I started by questioning him about what he wanted to know, and he tried explaining the areas where he lacked information. Tony said that the issue first came up with International Blog against Racism Week. In formulating a response about being White and Mexican, he realized that he didn’t know, or couldn’t remember very much about his family history, or ethnic identity. My first stab at answering was to say that Kathy and I believed that color was never an issue and that he and Prisa were Americans of split Mexican and Irish descent. In teaching them about their ethnic backgrounds, we practiced “The teachable moment”. We used calendar dates (e.g. March 17, April 24, May 5, September 16, December 8, and December 24) to inculcate national and religious holidays that carried ethnic significance (Feast of Saint Patrick, Easter Rising, defeat of the French Army, Independence from Spain, Feast of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and the observance of Noche Buena); and we took advantage of opportune moments in the children’s elementary and high school years (places and situations), to introduce and explain racial attitudes, and ethnic pride. The pejorative remarks he made in the car about Mexicans would have been one of those teachable moments.
 

 

“Do you recall that scene, Dad?” Tony asked when the waitress interrupted to bring us our food.

“Yes I do”, I replied, “but surprisingly, your mother doesn’t. I remember her shooting me the look you described in your blog across the car. It seemed to scream ‘What are you going to do?’ But she knew exactly what to say. She wasn’t going to let that moment slip by without pointing out the errors of stereotyping by color or racial features. We both had something to say, and I clearly remember asking you if you understood what we were trying to tell you”.

“How old do you think I was?”

“I visualize it happening while I was driving along Topanga Canyon Boulevard. I’d guess that you were in the 5^th grade”.  

 

It was here that Tony redirected my talk, by saying that he was familiar with the historical dates I mentioned and their significance, but he lacked specific knowledge about his deceased Mexican-American grandfather, Mexican great-grandparents, and their offspring scattered throughout Los Angeles. He did not know how they came to America, how they lived, and what they experienced in California. This clarification gave me pause, because I had never thought of mentioning these topics during his childhood. Except for on official reunion in 2001, Toñito  and Prisa had no contact or interaction with the aunts, uncles, and cousins in my father’s family. Tony’s sudden interest in a personal family history of how my Mexican grandparents and their offspring assimilated into America, and how they interacted with “white”, Anglo-Americans, caught me by surprise.

 

“I think I see what you want to know”, I said, nodding my head. “That’s more information than I can give you in one sitting. Since my father’s death in 1971, when I was 23, I slowly separated more and more from his family. With the deaths of my grandparents, contacts became even more infrequent and eventually stopped altogether. By then, I had my own family to care for, and we only socialized with your immediate grandparents and your aunts, uncles, and cousins. I can give you a brief synopsis from my own perspective. Is that alright for now?”

“Sure” he replied. So, as we began eating, I told an abbreviated version of a family saga that went something like this:

 

Color was never an ethnically defining feature for me. As an infant I learned that language and birthplace were the weights that anchored Hispanics to their specific nationality; not the color of their skins. Latinos come in all colors. Complexions of every hue and shade were present in my father’s Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, and my mother’s family in Mexico. I had grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins with complexions that ranged from dark chocolate, through creamy bronze, to alabaster white. This spectrum of features surrounded me in my infancy in Mexico, through my childhood in the Lincoln Heights and the Silver Lake areas of Los Angeles. It was not until 1960 that I became aware that Americans used color to identify all racial types and ethnic groups, and treated the darker ones as inferior. Color and ethnicity became an issue when we left the central and eastside urban areas of the city and moved to Venice Beach on the Westside. Venice in the 60’s was a wonderfully diverse community, containing a pocket Mexican barrio (Rose Avenue) and a Black ghetto (Oakwood). The Catholic school I attended in the 6^th grade had a student population of all ethnicities, colors, and nationalities. The unifying factors among students were our age, grade, sports, religion, and ethnic pride. My parents had taken great pains to expose and indoctrinate us about Mexican history, culture, and the arts throughout our lives, and they had inculcated a great sense of ethnic pride. I was as proud of being Mexican as my Irish and Italian friends were of their ancestral nations. However, since my surname was a Latin-based word that ended in “o”, and Tony was my name, classmates (and their parents) assumed that my family and I were Italians. When I told them that we were Mexican, they became defiant and argumentative, refusing to believe me and telling me that Mexicans were brown or red. The only factor that finally reconciled them to our usual status (White Mexican!) was my ability to speak Spanish. When I mentioned this color identification to my parents, my mother became indignant and dismissed it as stereotypic tonterías (foolishness). They told me to ignore it; but my younger relatives in Lincoln Heights and East L.A. could not. These aunts, uncles, and cousins, were darker than I, and they were much more sensitive to the color discrimination by white Americans, and the inferiority it conferred on Mexicans. My Uncle Charlie and Aunts Espy and Lisa were my most reliable sources of teenage information. They attended high school and would soon be entering college. They were hipper, cooler, and more willing to ‘clue me in’ on ‘things you need to know’. They were the young adults who first explained and taught me the slag words, put-downs, and curse words that I could use as retaliatory weapons to taunting and bullying in after school playgrounds and parks. They also identified the ethnic and racial pejoratives that could enflame anger and ignite conflict: ‘beaner, wet-back, greaser, spics, mick, paddy, wop, dago, nigger, and spook’. These labels and their impact on people were my first clue into the simmering ethnic cauldron of anger and dissatisfaction that was boiling in Watts and brewing into a Chicano identity in East L.A. One would explode in violence in 1965 with the Watts Riots, and the other in the civil defiance of the Chicano Student Walkouts in 1968.
 

 

Because of my white skin and geographical isolation on the Westside, I was far removed from the effects of the Civil Rights Movement among the more alienated young people of color living in South Central and East Los Angeles. It didn’t exist in my world of Pop Warner Football, high school academics, sports, dating, and college. I remember watching the smoke rising over our Saturday soccer practice at Loyola University during the summer before my senior year in high school in 1965, not understanding the kind of anger that makes someone burn their community down around them. I was also oblivious to the rise of the Black and Brown Power Movements, and their evolution into the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and La Raza Unida Party. These were names I heard on the news, read in Time and Life magazines, and would mention at the dinner table. My parents, Depression children, wartime adults, and solid Republicans, dismissed these movements as the actions of a few disaffected radicals and socialists, and advised me to discount them. As I graduated from high school and entered UCLA, I was still comfortable in my notion of being a fully assimilated, 2nd generation Mexican-American (on my father’s side), and quite content to agree with my parents. The only vulnerability in this armor of complacency was my Eastside uncle and aunts. They were living in and listening to the rumblings of this socio-political awakening, and they kept me informed. They were never strident or confrontational, but they were a constant reminder that something unusual was happening among the young Mexican-Americans in the barrios of Los Angeles that I could not ignore.

 

The Chicano Movement was a student initiated socio-political movement in the American Southwest in the late 60’s and 70’s. It started where the early legal and political action groups that arose with the campaign of John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, left off. Their issues centered on civil rights, equal access to education, social justice, and bilingual/biculturalism. Hispanic Americans did not have the local agencies that existed in Black communities in the form of churches and activist ministers. However, they did have a large baby boom generation of high school and college students who had heard their veteran father’s speak of World War II, the GI Bill, and the promise that they would reap the political, economic, and educational benefits of their efforts and sacrifice. More and more Mexican-American students were being admitted into state colleges and universities (especially as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and the Affirmative Action programs enacted during the Johnson Administration), and they used that perspective to look back at the high schools they came from and began questioning the complacency, discrimination, and inequities, that were practiced by well meaning board members, administrators, and teachers. Organizing themselves into on-campus student organizations in high schools, colleges, and universities, these students decided to act against the most accessible symbols and agents of their alienation – the schools themselves. The first orchestrated act of civil disobedience occurred in East Los Angeles with the Chicano Student Walkouts, in March of 1968. Mexican-American high school students, who in defiance of acceptable practice, adopted the derogatory term for the sons and daughters of Mexican immigrants, “Chicanos”, and broke the law by walking out of their schools in Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights, in protest to the inadequacies of their school facilities, curriculum, counseling, and graduation rates. The after-shocks of this high school, civil disorder, reached across the city to the suburban slopes of Westwood and knocked me out of my Westside complacency to bring on a full scale identity crisis. The Chicano Movement forced me to ask questions about myself and my place in this Anglo-American society. It challenged me to look at myself and ask the questions - who was I and whom did I serve? Was I a hyphenated-American in an assimilated, white world, or a person who did not fit, a new man who was neither all- white in the American way, nor all-Hispanic in the Mexican way; but someone new and different? The term “Chicano” afforded me a temporary, safe harbor, because it was the defiant declaration of an ethnically independent man who was neither Anglo-American nor Mexican. Until that moment, I had been happy as a history major concentrating on Mexican and Latin American history; from hence I would spend the next 7 years seeking a Chicano identity. The questing stopped when I married and had children, because I gave them my full attention. During those seven years, I attended school in Mexico twice, took a graduate degree at UCLA in Latin American Studies, and enrolled in Chicano Studies classes. I even taught Chicano History for 2 years at Santa Monica College.
 

 

“I think I better stop for now” I said, bringing my long monologue to an end. I felt I had talked too much already.

“Thanks, Dad”, Tony said, leaning back from the table. “I never knew any of that”.

“Your welcome”, I replied. “I never knew it was that important to you. You know, there is still much more to tell. We need to have more conversations like this. Now, as for your question about bilingualism - I tried to address it in my blog response. But I’m curious, when did speaking Spanish become so important? You took it in high school for 2 years, and you never seemed excited about it. I thought you were simply humoring me; especially when I would carry full-on conversations with you in Spanish, after picking you up from school”.

Tony paused for a while, and said “Jonaya and I are thinking of bringing up our children bilingually. You see, in all likelihood, for the first time in this family, our children will LOOK Mexican. With their darker skin, and Hispanic surname, their ability to speak Spanish will immediately ground them ethnically and spare them a lot of ridiculous questions and speculations from white, Anglo-Americans. I want to give them a strong sense of identity and pride. Jonaya and I have are in agreement on this, and we plan to do it”.
 

 

Well that explained it. Now I could see what had prompted Toñito’s blog and the questions about ethnicity, bilingualism, and family history. He was anticipating the issues that might arise when raising children of color from three ethnic groups; white Irish, brown/red/or yellow Mexican, and black African. We spent the next 30 minutes over breakfast talking about the more immediate family events and activities, and then Tony left to drop in on his mother before heading home. On my own drive home, it occurred to me that Toñito  was indeed beginning a quest. The prospect of multi-racial children had challenged him to seek answers to new questions about where he came from, who he was, and what would his children need? It was a quest that I had begun, but never completed. What help could I provide now? Of course I could continue answering his questions about family history, but quests are not about knowing – they are about learning. In Parzival, the archetypal tale by Wolfram Von Eschenbach, the young hero-knight, Percival, goes in search of the Sangreal, the Holy Grail. The quest is achieved NOT by acquisition of an object or a goal, but by learning the 2 questions that must be asked: “What is the secret of the Grail?” and “Whom does it serve?” It is only in the heartfelt asking of these two questions, from a compassionate, yearning desire to help others, that Christ’s “precious blood” (sangreal) is released and the wasteland of our lives is nourished and allowed to flower.
 

 

As I drove into the garage, I couldn’t help but think of one more piece of advice I would give Toñito – to read Jose Vasconcelos’ treatise called The Cosmic Race. In my own quest in search of identity, I discovered that Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher at the time of the Revolution, proposed the theory that America offered the world a potential gift beyond value – the opportunity for the melding (mestizaje) of a new race, “The Cosmic Race”, born from the mixture of  the 3 primary races (African, Asian, and White). Tony and Jonaya’s offspring would be those cosmic children, and my grandchildren.