Recently "American"

I've been thinking a lot about the subject of assimilation into "American" society since our Durán family reunion this summer.  Our family was fortunate that a few of our cousins had worked on our family tree/history and built a website so that we could share the knowledge previous to the reunion.

During the reunion, our cousin Dr. José Rivera spoke on our family tree/history.   This gave me an entirely new perspective on the broad European and Native Mesoamerican mix that I embody.  Further, our reunion committee held several meetings.  My father was the reunion director.  I was the registrar.  My father and I traveled to Las Vegas, New Mexico (where the reunion was held) several times to these meetings.  We discussed his recent readings on the history of northern New Mexico.  We debated.  We discussed.  He talked. I listened. I learned.

I learned that a part of my family that I disliked - namely the ambition to "succeed" in mainstream American society (one that immigrants often adopt in order to survive) - was a normal response to a genocidal situation.

The problem was that I've never seen myself as an immigrant.  I've always thought of myself as native to this land.  Sure, I took History of New Mexico at Northern New Mexico College, but the phrase, "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us" never mattered much to me except as phrase used in organizing for social justice.  It's become very personal to me.

At our Compadrazco on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo this Spring, I learned that when the U.S. came to what is now called northern New Mexico, they burned our villages and burned our seeds. We hid in the hills.  We were hunted.  They wanted us dead.  If they couldn't kill us now, they would get us by ensuring we starved to death without seeds/crops/food. This thought always brings me to tears.  My father reminds me - we were at war.  It is a different perspective than the Holocaust.

However, those whose families lived in the outposts of the Spanish/Mexican empire know, it wasn't a war for us.  We didn't have the defenses that could match our enemy.  It was genocide.  As a people of mixed history who owned a piece of American leaders' Manifest Destiny, we were expendable.  As a people who would not be beaten down, we were better left dead.  Yes.  We were nearly on the same plane as our tribal brothers and sisters.  We were not human.  We held no value.  Nor do we now.

That is what we as Chicanas/os live each day.  We are a people of many peoples. We fought the country in which we now find ourselves as citizens.  Our land was taken from us through chicanery.  Our relationships with our native brothers and sisters was broken and used as a tool to divide us.  We have had to declare ourselves not native, but European to survive.  We have held ourselves as only half people to this country's government.  We may only hold ourselves as whole - Meztizos, Chicanos, Genizaros - within our own families, circle, communities.

Like our native sisters and brothers, we have hidden the depth of our religion(s), our ceremonies and traditions.  We have watched as some tried to sell our sacred.  We have fought.  Sometimes we've won.  Mostly, we have fallen into a bog and been confused by mist as to the way to get free.  Mostly, we struggle.  That is not a meek word - struggle.  It denotes a constant battle that takes strength, stamina, determination and faith to continue waging.  Mostly, we are constantly seeking ourselves in this foreign world.

Immigrants. My grandfather remembered someone coming to his family's home when he was a child and telling them that the family had to choose whether to remain in "America" and become U. S. citizens or to move further south and remain part of the country that had only recently become "Mexico".  Choose the victor and remain as peasants on their land or choose the way we'd known for both 400 years (as Europeans) and milenia (as native peoples).  What was this choice to them?  How did they make it?  Many of our families went south.  Why did we stay?

This blog is now my personal journal to knowing the mysteries of ME along with all of the actions I choose to undertake in the struggle.  It's the time to learn and know myself through the deepest part of me - the part that IS powerful, whole and free.