September 11 Changed Me

By María de la Luz Reyes, Hispanic Linkhispanic-link

When I was a little girl the mere sound of a fire truck or a police car would elicit an automatic knee-jerk response in the form of the sign of the cross and a silent prayer, Ojalá que no sean mejicanos.  I don’t know exactly where or when my nationalistic prayer instincts began, although now as an adult, I can conjure up a reasonable explanation for thatreaction.

Since the age of 4 or 5, my first identity marker was mejicana. (I had not yet been introduced to the term Chicana.) A mere glance at a mirror reflected back a brown face, dark brown eyes, and thick, black hair.  There was no denying it:  I was Mexican.  I couldn’t pretend to be other, nor did it ever cross my mind.  I attended an all-mejicano Catholic school.  The choice of a religious school was my parents, the segregated nature of the school by default.  Besides religious reasons, it made more sense economically for my parents to send five children of elementary age to a school where uniforms were required. In school clothes, alone, public schools were beyond our means.  Since the school was in a segregated barrio it did not draw attendance outside its perimeters where the gringos lived.  This segregated arrangement during my formative years played a major role in my identity.

This all mejicano cocoon provided me education, religion, personal and social life, in essence, my life-blood.  I knew almost every family in the barrio, if I didn’t my family knew them, or about them.  Whenever I ventured outside the barrio, it was clear I was Mexican—and different from whites. There were even signs posted over water fountains at Kress Store and other shopping stores “Whites only’” and “Mexicans only.”  There were separate toilet facilities and separate seating arrangements at major theaters and public places.  Even my girlfriends like who had light skin and light hair were singled out as Mexican.  Somehow their light skin and light hair did not make them like the rest of the Americans outside the barrio.  (I didn’t know at the time, that socialization, cultural and linguistic differences played a big role in setting us apart.) How, then, could I escape my own identity?

Of course, I understood that I was legitimately American.  I had no trouble with that concept. My siblings and I were all born in the United States.  I was born in Texas.  My father was born in Texas, as was his father, and his father’s father and so on dating back prior to 1846.  On his side of the family we were 8th generation American –with the Reyes living in Texas before Texas was part of the United States.  My mother, on the other hand, was born in Mexico, although she was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

No matter what I did and where I was, I felt Mexican American.  In high school, my friends and I were referred to as “the Mexican girls.”  We were a handful of students from thebarrio; the majority of the other girls were white. I made friends easily, but the white girls I hung out with during the school day, I noticed, were the “rejects” in their own gringoworld.  They seemed to have less educated parents, less spending money for cokes or candy.  They were rarely the ones selected for class officers, cheerleaders, queens or princesses.  In this respect, they were more like me but yet they were simply Americans; I was Mexican American.  Aside from the school-hour friendships we enjoyed, we never invited each other to our homes, we never socialized outside of school.  We, in fact, knew very little about each other.

In the 60s and 70s when I learned about the Chicano movement, I stopped being Mexican American and became a proud Chicana, a term we had given ourselves in the struggle for civil rights.  The whole movement made sense to me, so I became a Chicana as I gained a greater understanding of the standing of the Chicano community vis –a-vis other Americans.

In the 70s and 80s, I rejected the Feminist Movement because I felt little in common with white women who headed the movement.  They talked about equality and equal pay for women, but they really meant white women.  My first identity-marker was not female, it was Chicana.  The Feminist Movement ignored the needs of brown women and had little understanding that, as a community, both our males and our females needed equality with whites.  I felt little sympathy for white women who earned more than my Chicano husband, and wanted to recruit me to help their cause for their equal pay with white males.

September 11, 2001 changed everything for me.  When I saw the sight of two high-jacked American planes hit the World Trade Towers in New York, knocking down the two 110 floor towers, I winced in horror.  The ball of fire quickly consumed the first tower, and the second one imploded as hundreds of people jumped off windows in an effort to escape the burning flames.  I was frightened to my core.  How could anyone commit such despicable acts of hate against Americans, against us, against my people?

For four days I was glued to the television, listening to all the reports of carnage, of fires at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania where Americans had been killed in the planes and on the ground.  The reports predicted deaths could mount to thousands.  My heart sank.  I tried to reach everyone and anyone I knew in Washington D.C. and in New York.  Had they been hurt?  Were they safe?  For the first week, my heart was heavy with grief.  I was frightened, angry, and sad, all at once.  The tears flowed easily at every repeated scene of the planes crashing into the WTC.  “How?  How could this happen to us?” I repeated over and over in my mind.

During that first week, I was like every American who was interviewed on television, I felt terrorized. 911 was an incomprehensible and unimaginable tragedy that had befallen us.  And, for the first time in my life I didn’t wonder, “How many Chicano/mejicanos died in these incidents?”   It never crossed my mind.  I believe that was the first time I had truly felt American- an American indistinguishable from other Americans.  I shared their pain and their vulnerability, their insecurity.  I don’t really need an ethnic breakdown of the victims anymore, it isn’t about us and them, it is about ALL OF US.  Maybe I have just joined the human race.  Suddenly, I am beginning to understand what people in other war-torn countries have been going through for years while we have ignored their grief and pain as we watch their dead and wounded in the comfort and safety of our living rooms and our big TVs.

This article was first published in Hispanic Link.

[Photo by wallyg]

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