Hispanics in Panic

How to deal with the Hispanic causing panic? Being New Mexican usually affords you a dog in the fight about how Spanish one is. This post is not about the measurable traits to help with this argument. This post is about my understanding of how the Mexican descendants in the borderlands, the North American Southwest, demonstrate heritage acrobatics to draw a phantom line between an Anglo heritage and a Mestizo heritage.  The idea of identity itself is phantom and only a frame of mind. The two words Spanish and Mexican qualitatively not only divide a mindset, but these contrasting signifiers ripple through in Nuevo Mexico’s politics, prejudices, and myths. 

Most Hispanics aren’t white supremacist. White supremacist in this context is the belief that Anglo-euro white persons are superior to all other heritages, often using race as a criteria for this belief.  This post is also not about breaking down the semantics for what can be seen as white supremacy. I use this as a basis for describing a cultural divide amongst Mexican descendants in the borderlands. The fallout of the Treaty of Hidalgo, was a promise through a “sporked” tongue. This is the type promise where the agreements were implemented with the bigotry and system rigidity that ensure quick unraveling of any promises, and with an invisibility that left Mexicanos screaming with no one to hear.  The agreement was implemented in a way that provided loopholes, negations, and forfeitures in a manner that skirted the line of evil, while blowing past dignified. This was a colonial carry over from imperial tactics, but mainly just dirty.

This is where the Mexicano people likely consummated the Corsican relationship between Chicano and Hispanic. It served the newly acquired “American Citizens” a naturalized chance at running the prosperity obstacle course to retain their land, rights, and dignity. Many of these land owning Mexican descendants saw the landscape of this obstacle course. They learned from watching squaters, false claims, vigilante justice, and susceptibility to unchecked white crime. They learned how important it was to claim “White” as a piece of safety equipment.  New Mexicans found themselves at the mercy of the American’s appetite for all things profitable. 

The paradox here is the wealthy newly naturalized American citizens likely used similar tactics in their past to acquire their capital during the conquest. So the capitalist encounters a more vindictive capitalist and we have two bullies finding new ways to keep their power. The Mexican with much more to lose transforms themselves from Mexicano into something distinguished, Hispanic. The New Mexican northern Mexican villager who somehow had a direct flight from Santa Fe or Albuquerque to Spain. One of the very first Southwest Airlines  “gotta get away” deals. Joking aside, elite Nuevomexicanos among other politically motivated people used their Spanish lineage as a litigation tool.  

Nearly 200 hundred years later we have people who hold tightly this same Spanish purity myth.

I offer me.

As I recognize my life’s tank dial, move closer and seemingly faster than ever towards empty, I accept how pain and love complement themselves more than ever.  I love that I feel pain free and simultaneously respect how pain filled life has to be.  My youthful self mildly glamorized a pain filled self perception and romanticized some struggles. I romanticized my story stirring up pain, replaying thoughts of hardship. I think through the years I have learned to value the reflective strategies that help me assess my pain; translate my pain versus indulging. My Catholic faith with its many flaws, provides me with tools that help me understand when and if my pain is phantom or real. Both my romanticized manifested pain and real wounds are impactful. 

The phantom pain lead to the stirring up of anger pangs, and the real pains hurt so bad I am led to anguish reminding me they still needing healing. I also get to taste the pain, regardless of its ontology, and can better determine if the pains are necessary or in vain. The strategy I feel most essential to my encounters with pain is embracing paradox.  My capacity to scan for paradox is a tactic my Catholic faith instilled in me. It is literally a believe system of contradictions where holding a concept made of competing truths is fundamental. In  the context of pain, it is the movement to find a balance between fear and trust. I have to hold the avoidance of pain with the absolute inevitability of pain, like a person who has to breathe in while going under water, building up a panicked eagerness to breathe out.  The paradox isn’t the breathing, the paradox is the desire to be where we don’t naturally belong to get a taste the forbidden, at the risk of drowning; we find a way to have both. There are tiny opposites in every paradox creating small revolutions of meaning. At the same time there is a consequential tranquility laying down a stillness. The struggle and or the dance to seek out this idiosyncratic balance is what I call a Chicano style. Finding a personal balance between two competing intrapersonal truths and offering that awareness as a contribution to the everyday interpersonal existence, a Chicano Style. Most healthy cultures have a similar system. 

I think there is something revealing about the mestizo attitude that encourages gravitation towards pain. My pride in a Nuevomexicano (Mexican-American) heritage gives me the bedrock to let my pain filled experiences flow right into a humility that my elders prepared me for. Hard work is the place where pain goes to be planted, beads of sweat cool the tempers, releasing tears dripped from the grief, hydrating my seeds of passion. Seeds of passion that were fanatic in my childhood and adolescence. Seeds of passion that were economic and political in my early adulthood. Maybe the social justice curiosity is how I have learned to deal with my pain.  Social injustice is the way for my pain to be externalized. How I approach the externalized is how I feel I will heal the internal. If I let the greedy American infuriate me with their disregard for my heritage or perceived dignities then I cannot learn about the defenses of those material imbalances of land, water, money, laws, comforts, rights, or culture. This is where my faith guides me into paradox. The greedy American is in pain, and maybe more pain than me. Their insatiability is the strategy they’ve learned to rely on to ease their pain. I have that same insatiability in me. The paradox is seeing myself as a greedy Chicano, while also defending myself from the toxicity of the greedy American. My peace of mind has to be found through the hard fight of treating my inner insatiable and building up a harmonious internal sense of enough. Then bring this feature to existence in the form of a Chicano ofrenda to my immediate world. 

I understand that my romance with pain, gave me the emotional state to write interestingly, at least to me.  And at least it felt more interesting as I revisit it.  Now I just feel the paradox. The fire that pain once lit, is now more of an irritating burn. I have found joy in the mediocre.  I can’t write like I used to. I often feel like my thought process is analogous to a cows digestive system. I chew the same topics, swallow, digest, absorb, regurgitate, and bite a few more blades of tragedy.  It doesn’t feel as poetic and color filled as it once did, when I was closer to my pain. I think that balance is easier to choose than preference.  My emotions aren’t as contrasting, making it harder to find the momentum to write. With acceptance comes comfort. I haven’t learned to write from comfort.

I wonder if this is a type liminal space that might help with saying goodbye to this world.  Does balance fit with acceptance?  Is acceptance an illusion that is really just expressing the condition of being option-less.  I once relied so much on my grandparents.  I relied so much on mothering from, of course Mom, and fortunately my Aunts.  I felt such hurt from the lost or missed time with an attentive father. And yet I had the attention of loving people,  I found perspectives that highlighted my pain and that I nestled up to. My pain was a fuel for my movement, pain was my rhythm.

I am losing my family and friends. I think this would bring on a sadness that I think I would channel into these perceptions to propagate the same outlets.  I’m not sad in the same ways.  I am a sad that feels as if it skipped straight to acceptance.  I am curious about my comfort with solitude.  What is it about balance that allows for an apparent comfort for being alone.  My life still feels meaningful but equally it is definitely feeling less certain.  I still want to live.

Life is still teaching me.