COMMUNITY ESSAY : ‘Here Is Where We Are From’ : A Los Angeles native who is partly of Mexican descent finally understands the intent of those who ask her nationality.

“Where are you from?”

This question has followed me since early childhood. My initial answer, “93rd Street,” always seemed to disappoint.

“No. Your nationality. Where is your family from?”

“Here,” was my reply.

Then came the doubtful smile, even from my peers. It seemed obvious to everyone, except me, that I wasn’t from here.

I recall the vacationing couple camped near us in the sand dunes of Newport Beach, where a plastic smiling whale floated just beyond my swimming ability. It was the late 1960s. “Where did you get the little brown one?” they asked my blonde, Anglo mother. “You adopt her?” I heard that more than once.

I took pleasure being singled out. The middle daughter of five, I craved attention. The curiosity of strangers gave me (so I thought) stature in a family where I competed (so I thought) with the beauty and talents of four sisters, daughters from mother’s other marriages, taller, blonder, whiter.

I soon learned the answer to satisfy the questioners: Mexico. It explained my father, the color of his skin and mine, our eyes and hair, the sound my last name made when the teacher read roll, the classes in which the school placed me, and why some children beat me up, calling names like beaner or wetback.

I embellished what little I knew, fantasizing a lineage connecting a mixed-race brown girl in Los Angeles to Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, the Aztecs. I wasn’t insulted. I wanted to belong.

In my 20s, I worked alongside a woman named Thelma in a high school. Teaching assistants, we instructed troubled young people who, like us, were often from someplace else. They’d been asked, no doubt, “Where are you from?”

One day, early in the semester, we lunched with other instructors. I remember the warm ease of the table as we removed our meals from paper bags and small coolers. We were all women, which reinforced the sense of intimacy.

As Thelma peeled back a Tupperware lid to reveal steaming microwaved vegetables and rice, someone asked her the question. My question.

“Where are you from?”

“Kansas,” Thelma answered between bites.

The woman wasn’t satisfied. “No, where are you really from?”

I saw Thelma swallow. “I’m from Kansas,” she repeated. Before the woman could resume, Thelma asked her own question, coolly, without malice, with concern. “Have you ever thought how racist that question is?”

The mood cooled. Napkins met lips. Plastic cutlery rattled. The woman defended the question as only natural. Thelma countered with an explanation of assumptions inherent in the question.

“You assume,” she said, “I can’t be from here because I don’t look like you. Because I look like this,” and she gestured to her Asian features, “I must be from somewhere else. I must not be American. But I am. I’m from Kansas.”

Now, years later, I’m still asked that question about once a week. But now I offer a different answer: I’m from a country that, despite its celebrated melting pot, possesses a still-potent past of suspicion and oppression toward those considered “other.” A country that, at different times, has freely chosen politics of occupation, slavery, exclusion and selective justice.

In post-Proposition 187 California, Thelma might advise that the real question is, “When will you go back?” But that question, like the one it hides behind, doesn’t recognize reality. Here is where we are from. Here, fated to answer these questions, is where we stay.

Lisa Alvarez was born in Inglewood and lives in Laguna Beach. She is an assistant professor of English at Irvine Valley College.

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