When a Case of Mistaken Identity Is Not Amusing

It tends to happen when I’m wearing blue jeans or a Windbreaker. If I’m working in my frontyard, a hedge clipper in hand, it is almost sure to happen.

Or if I go to the mall and buy some flowers.

Or if I stand in a restaurant parking lot with my hands in my pockets.

Every time it happens, it takes all the self-control I can muster to keep from shouting:

“No, I am not the gardener, I actually own this house!”

“No, I am not the valet. Park your own car!”

“No, I’m not delivering these flowers. They’re for my wife!”

If you’re a Latino professional in Los Angeles and happen to look a little “street,” this has probably happened to you at least once. Unless you’re dressed in a business suit or happen to be one of the more fair-skinned among us, you run the risk of being confused with the hired help.

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Actually, there was a certain poetic justice in my being mistaken for a valet parker as I left a chichi Hollywood restaurant after having breakfast with my wife and son. I pointed this out, rather brusquely, to the woman who spotted me at the front door and asked if I would park her car.

“My father was a valet parker,” I said to her. “I happen to be a writer.”

Indeed, my father parked cars for a living when I was in elementary school. I have very fond memories of him in his black pants and red vest with the small “V” patch on the front. He’d leave our East Hollywood home in the late afternoon to work nights on the old Restaurant Row along La Cienega Boulevard.

Being a valet parker was a good job for him, a twentysomething Guatemalan immigrant. It was a step up from busboy, his first job in the States. And a huge step up from Gualan, the impoverished and very dusty little village in northeastern Guatemala where he was born and raised.

Having arrived in Los Angeles in the heady days of the 1960s, my father had great faith in the notion that the United States was the land of social mobility. Civil rights made it possible for even a poor man to hope his son might achieve what he could not.

In retrospect, that was a more innocent age. There were fewer of us immigrants in Los Angeles back then. We were not the multitudes we are today. People didn’t see us as responsible for the decline in the economy or for the crowding in the schools or the increase in crime.

All of that has changed, of course. There are so many immigrants in California now that no matter where you live in the city, or what you do, you can’t help but run into a Mexicano or a Guatemalteco or a Salvadoreno.

Being the son of two Guatemalan immigrants, I can’t help but look like one too.

Maybe it’s something in my Mayan features that makes me look like a gardener to someone from Mt. Washington, where I live. I’m willing to allow for that, since my ancestors did in fact work the land: My late grandfather, Francisco Tobar, once had a job fumigating irrigation ditches for the infamous United Fruit Co., which made much of Guatemala its corporate fiefdom.

Perhaps I looked a little like my grandfather as I stooped over the ice plant in my frontyard, pulling out weeds.

It was a beautiful summer day, and I had just spent what felt like an enormous amount of money for my first home. The house seemed too pretty and too big to belong to me. Still, my name was on the title deed, and I couldn’t help but feel the sort of pride that every first-time homeowner has. I’d decided to spruce up the place a bit.

I was standing not far from the “For Sale” sign with the little rectangle that said “Sold” on top, a clump of dead dandelions in my hand, when two women walked past on the street.

“Do you know how much they paid for it?” one of them asked me.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you know how much the new owners paid for it?”

I felt more hurt than angry.

“Well, I can tell you how much I paid for it,” I said.

“Oh, you’re the new owner!”

At least she looked a little embarrassed. So did the woman in the elevator at the Brea Mall who asked me where I was delivering the flowers. After I told her that the batch of irises was, in fact, for my wife, she blushed and said, “Oh, your wife is very lucky.”

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Yet even when people are nice and acknowledge their mistake, there’s a sort of punch-in-the-stomach feel at these moments. It’s as if you’ve awakened from a dream and landed in the real world again, where the color of your skin really is, as a sociologist might say, “determining,” where the notion of a caste system doesn’t seem so farfetched.

Most people of color I know--Asians and African Americans too--have had these experiences, even as they advance along the stations of the cross in our meritocracy. They are small re-encounters with the past.

“You speak English so well” was something I used to hear when I was in college and I was introduced to people as Hector from Guatemala. And then, much later, one of my first editors at The Times looked at a story I had turned in and remarked, “This is really well written. Did someone help you with it?”

In a way, being mistaken for a gardener or a semiliterate non-English speaker is something of a blessing. We Mayan professionals need to be reminded that most of our people really aren’t that well off.

Most of our people have real jobs that force them to toil and sweat, just as my father used to, lifting dishes into his busboy’s cart or running back and forth across parking lots late into the night, slipping tips into his pocket, saving money so he could send his son to college one day.