In the Middle of the Unending and Unresolved Mexico-U.S. War

Mexican. A word that depends. Sometimes people spit it out, like they did in school, when the word was spiked with all the hate I could possibly carry on my first-grade back. It was a word my Tejano father denied as his heritage. To my mother, the word was delicate as jacaranda, perfumed with stories, immense as the lapis lazuli sky of Mexico, where she’s from.

Like the story of the U.S.-Mexican War, a PBS production aired nationally last week, the words depend on who is telling the story. You see, the U.S.-Mexican War is my becoming, a Mexican American who calls herself a Latina, a Chicana, because my story begins with this war. My family, as descendants of the Cavazos land grant in Texas, resided between the disputed boundaries of the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers that served as the excuse for the war. As a result of the U.S. victory, my ancestors became Americans overnight--and ultimately lost about a million acres now encompassed by the famous King Ranch.

I’m glad I don’t have any land left. Though my father has grieved all his life, and clings to the one scrap of land remaining as proof that we were something once, that we belonged. That proof is a family cemetery in San Perlita, a town known as a little pearl that reminds me of the Magi’s lesson of the price we pay for wealth.

No, if I had some land, then I would think I am better than someone who doesn’t. I’m not. My Spanish ancestors claim the land from my Indian grandmothers. After the U.S.-Mexican War, my father’s cajun side came to Texas and married the rest of it through a union with a mestiza of South Texas whose family had always been here. Now, my land is my language--an amalgam of English and Spanish, the disputed territory of Tex-Mex and Spanglish, the Calo that embarrasses people like my mother, and all the words I absorb from the rich dialects of blacks and immigrants I meet.

I’m in the middle of this war because I’m an American by birthright, and a Mexican by heartright, though neither side accepts me as the human legacy of this war. All my life, I have been told that my English is really good, considering I was born in Mexico; my Mexican relatives called me a gringa who doesn’t speak her Spanish like a native. It took me a long time to realize wars are resolved by meeting in the middle. I embody a war from which all the others revolve, with its mutual lessons of conqueror and conquered, each side hungering for what the other seems to have, while we deny the best of each. It is my destiny, then, to be a witness to the war that has no end in sight.

But I don’t think we want to resolve this war. There are no Chicanos in the creative production of the U.S.-Mexican War, except for one. That’s because neither side wants to share the land, and meet in the place where I reside. The Americanos devour tacos and the Mexicans devour English--but neither recognizes me, because we are afraid of the middle ground. Of the America we might become.

Neither side wants to become something new, something different, because that would be inferior to who they imagine they are. There is too much at stake, a journey we don’t want to make, even when we know there is more to this, as we warily eye each other across the river amid barbed wire and abrazos.

Yet the resolution is in that borderland where I live. That is the place in the disputed territory that provided the excuse for the war. I am that middle which has seen the masculine imperative that demands war, the racism seeping from both sides, the pretensions of class from all angles, the profiles of feminism and sexuality that dissolve into the other like the streams that flow into the Rio Grande. I have seen this because I cross borders every day, and I am telling you there is another world to discover.

In Guanajuato, Mexico, where I lived, the upper class was confounded by my casual brown presence in the coffee shops along with my laptop--an emblem of status there. But they were more confused by my friendliness with the waiters who look just like me. The middle class envied my English but rarely my concern for civil rights. They have no experience with the ideals of democracy, only the ideals of class. The Harvard-bred leaders of Mexico don’t recognize equality, they’ve never lived it and will never pay my relatives a decent wage. They want to be like the United States in our consumption, not the consuming of democracy, nomas fijate the assault on Chiapas, the Wounded Knee of Mexico. Mexico, like the United States, glorifies her Indian heritage as she does everything possible to destroy her flesh-and-blood Indians.

The U.S.-Mexican War rages, and people like me, the Latinos, Chicanos, are the borderline between the victory or defeat of our humanity toward each other. Every illegal immigrant who crosses could be my mother, 40 years later. My youngest brother is getting a PhD. What did the new settlers of the Southwest think they would create by teaching their children to call me names at school and treat me as a token at work? What did the rich Mexicans imagine, that their children would not have to face someone like me one day, the child of one of their nobody campesinos, a child of the civil-rights movement, a grandchild of one of those revolutionary peons, across the table at the White House?

Words. We, as the bastard children of this war, are the ones who can interpret this war so we can understand each other. We know the meaning of the words behind the words, how the war continues on the cultural, social and economic fronts. This is a war without bullets, yet far more violent because we cannot see or touch it. No bloodless documentary can heal the wounds that are beyond words, the words that can’t be translated, the words that must be confronted, one by one. If we are to find the peace that we ask the rest of the world to find.

I don’t know if we have the courage to find that world. It requires that we meet in the center, and that’s a place more substantial than chipotle and Cheerios. It means you will have to travel farther than to Cancun or Disneyland, you will come to the middle, to the disputed territory, to confront what you have done, and apologize. It means that you trust there is another America, the kind that includes me, not as symbol but in practice, that this land was never meant to be yours or even Mexico’s. That it, like me, is a symbol of the possible, that you have many borders to cross, that you are not afraid, that you will never be the same again.

Then the war will finally be over.