But, Gosh, You Don’t Look Like a Latino

Blond, blue-eyed Teresa came home one night from Mexican folk dancing class and declared that her younger sister would make a good folklorico dancer.

Kevin Johnson asked his 7-year-old daughter why she thought that.

Because Elena looked like the other folklorico dancers, black hair and brown skin, the girl said.

Johnson wondered how life would be different for each of his children, two physically reflecting mostly their white heritage and one reflecting her darker Mexican American features.

An associate dean at UC Davis Law School, Johnson, 41, also grew up on the edge of two ambiguous racial worlds. He was raised in Azusa by a fierce “assimilationist” mother who denied her Mexican heritage, and a white father who embraced Mexican culture.

Other authors, such as James McBride, Judy Scales-Trent and Greg Williams, have documented the experiences of people with one black and one white parent. But less has been written by or about members of the growing Latino-Anglo population.

In “How Did You Get to Be Mexican: A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity” (Temple University Press, 1999), Johnson wanted to explore his mixed ancestry. He chose the title because of the confusion his surname and physical appearance created during interviews for teaching jobs.

His broader mission was to write about the diversity of Latinos--particularly the wide range of physical appearances. Such diversity, Johnson said, presents challenges to a diverse society: from affirmative action, to race and class relations--and whether darker-skin Latinos face unique challenges assimilating.

“I think it’s probably different for lighter-skin Latinos,” he said. “For poorer and working-class people, and particularly the more indigenous, it’s not as easy to fit in and to be accepted and not to be treated as a brown foreigner.”

Johnson, who through his life has had the option to “pass” as white, says he has seen from both sides of the fence how white and darker Latinos are treated differently. Race relations in America have traditionally focused on black and white, said Johnson--whose writing has been published in various law reviews--but he is working with Latino law scholars to focus on such legal issues as immigration and law enforcement that affect the Latino community.

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Davis, where the Johnsons live, is a socioeconomically divided town a short drive west of Sacramento. Middle-class whites live in town. Latinos are mostly the farm workers who live amid the tomato fields in which they toil.

Johnson’s wife, Virginia, a Mexican American from La Puente, has a somewhat light complexion. She has been “complimented” with such remarks as, “You don’t look Mexican.” She has also been mistaken as the nanny for her blond children but never for her darker child.

To keep their children in touch with their heritage, the Johnsons gave the kids Spanish names and enrolled them in Spanish-immersion language classes. They try to explain to the children that Latinos have brown eyes and blue eyes, dark hair and blond hair.

“But what she sees and hears,” Johnson said about Teresa and about growing up in Davis, “is different.”

The Johnsons live two blocks from the fields, where Latinos do backbreaking work. The farm workers’ children are the ones with whom the Johnson kids--three-quarters Mexican American--attend folklorico dancing lessons.

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Johnson says that the weakness of his book may be in illustrating race relations through personal anecdotes. But personal anecdotes--from childhood memories of ethnic confusion to recent chats with his institutionalized mother--are also its strength.

During a phone conversation with his mother while he was writing the book, she fell into one of her schizophrenic moments. As they said goodbye, she told him: “I love you, mijo” (short for “my son” in Spanish).

It was the first time the woman who all her life had tried to pass as Spanish, or European, rather than Mexican, had called him “mijo.”

His mother, Angela Gallardo, grew up in the era before the 1960s when some Mexican Americans, in shame, tried to rid themselves of their culture and language. In an effort to assimilate, Gallardo made up an elaborate story about being Spanish and, therefore, white, not Mexican and part indigenous.

Johnson’s father, Kenneth, embraced Mexican culture and encouraged Johnson and his younger brother, Michael, to be proud of their mixed heritage. Johnson took in mixed messages about the value of Mexicans versus Anglos. His mother encouraged marrying white. His father scolded him when Kevin used an ethnic slur against a man who appeared to be Mexican and who had hit the Johnsons’ car. That incident in Torrance was a powerful personal lesson, Johnson said, of how people treat others based on how they perceive them physically.

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During his years at Harvard, Johnson embraced his Latino heritage but was hesitant to approach La Alianza, the Latino support group on campus. He feared the group’s members would see him as an impostor. Indeed, there were some white Latinos who “checked the box” for affirmative action purposes but never again had anything to do with Latino organizations on campus or in the community, he said.

This phenomenon of passing for Anglo, also subtly plays itself out in society, Johnson said.

Many light-skinned Latinos are viewed as Anglos, just as he was by his colleagues at a San Francisco law firm. Through a portion of his life he happily avoided the race issue--until racial remarks made in his presence against Mexicans suddenly brought into question his identity.

“It’s sort of an intense thought-provoking process,” Johnson said of examining his identity, “as you try to put down what your thoughts were about your family and your experiences and how it fits into the larger social framework and what was going on in society generally.”

Not all Latinos have the option to choose identities. Black Latinos, who may come from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, for example, are seen as African Americans. Assimilation has always indirectly meant to become “white,” Johnson said. White waves of immigrants like the Irish--who at first were discriminated against--eventually assimilated fully because they were white. But certain physical traits and surnames have remained foreign, he said. Perhaps this is why descendants of the Chinese who immigrated roughly around the same time as the Irish, today may still be seen as “foreign.”

Latinos’ differences in physical appearance wouldn’t be as significant if it didn’t affect how they are treated in routine social and business interactions, the building blocks of being incorporated into society fully, Johnson said.

For instance, if one measure of assimilation is economic progress, he said, white Latinos--many of them Cubans--have moved forward much faster than black Latinos.

Johnson offers his mother’s story as an example of failed assimilation.

A second-generation Mexican American, she insisted on her Spanish heritage despite her second husband--a white man--teasing her, “You’re a Mexican like the rest of ‘em.”

Johnson says his mother’s lifelong struggle to fit in helped cause her mental illness. Now, the woman doesn’t mention her Spanish heritage anymore. Instead, she has her grandchildren call her “Nana,” a Spanish variation for Grandma.

And for all his mother’s efforts to blend in, Johnson says, even he hasn’t assimilated fully--evident at various times in his life when his identity has come into question.

As a civil-rights lawyer, he’s heard more than once the comment: “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from.”

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Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at jose.cardenas@latimes.com.