He Now Says Yes to Once-Denied Identity

There was a time when Humberto Caspa felt embarrassed by his own mother.

She’s a full-blooded Aymara Indian, one of the people who inhabit the high plain of the Bolivian Andes. She wears the traditional dress of the region--black bowler hat and long, multilayered skirt--the type seen in postcards and travelogues.

She was from a generation that endured overt indignities, like the law that barred the Aymara from the main square of La Paz, the Bolivian capital. That ban was revoked in 1944, almost 20 years before Caspa was born, but his generation hardly escaped the centuries-old bias against the country’s indigenous majority.

“When I was growing up, being Indian was a stigma,” said Caspa, 37, who now teaches history and political science at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where he first enrolled 11 years ago as a newly arrived immigrant knowing little English.

Back in Bolivia, his peers often sought to get ahead by suppressing their Indian identity. They stopped speaking their native language and some even changed their names to appease the Hispanic elites.

Caspa kept both his Indian surnames, including Quispe from his mother. But in his attempt to break out of his social caste, the young man, who dreamed of becoming an architect, betrayed his own blood. He didn’t want his friends back home to meet his mother, dressed in her pollera, or skirt, that branded her as a second-class citizen.

“How could it be that I denied my own family?” Caspa asked himself this week as we met for lunch in a Costa Mesa strip mall.

Here he was, thousands of miles from home. Light-years from his old life. A legal resident with advanced college degrees, an acquired command of English, a good starting job, a wife and a daughter. And still he agonized about the past.

A man of his achievements would never have to look back if he didn’t care to. Bolivia could remain just a bad memory of discrimination as a civilian and a soldier. His American success could erase the memory of military service in Bolivia that included beatings and psychological abuse, especially of lowly Aymara recruits like himself who knew they would never be allowed to become officers.

But Caspa doesn’t want to forget. He now dreams of going back to make a difference for the Aymara community.

“Right now, I’m at a crossroads,” Caspa stated in a college press release with his biography that caught my attention. “I love it here in the United Sates, and I enjoy teaching at Orange Coast College. . . . But I feel a call to return to Bolivia. I still think of the discrimination and bigotry, but I miss my country. I want to do something positive for the Bolivian people.”

Teacher Taught More Than English

Caspa came to Orange County in the mid-’80s, seeking refuge from Bolivia’s political turmoil and racial repression. He found work as a pizza cook, a dishwasher, a salesman and a forklift driver.

He started taking English as a second language at the Centennial Education Center in Santa Ana, part of the Rancho Santiago Community College district. There, he was inspired by an instructor named Karon Wells. She didn’t just teach him the language, recalls Caspa, she taught him the ropes. To show his gratitude, he named his daughter, now 4, after her.

He enrolled at Orange Coast, then transferred to UC Irvine, where he got his bachelor’s degree in 1993. He earned his master’s in political science from Cal State Fullerton, where he also starts teaching part time this semester.

For his doctorate, Caspa attended Mexico City’s National Autonomous University, the oldest in the Northern Hemisphere. He completed his dissertation in Latin American Studies, though a lengthy student strike delayed his progress.

While in Mexico, he drove a beat-up old pickup truck with faded red paint. He still drives the same truck today, minus a stereo stolen in Tijuana, where he visits his wife, also a teacher. The two share a successful commuting marriage, he said. The thieves ruined the door lock, so he can get in only on the passenger side.

Nobody promised immigrants a rose garden. But whenever the going gets tough, Caspa thinks of his stint in the Bolivian military. They were years of such hardship that he plans to write a book about the experience someday.

One phrase kept the soldiers going: “Esto se pasa,” which means “This too shall pass.”

It’s a phrase the Aymara could have been repeating for 500 years.

Humberto Caspa Quispe came here for opportunity and freedom, like most immigrants. He never expected that migration would also liberate his soul.

Caspa felt acceptance for the first time in the United States, where his indigenous identity was celebrated, not denigrated. He found the American reaction unfamiliar in its affirmation: “Wonderful, man,” people would say. “You’re indigenous!”

His new perspective as an expatriate allowed him to see the faults of his native country most clearly. From a fresh vantage point in multicultural California, the Santa Ana resident finally realized the shame for him and other Aymara of denying their own race because of discrimination back home.

Here, he finally felt free of the insidious system that kept Indians feeling inferior, even as they made progress in commerce and politics. From a distance, he realized how much that colonial mentality had infected his own psyche. He had internalized the prejudice, succumbed to the need to negate his own race.

“Querer no ser,” as he put it in Spanish, or “to want not to be who you are.”

That’s racism at its most successful, making its victims detest themselves.

It was a heavy topic for us to digest over fast-food chicken. But I wondered if he had ever apologized to his mother.

No. Where he comes from, children don’t discuss issues with their parents as easily as Americans do.

“The way I show my remorse is by being more ethnic,” he said. “By elevating that identity.”

Caspa has emerged as a leader of the small but growing Andean community in Orange County. He is founder and president of the Centro Andino Americano, a nascent group that hopes to open a center to serve families from Bolivia, Peru and other Latin countries.

The focus will be on the children of those immigrants, who aren’t achieving what their families expected, academically or economically. The new group plans to provide tutoring and other resources to help the next generation move ahead.

Caspa has been busy taking a survey of fellow Andeans in California, asking basic questions about their schooling and income. He hopes to fill a void in hard data about the community and provide the documentation needed to seek needed resources.

You’ll often find him circulating his survey at Bolivian restaurants in Orange County, like Beba’s in Santa Ana or Rumba in Fountain Valley. The day after we spoke, he caught a bus for the Bay Area to continue his poll-taking in San Francisco.

Immigrants need guides to point them on the road to success in their new world, he said, much like the good teachers he was fortunate to meet along the way.

One of them was Wendy Maccoun, who taught him English at Orange Coast. Maccoun was shocked to encounter her old student on campus again recently, this time as a colleague in the faculty mail room.

“I always knew that he would someday be a success,” Maccoun said.

“No one is ever a success alone,” Caspa responded, echoing the communal spirit of the Aymara people he longs to help.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.