All Mixed Up

Last week, I went to Spain as a Hispanic, but, once there, I felt more like an Indian.

I was one of 13 American Latinos invited by the Spain-United States Council, a nonprofit group whose membership includes high-ranking Spanish government officials and leading businessmen. We were flown to Europe to help la madre patria improve relations with its North American descendants.

At lunch the first day, U.S. Ambassador George L. Argyros welcomed us Latinos “back to Spain.” The conference’s Spanish participants marveled at the diversity of their nation’s far-flung legacy seated before them and applauded the persistence of their mother tongue. They wanted to see their image reflected in our collective eyes. But as I returned their stares, I became more conscious of my indigenous heritage.

I’ve never been allowed to be a Mexican American in Spain. Like other Old World peoples who confuse nationality with ethnicity, Spaniards often insisted that I’m not an American. “Eres mexicano,” they’d say, never knowing whether I’d moved up or down in their eyes. When I was younger, they asked me if I was Chinese. More recently, I was mistaken for a Canary Islander. My brown skin has always thrown Spaniards off my trail.

The conference’s organizers hoped that we American Latinos would begin to feel kinship with Spain. But this won’t be easy. For Mexican American mestizos, the racially and culturally mixed products of the collision of the old and new worlds, our connection to Spain is muddled, at best.

Like most mestizos, much of my heritage is indecipherable. My father has traced our family tree on his mother’s side as far back as 18th-century Chihuahua, Mexico. My great-great-great-great grandfather was listed as a Spaniard in colonial records. My mother’s mother, from Michoacan, could speak some Purepecha, the dominant indigenous language of her home state. Other than language and religion, it’s usually impossible to detect which part of me is New World or which part of me I inherited from the Old World.

Last September, my wife and I roamed Mexico City looking for historical markers of the collision of our Indian and Spanish heritages. At Tlatelolco, where Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, surrendered to Hernan Cortes after a long battle, we closed our eyes and tried to imagine that day. We loitered outside the Pino Suarez subway station, the site where Moctezuma, Cuauhtemoc’s predecessor, and Cortes first met. That afternoon, we paid homage to the home of Malintzin, Cortes’ indigenous mistress and translator without whom the Spaniards could not have conquered Mexico. Unlike so many Mexicans who have, at various times, favored one ancestry and demonized the other, my wife and I embrace both. Ironically, Mexican Americans are better poised to solve Mexico’s perennial identity crisis than are Mexicans themselves.

Once synonymous with “bastards” because we were largely the offspring of illicit unions between Spanish men and Indian women, mestizos have suffered rejection from both Spaniards and Indians. A marginal being from inception, the mestizo has long sought both roots and legitimacy. Five hundred years has not been time enough for the mestizo identity to congeal. “We are a new product, a new breed,” wrote Mexican essayist Jose Vasconcelos in 1926. We did not yet exist when King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. We were barely being born when, in 1519, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on a Wittenberg church door.

Official Mexico likes to speak of a Mexican civilization that is thousands of years old. But that isn’t quite accurate. The conquest of New Spain, as the Spaniards called Mexico, brought a cataclysmic end to the pre-Columbian world order. What emerged was not simply the replacement of the New World with the Old. Nor was mestizo New Spain a smooth synthesis of Europe and America. Rather, what the violent conquest wrought was something much more random, tangled and spontaneous.

In the United States, Mexican mestizo identity has never fit neatly into the Anglo American racial scheme. Although we were usually treated as nonwhites, we sometimes took refuge in the white Spanish side of our heritage. In the 19th century, our distinctive mixed-blood lineage helped us acquire U.S. citizenship when it was denied to Indians, blacks and Chinese. But our ambiguous racial origins also meant that our rights were not always protected.

Still, a Texas subdivision that prohibited Mexican Americans from buying a home nonetheless welcomed a newly self-anointed “Spanish American.” From the 1930s to the early 1970s, Mexican American advocates leveraged their whiteness in their efforts to secure full civil rights. In the 1940s, they didn’t fight school segregation on the ground that it was wrong, but, rather, because we, too, were white and therefore not legally subjected to such practices. It has only been in the last 30 years that activists have stressed our nonwhiteness. Only by doing so could Mexican Americans avail themselves of civil rights-era judicial rulings and minority-preference policies.

Our Indianness suddenly worked to our advantage. But this era, too, is nearing its end.

The late anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote that, historically, the mestizo’s “chances of survival lay ... in an ability to change, to adapt, to improvise.” I believe this still holds true. Despite all efforts to place us in boxes that aren’t of our making, mestizo identity will evolve beyond narrow racial categories.

In the mid-’90s, Madrid’s buses were plastered with travel advertisements enticing Spaniards to the New World. “Mexico,” the ads read, “it will conquer you.” In recent years, Latin Americans have begun to migrate in larger numbers to Madrid. Last week, I saw dark-skinned mestizos with what I thought were Indian faces walking in the city center. It seems that even as Spain reaches out to American Latinos, the mestizo experience is reaching them. Five hundred years after Columbus first arrived in the Americas, Indians are discovering Spain.