A daughter’s lesson for Mom

It was her last night home before heading back to San Francisco for college, and my daughter and I were on an evening walk through the neighborhood that has been our home for all of her 19 years.

Maybe I was wanting to assert my motherly influence, itching to impart the kind of wisdom my daughter wouldn’t get in her ethnic studies courses on campus.

Or maybe I was simply testy from a long day battling the heat and hordes at our nearby shopping mall in Northridge.

As we strolled quietly through the darkness, something about the shouted conversation through a neighbor’s front window — was it Armenian or Persian or maybe Russian? — set me off.

I unleashed a tirade about how they let their children run wild and their dog wander the street, how their grass is too long, their unread newspapers pile up, their trash cans sit at the curb for days.

My daughter listened as I grumbled on about their old-country ways and foreign tongue. What bugs me, I said, is the lack of respect — their ignorance or willful disregard of the conventions of our suburban block.

What bugged my daughter was what I said next: I don’t agree with the immigration law in Arizona, but I get where those voters are coming from.

*

She was speechless for a moment. When had her mother turned into Sarah Palin and joined the “take back our country” crowd?

What happened to the woman who, transplanted from Ohio, reveled in Los Angeles’ panoply of languages and cultures; who took night-school classes to learn Spanish and collected friends from Belize and South Africa and Israel and Iran; whose biggest complaint in her early days in the San Fernando Valley was its lack of color?

That was 30 years ago. Both the city and the woman have changed since then — have become more crotchety and less forgiving. These days, I find myself easily irritated and looking for someone to blame.

On our trip to the mall in Northridge that afternoon, my daughter and I seemed to be the only ones at the department store counter asking for shoes in size seven, not siete. Even my daughter — who had searched unsuccessfully for a job all summer — was prompted to wonder if you had to speak Spanish to work at Macy’s.

Outside at the farmers’ market in the mall’s parking lot, I listened to customers banter with growers in Spanish, then hand over a few dollars and walk off with bags bulging with fruit . My transactions were friendly enough, but my bags seemed emptier and my wallet lighter. I got the English-language price, I guess.

And I was still smarting from the night before, when I was rebuffed by the security guard at the locked door of a Hollywood linen store. I pleaded, pointing through the glass to the clock on the wall. It was five minutes before closing, the clerk was holding the item I wanted, I had driven 30 miles in heavy traffic, I said.

He shook his head and walked off. Then a young Latina showed up beside me, pounded on the door and summoned him back. Her Spanish bought what my English couldn’t; he unlocked the door and waved us in.

I was grateful, but oddly embarrassed, as if I were in the wrong for not speaking enough Spanish to negotiate my entrance, my purchase, my presence.

I tried to explain this to my daughter — that I felt like an outsider, my English unvalued currency.

But the encounters I found so aggravating she saw as inconsequential — inconvenient maybe, but opportunities as well. Learn some new phrases, she told me. Make some new friends. Don’t act like people are out to get you.

“Are you saying that they don’t belong here because they speak another language?” she asked, ticking off in her head, no doubt, the long list of her friends to whom such a judgment would apply.

*

Our conversation left me wondering what message I was trying to share with my daughter.

There are reasons why the Arizona legislation — despite boycotts and protests — is still drawing support around the country. About 55% of Americans favor it. And I don’t think all of them are racists. Many are more likely just fearful and frustrated, primed by economic uncertainty and political polarization to believe that “we” are falling behind and “they” are gaining on us.

For them — for a lot of us — language is a visceral reminder of our country’s shifting demographics, an in-your-face challenge to old ways and old folks.

What I felt, and tried to express, was the discomfort of being shoved to the sidelines by an influx of eager newcomers. But attaching that feeling to Arizona’s draconian law was not only clumsy but wrong.

My daughter had no problem pointing that out. Supporters of Arizona’s illegal immigrant hunt are as misguided as the Southern lunch-counter bigots of my era, she said.

Her generation, of course, is less wedded to a singular black-and-white vision of this county. Immigration has changed the nation’s palette. More than half of Californians under 18 are what we consider minorities. That will be true across the country before another generation passes.

My daughter feels liberated, not threatened, by the shifting tides of diversity and the loosening of the traditional reins of power.

And I think I would be better off following her example, brushing up on my Spanish — and learning Korean and Armenian — than trying to hold back change with bad law.

sandy.banks@latimes.com