As Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo with margaritas and street tacos, I’ll be bracing for an odd claim that seems to crop up this time of year.
Without question, many Americans will assert, “Latinos are the newest wave of immigrants in the United States,” arriving not-so-fashionably late.
Really? I’m no expert, but our nation’s collective amnesia about U.S. history and the history of the Americas — from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego — is staggering. Far too many Americans tack Latinos at the end of this country’s immigration timeline like an afterthought, but history proves we have been part of the American Story all along — and have been explaining ourselves ever since.
With so many new Latin American immigrants arriving today, Cinco de Mayo is a good reason to reflect on our past as we consider the future. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos will comprise an estimated 29 percent of the U.S. population by 2050, but it’s important to note that we are not a monolith.
We share a common Pan-American history, but our experiences and political persuasions are varied. From California to New York and from Texas to Florida, our stories are adding to the national narrative, enriching our understanding of what it means to be American.
As a U.S.-born Latina, I’m always surprised when people contend Latinos are newcomers to this country. Their words cause the pages of an enchanted history book to flip backward at warp speed in my mind and, with a Harry Potter-like incantation — obliviate historicus — my Hispanic-American family begins to disappear. Just. Like. That.
Gone are my pioneering grandmothers who birthed babies in 19th century adobe houses and knew their way around corn crops, rosaries, horses, cattle and rifles. Gone are my grandfathers who farmed, ranched, hunted and sweated over pickaxes, drills and jackhammers as they labored to industrialize the West.
Gone is my family’s San Luis Valley land, my grandparents’ backyard garden, my mother’s 1950s pencil skirts and 1960s beehive, and the war stories of my great-uncle, stepfather, father, uncles, brother, cousins and nephews who served in nearly every military conflagration of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Gone too are my memories of the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” televised images of the Vietnam War, the moon landing, Woodstock, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys, César Chávez, Watergate, the Bicentennial, and the civil rights, women’s and Chicano rights movements.
By now, Americans know Cinco de Mayo is a day to celebrate Mexican- American culture, but do people really understand the history behind it?
In the United States, the holiday is said to have started in California to mark Mexico’s 1862 victory over invading French forces during the Battle of Puebla.
After the Mexican-American War, many Spanish-surnamed families remained north of the new U.S.-Mexico border, and newly minted Americans likely needed a good reason to celebrate their ethnic pride as they adapted to their powerful new homeland.
After all, Mexico ceded more than a third of its land to the United States, including all or parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
It could not have been easy for Mexican-Americans to adapt to life as a reconquered people in a hybrid subculture shaped by the vestiges of brutal Spanish colonialism, tumultuous Mexican nationalism, echoes of a conquered American-Indian ancestry, and the powerful push of the Yankee culture that rose up around them.
Indeed, Mexican-Americans who know their history often quip, “We did not cross the border; the border crossed us.”
In Colorado, Spanish-speaking settlers migrated from New Mexico’s Taos Valley in 1851 to found San Luis, the Centennial State’s oldest, continuously inhabited town.
My family has lived in Colorado for at least seven generations, and before that in New Mexico for 150 years, yet well-meaning Americans and now — ironically — recent Mexican immigrants often ask me, “What part of Mexico is your family from?”
If I tell the truth — that I don’t have relatives in modern Mexico because my family has always lived on this side of the border — I’m labeled an assimilationist, whitewashed or in denial of my Mexican heritage.
Truthfully, I grew up in southern Colorado listening to rock ‘n’ roll and eating Thanksgiving feasts smothered with green chile. English is my native tongue and the Colorado-New Mexico region is my ancestral homeland.
I am American and Latina — personal identifiers that are not mutually exclusive.
This Cinco de Mayo, if I’m lucky, no one will question my nationality and maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to explain myself — again.
Deborah Méndez Wilson is a Denver-based freelance writer and public relations professional.
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