Becoming human [guest post]

As a mixed-race, mixed-nationality, second-generation Latino American, my identity has been in constant flux for much of my young life.Born in Humboldt Park, and surrounded by my dad’s side of the family, who seemed to end every other word with “-ao,” I was sure I was 100-percent boricua — albeit, a dark one with a lot of indigenous blood coursing through my capillaries. My grandfather Ines, whom everyone called “Papi Two,” was a short, bald old man whose dark skin made him look like a coffee bean wearing a golf cap and a white mustache. My grandmother, Doña Ana, whom everyone naturally called “Mami Two,” was an equally diminutive old white lady with red hair that made her look like a much aged Lucille Ball.

Now, here’s where things started to get confusing for me.

When I was younger, I thought Papi Two was an indigenous Puerto Rican, because I didn’t know Puerto Rican could be black, too. I also thought – and have no choice but to believe to this day – that Mami Two was Sicilian, because that’s what someone told me once upon a time.

Meanwhile, I was entirely oblivious to my mother’s family’s race and nationality. My maternal grandmother, Doña Blanca, owned a house just a few block from the park, and since my mom and younger aunt seemed to speak fluent boricua, I figured they were just light-skinned Puerto Ricans. The one anomaly was my grandma – whom I referred to as “Baca” when I was too young to pronounce her name. “Ita,” as I later called her, spoke a clear and enunciated Spanish, and my mom and her two sisters addressed each other as “vos” – though I first thought they were saying “boss” with an accent.

As you can tell, there were a lot of things I didn’t know growing up. No one bothers to tell a Latino kid anything. Los niños are treated like latecomers to a party that’s already in full swing.

It was only sometime after my mom gave up on trying to fix my dad and our family fled to the Northwest Suburbs that I learned my mom had been born in a faraway land called “Santa Lucía.” Whenever my mother’s family would get together – which was often, after the exodus – they would recount stories from the village they’d left behind more than a decade before I was even born. It was during these gatherings that I learned Santa Lucía was in a country called “Honduras,” which was in a place called “Central America,” which was south of Mexico but north of South America.

Ita’s maiden name was Lopez-Brooks. Her father was a civil servant in the capital city of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry. Her mother was the daughter of a well-to-do English capitalist by way of New York City — George W. Brooks was an engineer who came to Honduras before the turn of the century during the silver rush.

Much to my dismay, not much is known about my maternal grandfather, however. The two things I have of him are his name – Nikolai Silacci – and where he was from – the former Yugoslavia. I once worked as server in a restaurant that hired a lot of South Slavs, and when I asked them about the name I’d been given, they told me it was probably Croatian.

Anyway, back to the story.

As it turned out, my family had moved to a suburb with a strong Mexican enclave. I’m not sure I’d met a Mexican person before we moved there in the third grade, but my contact with Mexicans brought me to the realization that, not only were Honduras not like Puerto Ricans, they weren’t like Mexicans either. Mexicans spoke a Spanish I had trouble understanding – nothing like my grandma’s easy Spanish – and they ate strange foods, like mole and chilaquiles.

I remember being reprimanded by Ita for using my tortillas to make tacos from the meal she’d prepared. “We don’t do that,” she instructed. “We roll them in one hand and eat with the other.” (Ita later went on to become president of the Honduran Society of Chicago.)

And so, just as my mom had done in Humboldt Park decades earlier, I became a cultural mutt. But while my mom was a Honduran parading around as a Puerto Rican, I became a Honduran-Puerto Rican in Mexican clothing – quite literally. (I was, at one time, a full-blown cholo.)

But it was while reading the great thinkers of the past that I found a community where I felt I truly belonged – a community of thought. Here were a group of people connecting to me through the centuries that divided us. I bonded with them immediately, more than I had with my own friends and the people in my family. I understood them. We shared the same worries and the same hopes. I wanted to live in the world Rousseau and Paine had championed. I was as depressingly sanguine and driven to know as Adams and Lincoln. I was vexed by and compelled to explain the same things that vexed and compelled Clemens, Mencken and Baldwin.My mixed background made it easy for me to reject all racial, ethnic or nationalistic loyalties. If I’m going to claim pride for being black, white and indigenous, I might as well claim pride for being a human being — and who isn’t proud to be human? (PETA, maybe.) Likewise, if I’m going to claim pride for being an American, a Honduran, a Puerto Rican, a Brit, a Spaniard, a Croatian and an Italian, I might as well declare myself a citizen of the world.

The late Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” I, as a Latino of a multifarious background, have given up trying to pinpoint whether I’m mostly Honduran, mostly Puerto Rican or mostly whatever, because clearly I’m not mostly either of those things. If I discovered today that I was mostly Honduran, only to discover tomorrow that I was in fact mostly Puerto Rican, I doubt the news would alter me one bit. And the same goes for my Latino-ness and European-ness.