My favorite pecan pie recipe is from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; its slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in the ’90s in Mexico and grew up with the tantalizing promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This landmark trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional interconnectedness and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate delights: the chance to enjoy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or to buy the clothes Joey Potter wore in Dawson’s Creek, which we also now watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhoods, and with them, our identities.

I attended a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s expanding middle class and took pride in molding us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to college in the U.S. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I thought of myself as not only bicultural but binational too.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the ’40s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico inside the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her one day. Eventually, he did. They had five children. The last of them, my dad, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora but was eligible for U.S. citizenship through his mom.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, around 1997.

My dad was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to have dual nationality, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and, eventually, a Mexican work permit. In the late ’80s, his work permit expired, and he was deported out of Mexico. He crossed the border by foot, over the Laredo Bridge into Texas, carrying the official notice of his deportation from the country of his birth. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench inside O’Hare airport until enough hours had gone by that he could legally return to Mexico, where my mom and 1-year-old sister awaited.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deeply: I was both Mexican and American.

Ever since I can remember, my dad has tried to pass on his U.S. nationality to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he’s never lived in the States (outside of the winters and summers he spent at the family farm in Virginia), he always hit a dead end. Still, I remained convinced that getting my U.S. nationality was just a matter of time. If my grandmother had been American and my father was American, why wouldn’t I be?

When I moved to New York for grad school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my dad to request that I be given permanent U.S. residency through a green card. I could then, after several years, apply for citizenship. The reply from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came in the mail a few weeks later: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I needed to follow-up with the Department of State, which processes the residency applications of U.S. citizen relatives and, eventually, issues the actual green card. Because my case wasn’t eligible for expedited processing, it would have to wait its turn in line. Last time I checked, the Department of State was beginning to process applications submitted in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrating Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

Looking at the waitlist—and knowing I would not have documentation validating my binational identity for decades, at least—shattered something in me. The NAFTA promise that made us middle-class Mexicans think we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican and, as such, not always welcome.

I was reminded of this constantly while living in the States, though always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t pass as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” a woman on the other side of the phone replied when I called a public office asking—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me for the expiration date of my visa; I went out for a few weeks with a guy who ultimately decided he could no longer see me because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee a long-term stay in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I did not belong. I was not who I thought I had been.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out I was eligible for an O-1, also known as the exceptional talent visa. I just had to file the paperwork and wait three months. After some years with the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something felt off.

I knew my privileged education had unlocked a path for immigration that many people are desperate for. I recognized that being able to choose where to build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S. by any means possible wasn’t what I had truly been looking for. What I yearned for was a document that recognized my deep-rooted bond to my grandmother’s home. I had been searching, desperately, for something to validate my identity —papers I could point to that would say “You are of here, and also of there.” Yet documents alone couldn’t give me that. I headed back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City, I rented an apartment far from where I grew up. I began buying my produce at the local mercado instead of Costco, which is where my family usually shopped. My poultry and meat came from a carnicería around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than I ever had; in others, I felt like another digital nomad transplanted from the States to my own country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about going back to the U.S. dissipated, life took me by surprise. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. When considering options for delivering our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the U.S. It would be our way to give our baby dual nationality, opening up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done so and looked up doctors. But I decided against it.

These past few years, I’ve found a certain ease in my singular Mexican identity as I balance both the cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos for breakfast while listening to The Daily, bake peach pie on rainy Mexico City afternoons, and aloofly navigate the non-immigrant alien line at U.S. airports. While citizenship remains locked behind layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex blend of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my dad did to me.

The post The Borders Between My Mexican and American Identities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I tripped over the term NPC, quite literally, on my way to an event the other night. Rushing to get there, I fell right in front of the venue. Embarrassed by how many people had just watched me eat concrete, I texted my friend Claire.

“They’re just NPCs,” she wrote back instantly. “Who cares what they think?”

NPC, the acronym for “non-player character,” is a gamer concept that’s been around for 50 years now. Often thought of as a background character—a villager, a barkeep, a shop owner—who helps to flesh out the world around the protagonist, it can refer to anyone in a game who is not controllable by a human player.

But the way Claire used it speaks to a modern trend: referring to real-life people as NPCs.

It’s no surprise that the concept has taken off today. At a time when chatbots are doing everything from helping you buy a pair of jeans online to answering insurance questions, the idea of interacting with someone who turns out not to be, well, human, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It’s likely one of the reasons that NPC has been gaining prominence, with “non-player character” even making it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary last year.

As the term enters our everyday speech, though, it’s worth asking what we’re actually saying when we call someone an NPC. Already people have weaponized the concept, seized on the NPC label as a means of distinguishing “free thinkers” (themselves) from people whose thoughts and actions are, supposedly, pre-programmed (pretty much everyone else).

But to understand the history of the term NPC is to recognize that this kind of dehumanizing discourse hijacks its original conceit.

Born out of early tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), NPCs were never intended to erase anyone’s personhood or to imply actual humans were mindless automatons. Rather game-builders developed NPCs to do the very opposite: help RPG moderators build a world of possibilities for players.

The term NPC was first popularized by Dungeons & Dragons, created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The genre-defining collaborative storytelling game allowed you to play as your alter ego in an imaginary world brimming with adventure. You could be a fighter, magic-user, cleric, or chief; a human, dwarf, half-elf, or hobbit; as well as lawful, neutral, or chaotic. A designated Dungeon Master (DM) facilitated the game, developing and fleshing out the campaigns you embarked on, and serving as referee and judge when necessary.

Anything (really, anything, the game stressed) could happen. That’s how non-player characters took off; DMs leaned on NPCs to broaden and further story arcs. The original D&D rulebook even included a section dedicated to the “non-player character,” which touched on basic rules of engagement, like what happens when you hire the services of an NPC (they could help if they “receive their pay regularly, are treated fairly, and are not continually exposed to extra-hazardous duty, and receive bonuses when they are taking part in some dangerous venture”).

Signifying the importance of NPCs, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons released “Non-Player Character Records” in 1979. The booklet of blank character sheets helped formalize the concept, allowing DMs to keep track of the abilities, combat skills, descriptions, possessions, and backgrounds of the characters. “No longer will the DM need to worry about lack of continuity or lost records on non-player characters, for these sheets provide the DM with easy-to-store records of the many non-player personalities which populate his or her campaign,” the introductory text promised.

D&D is generally credited by game scholars as the first commercial tabletop RPG. As the genre grew in the late 1970s and ’80s and from there started expanding beyond kitchen tables onto computers and video games, conventions from D&D, including NPCs, followed suit. On screen, these characters could be especially comical, limited by computer programs’ rudimentary movement algorithms and scripted responses. That’s how NPCs gained a reputation for being goofy and robotic. Think of the tavern owner in a video game who never moves from behind the bar, or the stranger on a road who can only repeat canned lines, like, “Hello, fellow traveler, have you heard about the werewolf destroying the crops?”

People have had fun with these characters over the years, dressing up as them and channeling their jerky movements and clunky expressions. Today there’s enough of a niche audience for this kind of content that influencers even imitate NPCs for money.

An anonymous poster on 4chan was likely drawing on this clunky version of the NPC concept in 2016, when they shared a “theory” about a fixed number of souls on Earth, designating non-player characters as “the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us.” Pro-Trump supporters seized on this depiction of the NPC as a means of denigrating liberal activists.

What makes the slur more loaded than, say, “sheeple”—surprisingly not internet-speak but a term that dates back to at least the 1940s—was that NPC implies that the person you’re in ideological disagreement with is not just wrong, but incapable of independent thought and action. This distinction meant that a “mass outcry against, say, serial harassers, racial injustice, or Trumpian ideas,” could be “dismissed as not just inherently uncritical but prima facie evidence of a lack of human consciousness,” wrote journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio in 2018, as an NPC meme featuring Wojak (a blank-faced cartoon character recycled from an earlier 2010 meme) gained prominence.

Far-right watchers have since characterized NPC as a fascist “dog whistle” and a way to dehumanize people. They’ve noted that it’s part of a broader kind of rhetoric that’s leading to extremist violence around the world.

This use of NPC could have a natural expiration date IRL, as the in-game characters themselves evolve. A longtime goal of game designers and programmers has been to make NPCs more believable, and they’re getting closer. Take the simulation game Animal Crossing, which took off during COVID lockdowns; its anthropomorphic villagers are capable of doing most of the same things that playable characters can, and even are assigned specific personality types, like lazy, cranky, sisterly, and smug. While we’re still far from seeing the kind of NPC character promised by “Project Milo,” the graveyarded Microsoft Xbox 360 venture that claimed to have invented an “emotional AI” more than a decade ago, new technological advancements promise to continue to stretch the idea of what an NPC can look like.

Maybe in time, this will push the concept of NPCs in the culture, too, returning it closer to its foundational definition—not someone without free will, but a player like any other in this world we build together. One who, I’d hope, still wouldn’t care about an errant sidewalk stumble.

The post Who You Calling ‘NPC’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The city of Los Angeles, the world’s most famous zócalo, and the word “Latino” are connected by a shared history—a history of people and cultures and languages colliding, explained journalist and novelist Héctor Tobar. Tobar is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” and he was speaking at an event honoring his book and the themes of the prize: community, human connectedness, and social cohesion.

The event at the ASU California Center at the historic Herald Examiner building, titled “What Is a ‘Latino’?”, opened with a recorded reading by the 2024 Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Melanie Almeder, and then the presentation of the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize by Tim Disney, who generously sponsored both awards. “This book drove deeply into the dissonance, the paradox, between our very human compulsion to categorize, separate, and other-ize on the one hand, and our equally human capacity for decency, love, and connection on the other,” said Disney, before turning the microphone over to Tobar.

Tobar then delivered a brief lecture that wove together many threads—much like his book and the history of the word “Latino” itself. “To be Latino,” he said, “is to be a product of the sometimes violent, sometimes amorous mixing of cultures.” The people who built the town known today as Los Angeles, in 1781, didn’t think of themselves as Latino; they were classified according to race and caste labels invented by Spanish authorities. Many of those labels were offensive, Tobar noted, and became even more offensive and granular as the people of the New World mixed more and more—though the process also allowed social mobility that would have been impossible in Europe.

Two centuries later, when Tobar was born in a Los Angeles hospital in 1963, both of his Guatemalan parents were listed as “Caucasian” on his birth certificate, “invited into the safe, privileged ground of American whiteness” in Los Angeles of that time, as other groups had been before them. But decades later, with increased migration from Latin America into California, the ground shifted again—and Tobar, who had always called himself “Guatemalan,” became “Latino,” a word enshrined in the stylebook of the Los Angeles Times, where he was the “Latino columnist.”

“Unfortunately, ‘Latino’ hides our Indigenous and our African heritage, and replaces it with a term whose etymology goes back to Europe and Rome. Like every other ethnic and racial term, ‘Latino’ places a simple, one-dimensional label on relationships that are filled with complexity and nuance,” said Tobar. “Sometimes we wear those terms proudly, and other times they fit us like loose clothes, or like a sign someone stuck on our back. And sometimes, if we don’t fit them, we make up new ones.”

He continued, “To say today that Latino people are a race means only one thing. It means we have a relationship to the United States that is racial.” Yet if race is about power and labor, it is also about resistance and community, said Tobar. “We should treat those [race] labels as artifacts of a human journey, as myths made up to explain what a people are, and as a true story people tell about their families and their dreams. ‘Latino’ is a story of empire, of exploitation, and it’s a story of the work and struggles that have made us into a community in our barrios and the gathering places and the zócalos we call home,” he concluded.

American historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina—who writes about interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship—joined Tobar onstage for a moderated conversation and audience Q&A. They talked about their own Latino and Los Angeles stories, the students Tobar teaches at UC Irvine, and where they find hope for the future.

“A central figure in your book is Wong Kim Ark,” said Molina. What role does he play in Our Migrant Souls?

Tobar explained Ark’s story: born in San Francisco in the late 1800s, he was the son of Chinese immigrants during a time when little legal migration was allowed. After a trip to China, he returned home and was put in immigration detention for months. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in Ark’s favor—that anyone born in the U.S. was an American citizen. Ark’s story resonated with Tobar on many levels, including the fact that his parents were in the U.S. on tourist visas when he was born. Later, Tobar learned about the Chinese community in eastern Guatemala, where his father is from. “Everywhere you look in American and Latin American history, you see this braiding” of peoples and histories, he said.

That braiding is part of the lives of his Latino students, who helped inspire the book—which Molina called “a love letter” to them. She asked Tobar, “What changes have you seen across the years in your students?”

“People have a way of processing traumas and processing things that embarrass them and turning them into something powerful,” said Tobar. For example, the terms “Chicano” and “Cholo” were an insult and a race term, respectively, that eventually took on new meanings. Young Latino people have taken embarrassment or self-consciousness around how they speak Spanish and claimed it for themselves: They are “No Sabo” kids. They have also turned the bureaucratic term DACA on its head, with unDACAmented and DACAmented.

On a more sobering note, Tobar thinks his students “are living in an age with less opportunity than we grew up in. And of more difficult choices.” But they also have an “incredible ease with multiculturalism,” he said, recounting how many of them write about their interracial relationships and families.

“They want to learn more,” said Molina. “They expect those stories to be out there.”

“They’re less tolerant of the erasures, I hope,” said Tobar.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

That hopeful note is central to Our Migrant Souls, which chronicles the pain of Latino history but also the celebration. “What do we need to do to keep that hope alive, to keep the story of Latinos as one of hope?” asked Molina.

“It’s personally never allowing my curiosity to be totally satisfied,” said Tobar, who has found inspiration in queer history. It’s about “embracing the idea that somebody’s going to surprise you in as many positive ways as negative ways,” he said. He added, “There’s lots of accusation, there’s lots of name-calling. But let’s go beyond that and let’s imagine the future we want to create and what that might look like. That to me is the lesson behind this journey of exploration.”

In the audience Q&A, Tobar dug deeper into the multitudinous meanings of “Latino,” and offered more hopeful visions of the future.

“There’s going to be another term later, right?” asked one audience member, echoing Tobar’s argument that “Latino” denies African and Indigenous roots. “What’s going to be next [and] how can we influence the development of that next term?”

“My own personal project now is to understand the roots of Los Angeles and its Indigeneity,” said Tobar. It’s a difficult project—he hasn’t been able to pin down the roots of his own Indigenous heritage—but he believes “Indigeneity has shaped our way of being in Los Angeles. I think that’s one of the ways we can think about what Latino means. It’s absorbed so much indigenous and African culture. It’s our job not to treat it as something exotic but as something that’s as much of our being as the Pilgrims.”

After the Q&A, speakers and audience members gathered for Guatemalan food from Casa Chapina and signature cocktails and mocktails from Vucacious. It was the evening’s second opportunity to mingle and talk. Before the program’s official start, a smaller group of audience members gathered at The Hoxton, across the street, for Zócalo’s inaugural “reading hour,” Zócalo Reads.

Tobar read an excerpt from his book, and then audiences sat and read quietly, or had conversations with strangers about what the border means in their lives, why they love/hate the words Latino or Chicano, and more.

The post Héctor Tobar Peers Deep Into ‘Our Migrant Souls’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2022, I found myself reaching back to my childhood’s favorite monster for literary inspiration.

That year’s midterm elections had brought with them another round of angry MAGA candidates promoting the Trumpian lie of a stolen 2020 election. Part and parcel of their rhetoric was—yet again—an attack on immigrants and anyone who just didn’t fit in with their image of “real” Americans.

Trump’s wrathful rallying conjured images of the torch-bearing mobs of black-and-white horror films. I thought about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 tale—and the inherently political implications of being a “monster” in a society that created you on the one hand and is repulsed by you on the other.

Like that, Chicano Frankenstein was born. In the tradition of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, animators, and graphic artists before me, I wanted to use Frankenstein to explore how, under the right circumstances, anyone can become a destructive force in society. And that sometimes it can be difficult to know who the monster really is.

My first exposure to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus came from the 1931 classic Universal Pictures film adaptation. That celluloid creature imprinted itself on my 5-year-old psyche like no other horror movie of my 1960s childhood.

What was it about the monster—gamely played by Boris Karloff—that captured my imagination from the start? Was it the drooping eyes added by makeup artist Jack Pierce at Karloff’s suggestion that made the creature look half-dead? Or perhaps it was the flat skull shaped in such a way to ease the implantation of a cadaver’s brain? Or maybe the monster’s grunts and growls? I wonder if even back then, lurking in my young mind, there was some connection to, and sympathy for, this monster, who didn’t really mean to hurt anyone, right?

When I read Shelley’s novel for the first time in high school, I was surprised, like so many, to discover that the monster remains nameless throughout the book (the name Frankenstein belonged to his obsessed creator, a doctor who dared play God). But the real shock came when I realized that in the book, the monster learns to read and eventually speak rather eloquently. While the creature of the movie evokes fear and sympathy with his grunting monosyllabism, the monster of Shelley’s novel explains in perfect English what drove him to murder: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”

In both the original Shelley novel and all the adaptations that followed, it’s telling that one plot point has remained more or less the same: Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is eventually shunned by both his creator and society, and it is this rejection that turns the creature into a monster.

I wanted to reflect on that theme in my modern retelling. As I planned my novel, I envisioned the creature not as a singular entity but as a class of people—reanimated corpses who’ve been brought back from the dead to replenish an aging workforce. After a decade’s worth of reanimation, 12 million of these cruelly mocked “stitchers” now walk among us in the United States—including the hero of Chicano Frankenstein. Other than having been brought back to life after a horrific car accident, our hero is just like any other person holding down a job: He earns a paycheck, attends work-related events, rents an apartment, and runs each evening. But having also lost his left arm and leg in the car accident, the man—described as brown-skinned—has had a replacement arm and leg, both of which are white, “stitched” onto his body. The mismatched limbs flag him as a reanimated subject, marking him for jeers from people who disdain the reanimated population as monsters created by science, who threaten to replace “real” Americans. The story follows his journey, as he attempts to maneuver a world that both needs and resents him.

In my worldbuilding, I determined that the reanimation process should wipe the subjects’ first lives while saving their education and skills. By setting that rule, I could mirror the immigrant’s journey of leaving behind home, family, and friends to become a stranger in a strange land. The “stitcher” epithet also let me explore how those who resent immigrants often rely on dehumanizing language (such as “illegals”) to strip people of their individuality. The irony, of course, is that our country needs immigrants at all levels of employment to replenish our aging population.

For those of us whose “belonging” is constantly questioned, Shelley’s monster is a kindred spirit. As a Chicano, I have experienced too many situations where my presence in this country was questioned, and my self-worth challenged. For example, I remember the time when my football coach in high school called me a “stupid Mexican,” or when police stopped and frisked me when I was just walking in my neighborhood in my teens. My parents and I were born in the U.S.—still, on an Amtrak trip from Los Angeles to San Diego a few years ago, an ICE agent asked what city I was born in.

Writing Chicano Frankenstein, I reckoned with the enduring question Shelley left for us: Who is the real monster? Put another way, what person is truly free from bias? Even the most open-minded person carries assumptions, accumulated at home, work, and the world beyond. It can take great effort to see another person’s full worth.

In Chicano Frankenstein, I present an extreme through a virulently bigoted president concerned with her “legacy,” who wields the specter of the unfamiliar to goose her midterm numbers. But even my character Faustina Godínez, the hero’s love interest, wonders at one point if she could ever have a life with a person who has no history.

This range of behavior makes sense to me. I am a writer, but I’ve also been a practicing lawyer for almost 40 years. I’ve learned in that time that there is seldom a “slam dunk” case. Most disagreements come in shades of gray, and there are two (or more) sides to every conflict. I’ve also observed how an irrational fear of difference is often the driving force behind such behavior. Like the fictional president in Chicano Frankenstein, people throughout history have weaponized “the other”: through slavery, Jim Crow laws, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the so-called “Operation Wetback” immigration enforcement campaign of the summer of 1954, which resulted in the mass deportation of at least 300,000 Mexican nationals.

Most people at least attempt to quell their biases. But fearing those who are different appears to be an intractable human trait that continues to be used to turn others into monsters. Regrettably, I suspect that the monster may very well be within each of us.

The post Who Is the Real Monster in <i>Frankenstein</i>? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In March 2020, I stopped cutting my hair. Like many, I wasn’t about to risk a COVID infection for a trip to Floyd’s barbershop. Unlike many, however, I have yet to return to the barbershop chair. I am now 41, my hair falls halfway down my back, and I have almost no clue what to do with it.

I never intended to go four years without a haircut. I teach fourth grade. During year one of the pandemic, in the name of social distancing, our school halved class sizes and moved us into a gymnasium. Suddenly I had 13 students, polished wooden floors, and a regulation basketball net overhead. We ended each day with the Rocky theme song and a session shooting hoops.

If all 13 students made shots consecutively, I told them, I’d go home, cut my hair, and donate it. We graphed their collective progress as a math exercise. In year two of the pandemic, I made a similar deal with my new class. And the next. And again, this past year. You can guess my students’ accuracy from the length of my hair.

As my hair grew, however, I learned that although it had been with me for four decades, I really didn’t know it. I didn’t know how to care for it or style it. I didn’t know how to deal with the escapees that showed up in my shower drain, my keyboard, my headphones, my floor.

My first pandemic school picture day, I made an attempt at presentability with a fine-toothed travel comb I found at the bottom of a bathroom vanity. The result was a frizzy poof with the consistency of high-grade fairground cotton candy. We were in line when a student asked me,

“You’re getting your picture taken like that?”

“What should I do?” I replied.

“Put it up.”

If you flip to the faculty pages of our 2020-2021 yearbook, you will agree that I should have taken her advice.

Hair-care manuals abound. I know because I have borrowed all of them from the McArthur Public Library of Biddeford, Maine. But as a teacher, I know that humans learn best by observing others: parents, siblings, friends, siblings of friends. They teach us, through example and instruction, how to tie our shoes, how to talk to girls, how to roll a joint, and everything else that’s important about growing up.

Because long hair is an almost exclusively female trait in America, the cultural knowledge of caring for long hair is passed down almost exclusively between women. Four of my female students, in 2022, spent an hour every Wednesday in an American Girl Dolls after-school “enrichment” class where they made crafts and styled their dolls’ hair. At 10 years old, these girls had spent more time with doll hair than I’d spent on my real hair.

I arrived at middle age without knowing how to do something as simple as combing my hair without making tangles worse. How do I put my hair back without unsightly strands escaping the elastic? How to manage the frizz? What the hell am I supposed to do with the short wispy hairs sticking up every which way?

“Oh, those are called flyaways,” a friend’s sister told me.

“Fly-aways,” I repeated softly, as if learning a new language—which I was.

I learned how to dry my hair at age 40. I was at a Fourth of July party. A female friend was aghast—no other word can describe her precise facial expression—after I mimed the three-step post-shower process I’d practiced my entire life:

Bunch towel in hands
Place bunched towel on wet head
Rub towel as violently as possible

Turns out this is not the best way to dry long hair. This is the best way to damage long hair. The proper way to dry long hair requires the tender patience you might employ upon rescuing a litter of frightened newborn bunnies from a rainstorm. Pat gently. Squeeze ever-so-lightly with a soft towel. Allow plenty of time to air-dry. Blow-dry if you must, keeping the heat six to eight inches from the fur, to avoid overdried patches.

The French Revolution ushered in a wave of short hairdos with names like La Bastille and La Sacrifice and La Victime. The last featured a close shave to the nape of the neck, then a “shingling” of the hair up the back of the head. It mimicked the cut nobility received prior to being guillotined—hence “The Victim”—to provide the executioner with the best line of sight. The public often accompanied La Victime with a red ribbon tied around the neck—celebrating the destruction of the ruling class. All the popular styles during the French Revolution were short. Long hair was a sign of royalty. Leisure. Excess.

I get it: Long hair takes time. Investment. Practice. Product. Help.

After four years with long hair, I’ve learned a few things. Some activities are less enjoyable (pushups, middle-of-the-night pillow adjustments, walking with wind at my back, driving with the windows down, eating cereal) while other activities are more enjoyable (skateboarding, headbanging, pond hockey, imitating that scary girl from The Ring).

I still don’t know if there’s any grand significance to being a man in middle age with a head of long hair. Some days I see my hair as a symbol of confidence: look at me, unbothered by gender norms, unconcerned with social conventions, comfortable with who I am, grateful for the genetics that allow me to push out roots while I still can. Other days, I wonder if my hair is a blinking reminder of my insecurities: my age, my vanity, my masculinity, my privilege, my desire to be taken even a little bit seriously.

School picture day always seems to arrive a little bit sooner than the year before. By the next one, will I have my fly-aways under control? Will I even have long hair? I don’t know. But what I do know is that my long hair has taught me that, halfway through life, I’m still getting to know myself.

The post How I Learned to Blowdry My Hair at 40 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances to graphic novels and games. We spent the semester framing Shakespeare as an idea we all participate in making.

The class was inspired by a 2019 episode of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast that discussed Shakespeare and his plays’ racism, sexism, and antisemitism. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s good for you. He’s universally good for you,” said ASU professor, theater practitioner, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director Ayanna Thompson. “We have to make that a more complex narrative.”

Thompson and the advocacy of the RaceB4Race community, a conference series and scholarly network galvanizing conversations about Shakespeare’s digestibility, particularly around race, challenged my students and me to build a more nuanced relationship to the Bard. We read plays by Shakespeare alongside adaptations of his work, approaching the materials as more than plots or settings or characters and changes therein—and instead as complex processes of belonging.

We spent part of our first meeting examining our own identities and interrogating the stories past classes and popular media had fed us about Shakespeare and his work. What were the sources—play texts, narratives or rhetoric (from parents, teachers, friends, the news), and media (movie adaptations, performances, YouTube videos, etc.)—that shaped our relationship to Shakespeare? How did we feel about him?

This framing can be deeply meaningful for students, who are navigating multiple spheres of influence: professional aspirations, societal or familial expectations, their own interests and passions. They are also grappling with knowledge—career content knowledge, self-knowledge, communal knowledge—and responsibility. To whom am I responsible? In what ways? Shakespeare and those who adapt his plays offer powerful opportunities for thinking critically about such epistemological and ethical questions.

To prime my students for questioning Shakespeare and their knowledge of him, our first unit didn’t start with a play; instead, we focused on Shakespeare’s biography and historical record. I sent them on a treasure hunt through the amazing resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection of archival documents around the Bard’s life. My students got to build out the gaps in history, wrestling with what we don’t know about the life of Shakespeare and his authorial connection to his plays. We then used movies to visualize these holes; we asked if two very different fictional biopics, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and 2011’s Anonymous, would exist if the historical record had different documents in it.

Framing Shakespeare’s history in part as a narrative that is created and interpreted allowed my students to think more expansively about his literary authorship and cultural power.

Then, throughout the course, we treated each play and adaptation like a helix, where both texts twist recursively back upon each other. But the texts also connect to other authors’ lives and work. We know that Shakespeare relied on numerous source texts for his plays and that he influenced his contemporaries. And adaptations do not solely rely on Shakespeare either—they draw on many literary and cultural connections. We traced textual belonging as well as different types of thematic and material belonging—political, familial, racial, historical, gendered, peer group—across primary documents, play texts, and adaptations in various media forms. Studying adaptions in this way places Shakespeare in a larger world—or rather, worlds—both his own and ours.

Oxford professor Emma Smith attributes our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare to “gappiness,” which she defines as “all the things that we don’t know, the space there is for our creativity.” She says, “These plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience.” In the classroom, attention to “gappiness” gave my students a feeling of agency. With this intellectual space, they could wrestle with whether they hated, loved, felt indifferent to, or were curious about Shakespeare, all at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet—a favorite in high school curricula—elicited an interesting range of reactions. Despite initial grumbles about having to re-read a play, my students enjoyed exploring how their own maturation and life experiences shifted their relationship to the story. Juliet tended to rise higher in their estimation than previously, while Romeo fared worse. The students, having now had the experience of choosing a college and leaving home, felt the stakes of Juliet’s decision to defy her parents and make a choice for her own life.

We next read Ronald Wimberly’s 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats, which focuses on the character of Tybalt and is set in what the author describes as an “alternate universe New York where dueling is part of the [street] culture” that led to the hip-hop of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic has a racially diverse cast and a Black protagonist in Tybalt, and samples an array of influences, of which Shakespeare is just one.

Wimberly speaks about how some audiences consume Black artists’ work through a tokenizing gaze—seeing it as valuable only because it makes them feel that they are being inclusive. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the hot-tempered Tybalt (whom another character calls “the prince of cats”) sets off the violence that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the two lovers. But by focusing on Tybalt and his relationships, Wimberly shifts how we understand death in the story. Where Shakespeare focuses on the “star-crossed lovers” and their tragedy, Wimberly attends to the bonds within families and among community members. He also suggests that Shakespeare himself tokenizes his minor characters in this play—stereotyping them as barriers for his main characters to rebel against but refusing to “get more into the price of violence for all involved.”

Tybalt and Prince of Cats led us to one of our most powerful meta-explorations of how we should engage Shakespeare at the college level. We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare, but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship. We can even choose not to discuss Shakespeare when talking about these texts. And throughout, we can interrogate the roles of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia in the plays, and explore our own and others’ agencies as authors of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, these choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author. Framing “Shakespeare” as a process of belonging—one that we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part—means we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach—and in what ways Shakespeare belongs to each of us.

The post Who Is Shakespeare For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not really American, and I couldn’t be prouder of that.

I hope you, my fellow Californians, feel the same way.

Because sometimes there’s no greater compliment than an intended insult.

This time, the backhanded praise came in the results of a Los Angeles Times survey, conducted early this year by the Canadian firm Leger, which examined how Americans feel about California.

Among the findings was that half of American adults believe our state is in decline. The survey made headlines for laying bare how much American conservatives dislike the Golden State. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed say that the national impact of California has been “net negative.” (We are merely the home of the world’s leading technology and entertainment industries!)

As the kicker, nearly half of Republicans consider California—and Californians by extension—to be “not really American.”

The media reports about the poll treated this label “not really American” as harsh criticism. The L.A. Times dwelled extensively on how such an outcome reflected a terribly divided and polarized country. Two of its columnists, simultaneously taking the bait and taking leave of their senses, proceeded to defend California as being very American.

Why bother? I mean, who in their right mind wants to be “really American” these days?  In this century, our country has become defined by its anti-democratic fascism, rage, and madness. Being considered less than American by other Americans should be considered a badge of honor. Reading the poll, I wanted to print up “Not Really American” T-shirts and hand them out at a big California-themed party.

Disdain from the rest of the country isn’t new, either. In fact, it’s one of the few things that never seems to change here. The first best-selling book about California, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction—published in 1855 by a Southern white supremacist named Hinton R. Helper—called California “an ugly cheat” and said, “there is but lank promise in the future.” If only you could see us now, Hinton!

Among California’s partisans, the fact that the state doesn’t really fit in the United States has always been a signal virtue. The journalist Carey McWilliams, perhaps our state’s greatest interpreter, wrote in 1949: “One cannot, as yet, properly place California in the American scheme of things.” He then added: “To understand this tiger all rules must be laid to one side. All the copybook maxims must be forgotten. California is no ordinary state; it is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception among the American states.”

Even Republicans and conservatives, back when they ran the state, once considered California’s singularity a virtue. But in the past two generations, as California has grown more liberal, our distinctiveness has come to be seen as disloyalty.

Not long before his death, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that California “does not count” as a real American state or as part of the U.S. West. Tellingly, he included this insult in his dissent from the landmark 2015 court decision legalizing same-sex marriage—which makes the justice’s ugly remark just another compliment.

Californians ought to be prepared for many more such compliments. Donald Trump’s backers have published plans for an initiative called Project 2025, which would treat California as an American enemy—because, of course, our values are not really American.

The plans seek not just to overturn California policies, but to punish Californians for having backed them in the first place.

For instance, California’s “un-American” support for women’s rights and reproductive rights would be met with a Trump federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, as well as harsh penalties for Californians and others who continued to provide the services.

Our wise extension of health insurance, including Medicaid, to all our people, regardless of their legal status, would also be targeted.

In addition, we’d lose the power to establish higher-than-American standards for pollution and air quality. Our terribly un-American efforts to fight climate change would be similarly reversed and penalized.

Naturally, we’d pay a price for our not-really-American commitment to gun control. And we’d pay for protecting immigrants from Trump’s promised military-led deportation scheme, which is all but certain to sweep up U.S. citizens too, since half of California’s kids have an immigrant parent.

Trump has also promised to overturn the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright citizenship, which would take away rights from more than five million naturalized Californians.

In this context, is it any wonder that a majority of our not-really American state is ready to leave before the Americans kick us out? According to another recent poll from the Independent California Institute, 58% of California adults say we’d be better off than we are now if California peacefully became independent—its own country—in the next 10 years.

An even higher number, 68%, say California would be better off if, instead of seceding, the state obtained a special autonomous status within the U.S. that allowed for more control of our land and infrastructure.

All that said, while many Americans seem to hate California, we don’t hate Americans back. The same Independent California Institute poll asked Californians if they felt more Californian or American.

Fifty-one percent said that they felt equally Californian and American. Only 21% said they felt more Californian. Still, 63% said they wouldn’t live anywhere in America other than California, our less-than-fully American home.

For such a loving people, the correct response—when faced with glorious insults about our lack of Americanness—is to lean into the hatred. How? Californians might borrow from FDR who, in countering wealthy critics who saw Depression relief as a communist plot, declared: “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”

But that might be too American a reference for our state. Instead, let Californians answer the American Ahabs with the love of the Gospel of John, Chapter 15, Verses 18 and 19, when Jesus tells his disciples:

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

The post I’m Proud to Be Un-American appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…” opens Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets, a study devoted to the hue that spurred a Picasso period, the blues of the Deep South, and Yves Klein, the artist who even turned urine blue.

I, too, have fallen in love with a color—it was a bit obsessive. For me, Brown has always been everywhere, is everywhere. But to truly love it, I had to learn to see it anew, to meet it again and again in various forms, own it, and honor it. Only then, in Brown, I found a place to define myself and grow.

What is Brown? We brown-nose, we bake brownies, we live in brownstones, we have brownouts, and to quiet the clamor we listen to brown noise.

For me, Brown was first Queens, New York, aka the World’s Borough. Home to 130 different spoken languages—Spanish, Russian, Korean, Greek, Urdu, and Tagalog, to list just a few—my hometown represents over 120 countries. On 107-17 64th Road, 11375, Brown was everywhere, so like the fish in the sea that doesn’t know water from air, I didn’t know how special it was.

Still I remember being a kid faced with the dilemma of coloring myself on a blank sheet of paper, and I couldn’t color myself in: “None of these colors look like me.” I mean, of course, if I wanted to, I could use the peach crayon indicated for “flesh”—but whose flesh? So instead I opted to make myself green and purple and orange. Like when you go out to get a Band-Aid and it doesn’t match your skin—so you go with the colorful ones, with cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny or the Flintstones on them.

Brown exploded into my life in 2018. I was living in Los Angeles, doing the Hollywood thing, and one night I was invited to see Ta-Nehisi Coates—a person many have called our modern-day James Baldwin—speak at the public library in downtown Los Angeles. I’d never heard of him before. But my friend insisted he was a big deal.

Coates spoke about Black and white, and then he spoke some more about Black and white. Everybody was filled with awe, and the occasional “Yes, yes, brother.” And it was well-earned; it was intellectual church.

When it came time for questions, I hesitated. I really didn’t want to say anything, because at the time, I wasn’t a raise-your-hand kind of person. I didn’t trust I had anything of value to say. But I knew I needed to ask him a question now or I would regret it forever. So, I asked: “Black and white, that’s all I hear, Black and white. As a Brown man, a Dominican, Colombian, Latino in this world, where does that leave me in the conversation?”

Coates took a short breath and responded, “Not in it.”

“Not in it?” I asked.

“Not in it,” he replied.

The moderator snatched back my microphone. They moved on to the next question, and I sat down like a child reprimanded for asking a stupid question with a simple and obvious answer.

I was dumbfounded. I wasn’t in this conversation? What a curse to be told you do not exist in such a vital conversation in America, I thought.

And so my obsessive journey with Brown began. I was a baby learning to walk again, tripping and falling all the way across the room.

After the talk, I was supposed to go to dinner with some friends, but too keyed up, I went home instead. I stared up at the ceiling of my small, Little Armenia studio, wondering: “Not in it? Why am I not in it? Where am I? Where are the Brown bodies? Where are our stories and our voices? Where are my father and mother? Where are the people I love?”

These questions began to consume every inch of my life.

For a while after, I could no longer do anything without the weight of race in it, without seeing or hearing this not-in-it-ness. It was exhausting, I couldn’t watch a movie, or go to the park with all the joggers and dog owners, or read the news, or get a cup of coffee, or go on a date. Even a haircut paralyzed me. If I cut the curls off, am I losing my identity? If I go traditional crew-cut, will that make me more ethnically ambiguous, and is that what is wanted of me by Hollywood, by media, by culture? Will that push me closer to some sort of “success”? To cut or not to cut? 

Then, some six months later, I saw a solo performance by the Salvadoran American playwright Brian Quijada. It was called Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Brian tells the story of a question he once asked a teacher when his class was learning about Rosa Parks during a Black History Month lesson. Looking around his public school room, he saw white kids and Black kids and wondered, first to himself, and then, out loud to the teacher: “What about Brown Hispanic people? Where were ‘we’ when all of this was going on? Where did we sit on the bus?” The teacher told him, “You weren’t there.”

This got at exactly what I’d been feeling—it’s impossible that we weren’t there. On August 28, 1963, when MLK led the march on Washington, out of the 200,000 to 300,000 people who attended, thousands were Latinos—many of them Puerto Ricans from NYC. This is largely because MLK asked Gilberto Gerena Valentín, then president of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, to get the Latino population to turn out. For King, having a Latino presence was necessary. He said to the masses, “There is discrimination not only against Blacks, but also against Puerto Ricans and Hispanics.”

We were there when there were white water fountains and Black water fountains, white bathrooms, and Black bathrooms. We, Latinos, Native, Indigenous, Mixed, Middle Eastern, Asians, and other underrepresented communities were there, facing our own discrimination, somewhere in the middle of Black and white.

America is becoming Browner every day. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in about 25 years, the nation’s population will become “majority-minority.”

Each and every one of us wants to be a part of something. We want to walk into a room and know: I belong here. But there isn’t a sense of cohesive Brown identity.

Being in this middle, fluid space can feel at times like there is no separation between up and down, right and wrong, fail and pass, this and that, his and her.

Because it is such a wide category, so vast, for a time, my own individuality, my own specificity, my own “Christopher Rivas-ness” felt lost.

But since I have become obsessed with Brown, and have started to see it for what it truly is, now I embrace the millions of complex shades it holds. Because to say, “I am Brown,” is to say, in this Black / white world, I am somewhere in the middle—a space beyond dualistic and binary thinking. There are no fixed endpoints. Nothing is ever set in stone. In Brownness we are always becoming.

Looking back to that night in 2018 when I was told I existed outside of the Black/white conversation of race in America, I still feel like Coates wasn’t wrong: there is still a very clear line in the sand, a clear divide in our binary world between Black/white. Though that conversation was shocking and hurtful, it helped me engage with the alchemic power and privilege of my Brownness, and how to best use my privilege of being able to navigate the middle and sometimes play both sides.

Now, when I think about Brown, I think about it as both color and concept. It is the color of roots. So many pigments of Brown come from and indicate dirt—from which everything grows; our sustenance, the trees that give us the air we breathe.

I can now celebrate my cultural, ethnic, and racial identity and bring to light some of the issues and problems we face. In short, I can now put myself in it and carry my Brownness proudly.

The post What Does Brown Mean? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I thought they died out,” a woman remarked flippantly to my friend just the other day. She, like many Indians, has long believed that Anglo-Indians ceased to exist when the British left the subcontinent. But despite a recent Indian government effort to strip us of our legislative protections after a bogus census count, we have endured.

I am Anglo-Indian—AI, as we are commonly known. I am not dead. In fact, there are over 350,000 of us in India today. And our history tells the story of a group of people that straddle two worlds, offering a glimpse into the complexity of colonial and postcolonial life. It is also the story of how a small minority group has nurtured a deep sense of community for hundreds of years in Indian society, which has both embraced us and held us out as vestiges of a foreign occupation.

Yet we have remained invisible in most colonial histories. Article 366(2) of the 1950 India constitution defined an AI as “a person whose father, or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line, is or was of European descent, but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is, or was, born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein, and not established there for temporary purposes only.” My childhood friend Barry O’Brien, in his exhaustive book The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait Of A Community, traces the story of AIs, “one of the oldest and largest communities of mixed descent people in the world,” back to 1498 “when Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, set foot on the shores of Calicut—a whole century before the British arrived in India.”

All my grandparents—Wilfred Mayer, Mary Michael, Benjamin D’Monte, and Vida Chatelier—were born in British-ruled India, as were their parents and most of their grandparents. My parents, George Mayer and Alicia D’Monte, were born before India won independence in 1947.

My family spread out across the subcontinent following the veins of the growing railway network. My grandfather Benjamin D’Monte was an engine driver who succumbed to lung cancer after a brief life spent shoveling coal into the belching boilers of English engines. His daughters, my mother, and her sister, Lourdes, grew up in a railway colony in the southern Indian town of Podanur.

Moira’s parents, Alicia and George Mayer, at their wedding in 1965. Courtesy of author.

Annual Prize Day at Frank Anthony Public School, with leaders of the Anglo-Indian community seated in the front. Courtesy of Karen Mayer.

From left to right: George Mayer, Moira (Mayer) Shourie, Jill (Mayer) Morris, and Alicia Mayer at the All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) Ball in 1995. Courtesy of author.

Anglo-Indian leaders at an All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) in 1980. From left to right: George Mayer, Josep Fusté, Maj. Gen Williams, and Malcolm Booth. Courtesy of author.

Over centuries, Anglo-Indians have formed composite identities in the multiracial population of India. Like our forebearers, AIs are Christian and multilingual: our mother tongue is English, and we often speak Hindi and the languages and dialects of the places we originated from (like Konkani, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu). For generations, we married mostly within our community. We exist outside the Hindu caste system, and have been referred to in derogatory terms like half-caste, kuccha bachha (half-baked child), and no one’s favorite, “bastards of the British.”

We have endured slurs and been alienated by our own people. We have been made the punching bag of every nationalist politician. The Indian stereotypes of Christians in general and AIs in particular are promiscuous, drunk, lazy louches. Hindi movies reinforce this idea by naming cocktail waitresses—symbols of loose morals—Mary. It was particularly harrowing for my parents to raise three daughters in a society that saw girls wearing skirts as fair game for sexual harassment.

This alienation had at least one positive effect: AI women gravitated toward careers that went against the restrictive gender norms of Indian society, working in public-facing jobs as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and flight attendants. As people with professional training and college degrees and a mastery of speaking English, many AI families rose into the middle class within a generation of India’s independence.

Our in-between status also created cohesion. In 1926, Sir Henry Gidney formed the All India Anglo-Indian Association to create a central financial, political, and cultural hub for our community. Among its early leaders was Frank Anthony, a London-educated lawyer, who in 1942 negotiated with Gandhi, Nehru, and leaders of the independence movement to enshrine legally-protected representation for Anglo-Indians in the infant country. Still, at that time, many AIs left India along with the British and emigrated to other Commonwealth countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

But AIs have found ways to keep our subculture alive through music, food, and the annual general meeting. AGMs are usually held during the Dussehra-Diwali holiday season in October and cover a wide range of issues, from education and sports to civic participation. While our parents engaged delegates from all across the country in debates about the future of our community in the great hall of Frank Anthony Public School in Delhi, we kids played childhood games that morphed into teenage dance parties that blossomed into romantic relationships. Every year new couples found love, new romances were celebrated, new babies were christened. Moira Georgina Mayer was one such baby, crowned “Most Beautiful” in 1973, and paraded by Mr. Anthony’s wife, Olive, or “Beaut,” as she was affectionately known. And so we Anglo-Indians ensured our longevity and our sense of identity, even as a mere 0.01% of the Indian population.

I remember Christmas dances filled with the music of our very own Cliff Richard (born Harry Rodger Webb in Lucknow in 1940) and Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold Dorsey in Madras in 1936). Where ladies copied fashions and hairstyles sported by Hollywood stars like Merle Oberon (born Estelle Thompson in Bombay in 1911). And the menu consisted of dishes like glassy, pepper water, jalfrezi, country captain, and yellow rice with ball curry, a bed of turmeric-tinged coconut rice with a spicy tomato-based meatball curry. After all the uncles and aunties turned in for the night, we teenagers would bring out guitars and makeshift drum sets for spontaneous jam sessions, dancing along to ABBA, Lobo, Boney M., and Shakin’ Stevens. Often, a power outage would send us out to the school’s cricket field, where our neighbors from the surrounding Lajpat Nagar colony would pour out onto their balconies for respite from the oppressive heat and to enjoy the spectacle of Anglo-Indian youngsters partaking in wild revelry. On those nights the unofficial AI anthem was “Roll Out the Barrel,” a song that perfectly captures our lightheartedness, and love for a dance and a stiff drink to wash off the day.

I moved away from India to the U.S. when I was 24. Because I didn’t marry an Anglo-Indian man, my children are not AIs. But I continue to share the rich and hybrid culture we made our own with them. And so, the essence of so much of my community survives. I feel that they sense it in the way I speak, in the AI lingo I use when speaking with my sisters that sends my sons into conniptions (“Come on men Moira-girl, chuck off in the mouth,” which is AI-speak for “have a bite to eat, Moira”). And in the subtlest of my mannerisms. And not least in the food that nourishes us, often drawn from the handwritten cookbook my own mother gave me as a parting gift before I boarded my flight to Boston for graduate school, filled with recipes for Nana’s roast, bloody cutlets, mixed grill, and that signature dish of Anglo-Indians everywhere: yellow rice and ball curry.

The Anglo Indians Favourites Playlist:

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