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.

This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not the only one benefiting from this lesson. When my mother, Alicia Mayer, flies in from India and stays with us at our home in West L.A., my friends invite themselves over for lunch, dinner, and even breakfast, because she is incapable of cooking small servings and hates to see leftovers. My kitchen is then filled with simmering pots, intoxicating smells, and hungry people.

Her desire to feed and nourish stems from her life’s calling as a teacher. The school she runs in Dehra Dun—a small town in the foothills on the Indian side of the Himalayas—caters to children with learning disabilities, and those who have fallen between the cracks in a sprawling mass education system that misses children with alternative learning styles. On a recent visit to Los Angeles, she was eyeing my sons’ old laptops, and when I offered to buy her new ones for her school, she said that her students would feel intimidated by shiny new computers.

It’s this ability to see true value in the slightly tarnished that also makes her such an ace in the kitchen.

Her town in northern India is known for producing the highest quality basmati rice, unmistakable in its fragrance and long-grained fluffiness. Rice is the canvas on which the intricate flavors of Indian food are painted. However, even the most complex curry has a humble beginning in chopped onions and tomatoes.

Make that a very humble beginning. When I took her to Gelson’s, as part of a daughter’s attempt to impress her with L.A.’s high-quality grocery produce, she looked at the beautifully ripe and polished tomatoes and said that she would feel bad cutting them up for a curry. The neat, well-lit aisles felt more like museum installations than a grocery store to her. So I took her to Whole Foods instead—after all, their produce is laid out in a more rustic décor. But there she complained that they didn’t even have “basic” ingredients like curry leaves and bitter gourds. (Sorry Amazon/Whole Foods, you’re going to have to ramp up your world food offerings to impress my mother!)

Enter Leticia Lara, our energetic home cook, who specializes in Mexican food. She took my mother to the mercados of East L.A., which turn out to be a paradise for Indian cooks. My mother joyfully picked out fruits and vegetables from the rejected produce areas, because those make the best ingredients for curry. Unripe mangoes can be turned into a savory-tangy chutney. Slightly moldy eggplants are smoked and tossed with fried onions into a bharta. And discarded flour tortillas are transformed into casings for spicy samosas.

Indian and Mexican food share several basic ingredients. Rice is a standard side dish for a curry or mole; tortillas or roti can be rolled up or broken off and used in place of silverware; boiled or refried beans and lentils cut the spiciness of a kabab or fajita. Cumin adds earthy goodness to protein, turmeric gives rice a golden glow, and cilantro is liberally used as garnishing in both cuisines. And what’s a good tortilla chip or poppadum without a dash of red chilies sprinkled on top?

Leticia and my mother have ventured into homespun Indian-Mexican fusion dishes, much to the delight of my children. We eagerly dine on sopes topped with shredded Tandoori chicken, burritos filled with flavorful vegetable pulao, and black beans seasoned with dried red chilies and mustard seeds.

Their collaborative efforts in the kitchen spring out of each woman’s need to, quite literally, bring something to the table. When Alicia drizzled her mint-cilantro chutney atop Leticia’s Mexican street tacos, we reeled with the burst of unexpected flavor and spice.

That got them started on their wonderful collaboration. They soon realized their mutual preference for starting every recipe from scratch without the shortcuts of the average home cook, like using frozen chopped vegetables or a pre-mixed marinade. And most specially, they both share the hallmark of a great cook, whose aromas draw people into the kitchen like a magnet.

There were some hurdles to overcome, like incredibly different accents and the difficulty of translating names of vegetables from Hindi into Spanish. Papita is potato in Spanish, but it means papaya in Hindi. Trust me, you don’t want to eat a samosa stuffed with papaya!

Now that they are several years into their collaboration, they have worked out most of the kinks. Though it’s still hilarious to hear my mother giving Leticia directions to the Indian store. Their friendship runs so deep that I’m often put on hold when I call my mother in India, because she is face-timing with Leticia about a new dish they want to try out.

My feelings of India-Mexico connection go beyond my taste buds. As I make my way around Southern California, I am often mistaken for being Mexican—so often that I decided to delve deeper into the historic yet underreported relationship these two countries share.

Mexico, it turns out, was the first Latin American country to recognize India’s independence in August 1947. And, according to to Deborah Oropeza Keresey’s history The Asian Slavery in the Viceroyalty Of the New Spain, 1565-1673, the earliest person known have to traveled from India to Mexico was a slave girl from Calicut, in southern India, who arrived with Juan de Umbrage, the Franciscan Bishop of Mexico, in the mid-16th century.

And guess what? She was a cook!

South Indian cuisine is rich in pepper, coconut, and ginger. Its recipes entail marinades and slow-cooking in earthen pots to draw out the complex spices. Preparing a mole sauce is very similar to preparing a rich curry. It is likely that hundreds of years ago, Spanish colonial trade ships carried not just slaves from India but also its flavors, seasonings, and cooking styles, and eventually brought them to the New World.

The present-day culinary collaborations of my mother and Leticia convince me that these two countries, separated by two oceans, are home to the same people—just different shades of brown.

The post How Mexico and India Fused in My L.A. Kitchen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zeke had migrated to the U.S. from Mexico with my father-in-law and the rest of the family and settled in Watts. Not all of my in-laws’ memories are idyllic. They remember family members being racially profiled and accosted by white police officers, and a community deeply affected by poverty, economic marginalization, structural racism, isolation, and disinvestment—the frictions that would soon erupt in the Watts Riots of 1965.

But Zeke and another uncle, Carlos, have always insisted that their childhood experience wasn’t defined only by these hostilities. They say they loved growing up in Watts and the sense of community that permeated their childhoods. From that sense, and that place, their family would rise.

Their home was seven miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, but it was different from much of the rest of L.A. Watts was a place where minorities were intentionally segregated, but, where despite the weight of external hostilities bearing down, it was possible to own a home, to build a family across generations, to work toward a better life, and to be black or Latino and to find community. “We would play baseball with the African-American kids,” Zeke told me. “One kid even went to the majors, George Hendrick!” As Carlos put it: “Living in Watts, those were the best times of my life.”

Much attention has been given to South L.A.’s transition in recent decades from majority black to predominantly Latino, a transition Zeke and Carlos experienced firsthand. But the Latino presence in the area—Watts in particular—stretches back much further. The town was originally part of a Mexican land grant, El Rancho La Tajuata. After the Rancho was sold in the 1880s, some of the earliest residents were traqueros, the Mexican-origin workers who built the Southern Pacific Railroad, the tracks of which border Watts along Alameda Street. As Watts’ Mexican-origin community grew, it was sustained by San Miguel church, which opened its doors in 1928 in the center of the Mexican district.

My father-in-law, Manuel, and his six siblings were young children in the 1960s when they migrated from tiny Jalostotitlán in northeast Jalisco with their mom, Cele. Their father, Juan, had already been living in Watts’ Mexican district for nearly a decade, having ventured north to work alongside compadres who were already living in the town, his daughter, Rosa, told me.

They helped Juan find a job as a carpenter and upholsterer at a furniture store on Alameda Street, next to the railroad tracks built with the labor of their Mexican forebears. Eventually, his employer agreed to sponsor his legal residency. Such a simple act, but it was everything.

In an immediate sense, it meant Juan’s family could reunite—legal residency enabled him to secure visas for his family to migrate north. In the long term, what we now know—from a growing body of research, including my own on the Mexican-American middle and upper-classes—is that parental legal status is the one thing above all others that can pull families up out of poverty, helping elevate social status, income, education, you name it.

Over time the household expanded—four more children were born in the U.S.—and with 11 young mouths to feed, money was tight. Cele would make their clothes from furniture upholstery remnants from Juan’s job and flour sacks. “If the design on the sack was nice then it became a shirt,” Manuel remembered, laughing. “If it wasn’t, that was good for our calzones [underwear].”

In 1965, Juan sold the family home in Mexico and began looking for something suitable in Los Angeles. In August of that year, racial and economic tensions reached a breaking point and the Watt Riots erupted. Over six days, 34 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. There were thousands of arrests and tens of millions of dollars in damage. Despite the riots, the family had found community in Watts, especially in the San Miguel parish.

Besides, they knew that there were few neighborhoods where minorities could buy homes. Lynwood, the city directly across the railroad tracks, was majority white at the time. It also had a legacy of racially restrictive covenants designed to reinforce segregation by barring minorities from owning property. Manuel, my father-in-law, recalled that in Lynwood, “they would say, ‘We don’t sell to blacks or Mexicans.’ We couldn’t even cross the tracks to go to the park.”

Watts was one of the few areas where minorities could buy real estate. And so that year Juan purchased a house on Weigand Avenue in Watts, a block from the railroad tracks dividing it from Lynwood. Also in that year, San Miguel Catholic School opened its doors and Juan and Cele enrolled their youngest children. In exchange for tuition, Cele, who was widely known as a community leader, made hearty breakfasts of menudo for the parishioners to enjoy after Sunday mass.

Despite the discrimination, and despite their lack of material wealth, Juan and his family were the beneficiaries of a community that helped them build a foundation for future generations to build on. He owned a home, had a stable job, enjoyed a sense of community with his neighbors that centered on the church, and his family had attained legal residency.

In the 1980s, Juan and Cele bought a house across the tracks, in Lynwood. In just a few decades, Lynwood underwent a major demographic transition from working-class white, to majority African American, to Latino. As Zeke explained, “When my parents moved from Watts it wasn’t because Watts was a bad place. My dad wanted a bigger house and for them it was moving up in class status.” For Carlos, it felt like, “You are progressing. We were moving up.”

Around that time Zeke and Manuel opened a Latino grocery store—the first in what would become a modest chain—also in Lynwood but on the border of South Central. The brothers had stable working-class jobs at the time, but they knew that, if successful, business ownership would increase their incomes, wealth, and class status. It also helped root them to the community.

During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, many retail businesses in the area burned to the ground, but Zeke and Manuel’s store remained untouched—a fact that they chalk up to the relationships they built with their multiethnic clientele and their community roots. “We served customers from around the neighborhood, Latinos and blacks. We had a little book and if you didn’t have money to buy milk or meat we would record your purchase and you could pay when you had money.”

Today, many of Juan’s grandchildren—the adult children of the 11 siblings, the second and third generations—have surpassed the class status of the generation before them and are middle class. They are entering and graduating college. Several have earned advanced degrees. They work as teachers, school principals, and in corporate management. Those who have not attained college degrees still have some level of higher education and have secured high-paying white-collar jobs.

The family remains rooted to the community. The house on Weigand is still in the family. And though she had moved out of Watts, Rosa would drive her children everyday to San Miguel Catholic School. Just a few weeks ago, Cele, the matriarch, passed away at 88 years old. At her funeral service, nine priests from South Los Angeles, including a few from San Miguel Parish in Watts, cleared their calendars to attend her mass.

That’s not nostalgia. It’s the result of a strong community foundation. Born alongside baseball and community institutions in Watts.

The post How Watts Provided the Foundation for a Family’s Rise in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mariachi music and the Potomac River don’t often find themselves in the same sentence, but Mexico turned 200 overnight, so an exception had to be made. Mariachi music did indeed waft over the Potomac, emanating from the Grito celebration on the esplanade of the Kennedy Center. Ozomatli played, fireworks ensued, naturally, and thousands of melancholic Mexicans toasted 200 years of independence from the old empire in the capital of the empire many of them feel replaced it.

Ok, I am projecting when I assert the crowd was melancholic. There were some boisterous “Viva Mexico” cries, some laughter, some tequila. But two emotions ruled my evening, neither of them particularly light.

First, to the extent that Mexico is besieged by violence bred by the drug trade, this bicentennial feels like a birthday for an elderly and ailing relative. We might have been carrying on in Washington, but security concerns tempered public festivities in many Mexican cities.

How different this felt from that other North American bicentennial 34 years ago, when Americans – despite a post-Vietnam/costly-oil/disastrous-fashion malaise – exhaled triumphantly. One of the distinguishing hallmarks of Americans is that looking back invariably inspires us to look forward with replenished optimism. When Mexicans look back, we don’t often return, not even to the present. The past is sticky and unresolved – all-consuming. If Manifest Destiny remains the mindset north of the Rio Grande, Manifest Fatalism pervades to the south.

Notice the confusing proliferation of “we” in the above paragraphs, which brings me to my second roadblock to a joyous bicentennial: that familiar feeling of exile.

Having two homes is in many ways a blessing. But much of my life has also involved swapping one form of exile for another. Don’t be fooled by the map: my two homes are far, far, apart, and very difficult to bridge. We remain, as Alan Riding’s book title aptly put it a quarter-century ago, “Distant Neighbors.”

I remember that other American bicentennial, the so-called Spirit of ’76. I can picture myself – so suave at 10 with my braces, helmet haircut and tan leisure suit – strolling down Fifth Avenue with an expansive “This ain’t Chihuahua” grin. Or, to be more precise, make that a “¡This ain’t Chihuahua, cabrón!” grin.

Thanks to my gringa mother’s conviction that this – of all years – was the time for her kids to get to know their other country, we’d made our first foray from Chihuahua to the East Coast, inhaling Boston, New York and Washington the way (sorry but I’m still going with “we”) Americans do Europe. It was in the Big Apple that I felt oddly at home, and announced to the world – or to mom, at least – “This where I am going to live when I grow up.”

I wasn’t raised to hyphenate, or synthesize my Mexicanidad with my Americanness. I mastered both separately, undiluted, teeing up a choice. (Actually, Mexican law teed up the choice for me, since it barred dual nationality past the age of 18.) I always ate fiery, dousing spice with lime whenever possible not only because it is the Mexican way, but because I was so spooked by those descriptions of scurvy in “Mutiny on the Bounty.” I spoke with a norteño accent renowned throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the tenor of Pancho Villa’s Dorados. It’s that hyper-Mexican accent that makes people elsewhere in the world expect you to start a revolution, or at least sing a corrido about your horse.

I was also the güero obsessed with learning U.S. history, literature and politics. I was the kid in class who had no one to talk to about Holden Caulfield because no one else had read the book, or about how Americans could venerate someone like Robert E. Lee, who’d apparently managed to kill far more gringos than any Mexican general ever had. I couldn’t wait to go off to Exeter, Yale, and The New York Times, unaware that I’d only be swapping one exile for another.

But Los Angeles disturbs my ruminations about here versus there, about these distinctive, self-contained spaces separated by a fixed line running through my consciousness, as it does on the map. Los Angeles straddles my two worlds.

My three-year stint there had a sepia-tinted, surreal quality. My L.A. was a bit of a dreamscape, like the creations of Ellen Page’s character in “Inception,” the “dream architect” empowered to take certain liberties in designing a dream’s backdrop. You don’t have to have seen the movie to know what I am talking about – the way that dreams have of condensing things across time and spatial planes. Suddenly your spouse makes an appearance in your sixth-grade class, or your childhood house is across the street from your workplace.

My L.A. was like that. I was working downtown alongside such icons of American journalism as John Carroll and Mike Kinsley. But I could cross Broadway and moments later find myself in the Central Market, counting the number of Toluca and Cruz Azul caps, savoring the arid sweetness of a crumbling polvorón, grumbling to myself that U.S. sanitary laws seem to limit just how flavorful tacos al pastor can be.

Some of my colleagues who’d moved from the East Coast felt like expats in California, but for me Los Angeles offered the promise of hyphenation without dilution – an end to exile. If nothing else, I was surrounded by many others struggling to accommodate two worlds. At my first meeting with Antonio Villaraigosa, he told me he was scrambling to learn Spanish, which he’d not been encouraged to master as a kid.   It is a recent reckoning for all of us, with the notion that we can aspire to be both Mexican and American, without falling into some crack in between.

One of my fondest L.A. recollections was the glorious afternoon I took a visiting Moroccan journalist to El Gallo Giro in Huntington Park, a 24-hour temple to my Mexicanidad: a place offering tortas; tacos; a panaderia with those round metal trays and tongs to pick out your conchas and polvorones; and even a remittances window, all under the same roof.

Sitting outside, enjoying his first real tacos, Ahmed laughingly blurted out: “I can’t tell if I am in Mexico or in the U.S.!” Which to me, rather faintly, sounded a lot like, “¡This ain’t exile, cabrón!”

Andrés Martinez, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2007, is an associate editor of Zócalo and the director of the Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy chotda.

The post Bridging Mexican and American in Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.