This Is For La Raza
“Whatever you do, do not leave that airport.”
These words from my mother played over and over in my head as I hopelessly fought off sleep. Slumped against my overstuffed suitcases, watching the vital trickle of electricity seep into my nearly dead phone, the hard tile floor felt like a sea of goose down pillows. After a day of delays, long phone conversations with people who didn’t speak English, and missed connections, I had hit the wall of exhaustion.
I checked my phone again for a reassuring text from my wife and looked at the time.
It was nearly midnight, and I was stranded in Mexico City.
Built over the ancient ruins of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, among others, Mexico is centuries-full of rich history and stories of conquest and rebirth. A country of almost 130 million, the population is spread throughout a vast array of environments, from the dry mountainous regions in the north to the lush green forests in the south. Bordered on the east and west by beautiful beaches and resorts, with amazing Spanish colonial architecture spread throughout seemingly every major city, it is easy to get pulled in.
With this beauty and allure, however, comes those prickly thorns that dig into the flesh of those who don’t handle the country with the soft touch that is necessary. Years of corruption and violence, fed by the vast riches of powerful drug cartels, have left Mexico with a reputation of being one of the most dangerous places in the world. A rise in the number of murders and kidnappings in more recent times, has done nothing to dispel this image. As a result, the entire country has been painted as a land of “bad hombres,” with anti-Mexican sentiment washing over the neighbors to the north, the United States.
So, what was I doing in Mexico City? In my father’s land, where I had not visited in over a decade? Simply put, I had missed my flight. I had left from Orlando earlier that day after a long delay due to bad weather, and missed my connection to Cambodia, where I now reside, by about half an hour. With no flights planned for the rest of the day or the next day with my airline, I was stuck. Several hours of frustrating phone calls and arguing over what constitutes an act of God, I was going nowhere, slowly.
Luckily, my mother saved the day and I was booked on a flight with a different airline the next morning on her dime, with the warning that started this story, “Whatever you do, do not leave the airport.” She was well aware of the dangers that lurked outside the automatic double doors, where I stuck out like a sore thumb in my own ancestral land.
I dozed in and out of a restless sleep, on high alert even when my eyes shut out whatever light they could. I was waging war against the creeping darkness, and I was losing. Minutes dragged on like hours, with the end seemingly days away. I finally had enough and did what I haven’t admitted to my mother until this day: I left the airport and braved the city.
My wife had found me a nearby hotel with a 24-hour shuttle service and I finally relented and called their front desk.
“Buenos noches, ¿como le puedo ayudarle?”
The words rang in my ears like the sweet whispers of a lover.
In a matter of minutes arrived a hotel shuttle, which had been thoroughly described to me including the license plate number and driver’s description and name for safety purposes, ready to whisk me away to a soft bed and the wonderful sleep that only pure exhaustion and desperation can produce. A hot shower and a quick phone call to my wife and I was out like a light in the pitch dark of safety.
It was easily one of the most stressful times of my life and I can’t wait to go back and stay.
Why, you may ask. Why return to a place that causes so much anxiety at the thought of being out at night? A place where even if I may be Mexican by blood, I am still a foreigner by birth?
The answer is simple. However anxious and alone I felt the night before, it was all washed away the next morning when I went down to breakfast. After years of bouncing around the world in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, I had finally come to the place where I looked like everyone else. I didn’t have to prove that I belonged, even though I spoke the language. I wasn’t a Mexican-American, or an American expat, that morning.
I was a Mexicano, and I had come home.
While my mother’s family, the Garcia’s, have been Americans since Texas became a state, I spent more of my formative time with my father’s side, the Fuentes’, and created a bond with the more traditional portions of my Mexican heritage. My father would pile the entire family into our trusty pickup truck and make the long drive from central Florida to Mexico every summer and Christmas to visit. My youth is full of memories from the small patch of dirt in the northern state of Coahuila my father had called home so many years ago, and where I spent a lot of time connecting to my Mexican roots. Whether it was running to the playground with my cousins, or going to the corner store to get pan dulce (sweet bread) to eat with our morning coffees, the memories are deeply embedded in the person that I have become today.
It’s this bond that leaves me feeling like a first-generation American; the son of an immigrant family. My father’s beginnings in the country as an agricultural worker picking crops only reinforced this feeling further. His upbringing was the same of many of the immigrants that made their way north across the Rio Grande. Dirt poor and one of over a dozen children in a devout family, there wasn’t enough space or resources to stay put. He made the treacherous journey like so many have before and after and, through hard work and determination, was able to raise a family of new Americans, blessed with comforts he had only dreamed about as a child.
While Mexico has grown immensely in the time that I have spent away, it will always have to contend with being the other to the United States and Canada. It is the underachieving cousin that is forgotten until you hear the gossip about their latest run in with the law. You see them at family functions like Cinco de Mayo and the World Cup, but every time they start ambling over your way to say hello, you cringe.
Having had the good fortune to be born with the right passport, I was able to mitigate being painted with this image thanks to my well-spoken, non-regional English and my slightly accented Spanish. I grew up dreaming of going to Disney World and rooting for the local football teams. I celebrated the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving like any red-blooded American.
But I also woke up to Norteño and Mariachi music blaring on those weekends we had to clean the whole house. I was forced to watch novellas every night over dinner, which almost always had tortillas as the primary eating utensil. I went to Mexican Independence Day parades and broke pinatas at birthday parties.
I was like the countless Ford trucks that were built in factories all over Mexico; a symbol of the American dream, but Mexican underneath.
This duality has always plagued me, but more so as of late. While I celebrate being Mexican, what have I done to truly honor that part of my identity?
That is what drives me to go back; to be part of a “brain gain” for the future of Mexico. I received an American education and a degree from one the best schools in the country, the first in my family. Should I not return the favor of my father’s sacrifices, take that knowledge and be part of the generation that returns to improve Mexico and its future?
There’s no obligation for me to do so. There would be no shame in simply staying away from such a troubled country. I’ve met dozens of Mexicans in my travels who are thousands of miles away with no plans to make Mexico their permanent home again. How are they able to stay away with no desire to return, while I yearn to be there?
I could ask question after question to try to figure out what causes this pull, but the answer will always be the same, even if I don’t want to admit it. It’s put best by Edward James Olmos in the Selena biopic from so many years ago: “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting!”
In the end it may be to prove something that only I really care about. It may be to quiet some deep-seated “survivor’s guilt,” lucky to have been born better off than most Mexicans.
Or, it could be that every time I smell wood burning, I’m taken back to those crisp winter nights at my grandparents’ ranch, watching the flames dance and embers float into the star-filled sky with every pop of mesquite.
Maybe it’s that when I hear certain songs, I remember sitting at my late grandmother’s kitchen table, eating a plate of chile colorado con frijoles, watching her flip tortillas at the stove with her bare fingers, years of heat giving her asbestos hands, as my wife likes to say.
While I have been fortunate enough to travel the world and see amazing things, it is these memories that I hold so dear in a special place. It’s these memories that flood to my mind as I stare into my daughter’s eyes, knowing she can never truly experience what I have, there in that country. It’s these memories that pull me back, hoping to give her even a glimpse of that time.
For every selfish reason I have, it really is about her. She is a part of the next generation of Mexicans, ones who never really know the motherland. Forming new memories that create that bond helps us cope with our double identity, for we’ll always be seen as Mexican-Americans, never just the latter.
This why we go back.
This is for me.
This is for my daughter.
This is for la raza.
