Reply to Jennifer’s Email

i feel the need to clarify that i truly do not think you fetishize Latino culture, but the concept of a 5'1 filipino-colombian woman who was born in the same soil as perhaps thousands of confederate soldiers, decides to come to El Paso to pursue a masters in Spanish because she wants to experience the Latino Heat and fall in love with the aesthetic of it, is subjectively hilarious. i was so happy to read “a piece of your soul” because it’s the first time in my almost ten years here that i feel someone can relate to my relationship with the city , and viceversa. you described being “othered” in El Paso in a way that I relate to since I got here because I’m not mexican-american and this city at its core belongs to that community, to the Chicano movement in the 20th century and people here see me as an outsider, since similarly to you, they don’t belong to Mexican culture and are not white enough to belong to American’s history. the funny thing is that of course they do belong to both, history for both countries cannot be written without everything that has happened in El Paso. have you heard of Carmelita Torres and the bath riots and how Hitler cited El Paso as an influence for gas chambers during the Holocaust? now tell me that’s not American.

the thing that you need to understand about Chihuahua and why I ran as fast and as soon as I could when I turned 18 is that it’s not really México, or at least not how you’d imagine it. there’s a very REAL reason why people from Chihuahua have a certain kind of reputation in El Paso and Juárez. i always hated it growing up, the people, the culture, everything about it repelled me with the force of dozens of American fast food chains taking over the city, as if the local cuisine isn’t good enough. (Chihuahua is so americanized that it’s not uncommon for human traffickers to drop-off central-american immigrants in the most developed parts of the cities and tell them they’re already in the US).

the ultimate goal of the average person I grew up with is to be white and i’d say even most of them already consider themselves to be so. they try their hardest to be accepted by American culture, look down on morenos, produce their “content” (which they call art) in English (which of course i do too), hater our president for ALL THE WRONG REASONS (but that’s a conversation for a different time) and of course hated Trump but would have loved him even more than the average q-anon follower had he been a candidate in México. they only see El Paso as their backyard, as the place they can visit during Mexican holidays and do their shopping, only visit Sunland Park, Cielo Vista, the outlets, food chains that aren’t in Mexico and act as if they own the fucking place. i tried my best to distance myself from people from Chihuahua when I first got here because they still acted the same. most of them left less than two years into their undergrad, but i was still close with those who were already kindred spirits before we got here. but yeah, I absolutely disavow Chihuahua and being from that city whenever I talk to anyone in Texas.

also, growing up Catholic and going to Catholic school you’re taught that there is no one more powerful than the Virgin Mary because of her history with the country, but you’re going to tell me the whole story with Juan Diego wasn’t a fabrication and a tool to be used by Spain to advanace colonization???????? that’s why I despise catholicism with such a strong heart, why I made that joke about Virgin Mary going to a club, fucking a random dude and telling Joseph otherwise, not realizing that Claudia is deeply catholic lol.

some of these feelings towards Chihuahua have changed, but more on that later.

obviously i’m guilty on these things as well: i grew up listening to only American/British music, movies, and books — I think about David Bowie’s death every day and I can’t even remember the day Juan Gabriel died. Weyes Blood, Father John Misty, The Beatles, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion , they’re all white and as much as I relate to their lyrics/writings, they can’t relate to my experience. i can talk baseball and MLB aaaaaaaall day long but ask me a single thing about soccer and I wouldn’t have even the slightest snarky thing to say about the current state of the sport in México.

growing up in this culture made me feel like not a lot of things made sense and i grew resentful towards it since i couldn’t find an answer to all my questions. that changed until i met My Good Old Pal Rim because she taught me aaaaaaall that I needed to know about colonization, afro-pessimism, capitalism, the nature of American culture and how it all trickles down to Latin America too. the irony of an european woman in her late 40s being the one who opened my eyes is not lost on me. it is then when i started reading Black authors like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes and I relate to them in a very personal way — but I’m not Black, those movements/authors are not for me.

in my senior year I met Dr. Frank Pérez, a Chicano-Studies professor who became a huge influence on my ethnic/identity philosophies as well because I talked to him about these issues and he explained all the intersectionalities that exist within these movements. he made me realize that had i been of age in the 60s, I would have been an avid member of the Black Panther Party because ideologically speaking I 100% agree with everything they stood for and since they were aware of the intersectionality with Latinos and Chicanos, they wouldn’t have batted an eye if a mustached pretentious chainsmoker with a thicc mexican accent ranted in their meetings. at the same time, Dr. Pérez taught me everything I needed to know about the Chicano movement and even the darker, more radicalized aspects of it. but for the life of me I can’t relate to them! i know they would’ve fought for me during the riots in El Paso, but I still feel more connected to Afro-radicals and Afro-pessimists. a big Chicano legacy that Dr. Pérez did leave on me is my love for Rage Against the Machine, a heavy metal-rap band from the 90s made up by four Chicano-Black communists and one of the most influential musical acts of all time.

Yes, I know my enemies
They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity
Assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy
Brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams

that’s probably my favorite verse from any of their songs. the frontman’s dad was a Chicano leader in the 60s so he has always been very involved in the movement. that’s probably the most I will relate to a Chicano or Mexican artist. ideologically speaking, I am an Afro-Pessimist-Marxist but to my core I’m just a die-hard Rage Against the Machine fan. no one represents my identity politics better than Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics. they broke up in the early 00s because no leftist organization agrees on everything, but they were set to start their comeback tour on early 2020 and their first two dates were in El Paso and Las Cruces for obvious reasons, then the funniest thing happened. i have had tickets to see them for almost three years now and i’m not even sure to when the concert is supposed to take place?? i believe sometime early next year??
anyways.
but ask me about Mexican music and it will take more than a few seconds to list my favorite artists. maaaybe… early Belanova (looooool)??? some Julieta Venegas and Molotov??? but that’s about it. I do enjoy some music in Spanish like Soda Stereo, Mago de Oz (please don’t make fun of me if you know who they are), but they’re from Argentina and Spain.

after ranting and venting for so long about my upbringing and own relationship to my identity as a Mexican Living In The United States, it is time to circle it all back to El Paso. i already told you that my first 18 months here were tough on me because of Stanford and UMASS, but everything changed in early in 2016. believe it or not, I was a very PASSIONATE journalist and i covered the election and the impact in El Paso as if my life depended on it. i talked to people of all walks of life, explored every corner of this city and completely fell in love with it. as an eternal hometown orphan, i finally felt i belonged to a city, to a place, to somewhere, anywhere. i went deeeep into all the rabbit holes of El Paso, collaborated with the NYT, Washington Post, every local media outlet you can think of and even went rogue and just followed stories on my own. one of my COMM professors at the time sent me on an assignment and i ended up discovering an undercover KKK meeting less than six hours away from here. i sent her the story and she said this was a fish TOO huge for us to fry and sent it to AP News and of course they never followed up, because it’s Texas, because it’s the US and ultimately white-supremacy reigns here. as wonderful as this year was, it also was incredibly taxing because I realized that as much as I love Texas and El Paso, they won’t always love me back. and the journalism industry SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS. so i’m incredibly grateful for My Good Ol’ Pal taking me in her arms (literally) in early 2017.

long story short (lol as if i’m not like 2000 words in), i strongly believe El Paso is a diaspora for people like you and me, because yes, of course we don’t 100% belong here but we also don’t 100% belong anywhere. but we understand this city better than anyone because we are outsiders with a very unique perspective and background and El Paso and its culture was built by people like us. of course I understand when locals who have been here all of their life hate it, I would do too. but that’s not our situation. you belong as much as they do but they don’t realize it just yet. maybe there’s some confederacy to you, but El Paso is the Place for people like us because as a city/culture it is impossible to explain to anyone that hasn’t experienced yet; just as it is impossible to explain our culture/identity journey and be fully understood.

be more proud of your accent!! please do. as it is obvious to heather wilson and heather smith, I have a very thicc accent for someone who has been here for almost ten years, but that’s on purpose. i’m way more articulate and literate than the average El Pasoan so i like to stunt on them with extremely elaborated, wordy, pretentious sentences. i’ve also noticed that my accent resembles Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron or Iñarritu’s whenever they accept an Oscar, which makes me extremely proud. it’s not obnoxious and purposeful like Sofia Vergara’s, but fits my story and personality. and i think yours do too. you were right when you told stacy that saying your Spanish is so good is like necessary? it feels weird whenever someone compliments your second language, because I’m sure your Spanish is better than Stacy’s (if that makes sense). people here act as if Spanish is their second language, but it really isn’t (and that’s ok!), it’s just slang for them. so you should just embrace it because it tells a story, it shows where you’re coming from and there’s nothing better than that. and also, everyone here has an accent in either language even if they try to act as if they don’t. do they even know what tildes are?

i tend to downplay or straight up not talk about my three months in Chihuahua this past summer and what actually happened, but only because they were the most difficult months of my life. i was ripped off from El Paso because there was no other way around it. the city where I built my life for the past eight years was stripped away from me due to the Nature of America’s Culture. you have no idea all the uncertainty i faced there, how i was forced to deal with my family trauma in a way i hadn’t done before even after years of therapy and being fully aware of every mental thing that goes on inside my brain and soul. BUT! also. i found my valhalla. this is a much longer story and i won’t get into any details here but please feel free to ask. long story short (lol x2), i reconnected with a friend i drifted away from about a decade ago and he showed me this borderline clandestine cantina in the middle of chihuahua. he’s also a writer and a baseball fan. and we grew up listening to similar music. think of him as the John Lennon to my Paul McCartney. i was obsessed with The Beatles as he was with the Rolling Stones. anyway. he started taking me to this magical place, this cantina called Balalaika that was plastered with baseball posters and has this magical aura to it because no one knows about it. it’s a tradition mostly for the people that grew up in that neighborhood. most afternoons we were the youngest people there. so anyways, we reconnected in this cantina that we would frequent almost every week. we would get drunk as fuck, talk about everything, smoke a pack of cigarettes, debate literature, philosophy, music movies, the nature of Chihuahua, our life stories and writing. a LOT of writing. eventually, we started going to local baseball games in Chihuahua and every night/day I spent with him belong to some of my fondest memories ever. without realizing it, he made me realize that I never hated Chihuahua as a whole — i hated the culture i grew up in. catholic upper-middle class whitexicans who worship the US while denying their own heritage. i still missed el paso every day and wanted to come back and fought with everything that i had and more to make it happen. but things definetely changed. i saw that class and race are more interwined that i had initially thought.

there’s this joan didion quote i always had in mind when leaving el paso became a possibility and eventually a reality:

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

so no matter what anyone says about you, your background or all the questions/concerns/whatever you may have. if you love it here and relate to this quote, El Paso is yours and you are theirs.

i’m getting slightly drunk/tipsy, so i want to end on the note that after everything i wrote, there is not a single white person i 100% trust and i do not know you do it. i’m not judging, i’m genuinely wondering how you managed to do so, let alone marry one. i’m not judging, this just amazes me because both of you look genuinely happy. i love that caption, the one that says something like “i believe we would be lovers in a fable” or something like that. but what i mean is that how do you do it? because i believe our identities are defined by whiteness and that was never up to Colombians, Phillipinos or Mexicans. white people will never understand who or how we are. of course i have fallen in love with some white girls, be infatuated with them and whatnot, of course some of my friends are white, but i know when shit hits the fan in racial/ethnic issues, they will never understand me as much as you would, even if we share a different identity. which is why I LOVE ATLANTA so much, it explores these topics so in-depth and in such a brilliant way.

anyways, i’m just ranting and there are five ranch waters deep into my bloodstream. i do hope you reply, whether it is in person or in writing. thank you for sharing a piece of your soul with me, it made me feel seen in a way no one else has accomplished so during my time here and i know that wasn’t your intention. but just know that you’re not alone in all the concerns you have about otherness and not belonging here, but that doesn’t mean you don’t belong to El Paso. i think the joan didion quote applies to you because you love El Paso as much as I do, and always thinking about it is what brought me back here. whenever you want me to tell/write to you the full story about what transpired during January-July of this year I will be more than happy to do so.

i’m really happy we met and we are sharing these thoughts with each other.