Naming your own identity

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Mexican Immigrants, circa 1915*


My great great grandfather's family was in what is now U.S. territory before the American Revolution; he also fought in the Civil War as a Confederate soldier. I guess that makes me eligible to be a Daughter of the Confederacy.

Wait a minute, his father was born in Mexico - in a state called Coahuila y Tejas near what is now the town of Laredo. How confusing. Coahuila y Tejas is now part of the United States! Another factor adding to this ambiguous identity - the family was descended from Spaniards, not indigenous people or Mestizos - In Mexico (or New Spain) they were called white people.

The white Confederate soldier born in U.S. territory was named Jesus Paredes. His descendants have all been born in the United States, except one child that was adopted in Spain by military parents. Everybody speaks English; some are bilingual.

This leaves me in a situation where I have to make a decision. What should I call myself? Am I white, a Spaniard, a Mexican, an American descended from Spaniards or Mexicans or native Texans?

My decision depends on whether I want to keep my genealogy a secret. Would I do that to better myself, win an election, or marry a blue blood from New England?

I could. That's the beauty of this great United States. We can make up just about any identity we want. It is a country of re-invention. Thus we can forget that our other grandfather had three wives, or that our great grandfather was indigenous, or that he belonged to the Jewish Mafia.

Only thing is, as some French guy I read in graduate school said, what is buried always has a way of eventually coming to the surface.



P.S. Oh, I forgot to mention that the other side of the family is mestizo- there was a "Teco Indian" that married a nun around about the same time the Romney's first made it to the Mexico.

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Romney And McCain, 'Hispanic' Candidates?

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 26, 2008; C01

When Bill Richardson canceled his presidential bid, wags in the Latino blogosphere did not mourn the lack of other Hispanic contenders. They still had the "Mexican-American" and the "Panamanian" vying for the GOP nomination.

Those hombres would be Mitt Romney and John McCain.

A blog called Adventures of the Coconut Caucus had fun consoling readers thus: "But do not worry, there is still a Mexican-American left in the race, Mitt Romney . . . and of course we still have Panamanian John McCain, who is actually not doing as bad as he was, and could, with a constitutional change, become the first Central American President of the United States."

After the first primary, the Coconutters headlined their dispatch: "Panamanian beats Mexican-American in New Hampshire." (The blog's motto is: "We put the panic in Hispanic.")

Scribes, scholars and provocateurs have sounded similar themes in such online realms as Nuestra Voice, Latinopoliticsblog, Latina Lista, the Latin Americanist, HispanicTips, Think Progress and the Huffington Post.

It's all very funny. But it's not complete fantasy. And it says something about identity and labels.

Mitt Romney's father, George -- the late former governor of Michigan and onetime presidential candidate -- was born in the state of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico. Three generations of Romneys lived there, starting with Mitt Romney's great-grandfather, who helped found one of several Mormon colonies in that country in about 1885. Some of those Mormons, including Romney's great-grandfather, who had several wives, were seeking refuge in Mexico from a recent anti-polygamy law in the United States.

But in 1910 the Mexican Revolution broke out, and in 1912 rebel commanders threatened to pillage the Mormon colonies. Five-year-old George and his parents fled back to the United States.

As for McCain, he was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, where his father, Jack, a Navy man, was stationed.

In a campaign season in which the theme of immigration is about as stable as old dynamite, what is the meaning of these coincidental family histories of border-crossing and Latin American residency? The candidates don't talk about it much. So the bloggers and pundits are filling in the blanks.

"Mitt's papi, George, was born in Chihuahua and therefore more Mexican than your typical Chicano-studies major," writes Gustavo Arellano in his syndicated newspaper column, "¿Ask a Mexican!"

Where would Romney be now, Arellano muses in print, "if it weren't for porous fronteras"?

Romney comes in for rougher treatment than McCain because of his tough rhetoric about illegal immigrants and secure borders. McCain, in contrast, has endorsed a type of immigration reform that would give illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens.

"The irony . . . of course makes many of us chuckle," says Mario Solis-Marich, a Los Angeles talk radio host and the blogger behind Nuestra Voice. "Beyond the chuckling, there's certainly some interesting questions that this poses."

Romney "needs to come out of his Mexican-heritage closet," Solis-Marich writes in his blog. In an interview, he adds, "If his family has a history of knowing how fluid the southern border of this country has been, how is it, and why is it, to this day they have what I believe is such a disdain for immigrants?"

Romney writes only briefly of his family's Mexican history in his 2004 memoir, "Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games." He rarely discusses it on the campaign trail, because it hardly ever comes up, says spokesman Kevin Madden.

"He's readily explained to those who ask that his father was born there and did live there at a time," Madden says. "He never talks about this in the context of immigration."

Romney lauds the contribution of legal immigrants and reserves his condemnation for illegal immigrants. The circumstances of his own forebears' passing back and forth are somewhat murky, but it has never been proved they crossed illegally. At the time, there were fewer rules to obey.

In "The Story of George Romney" (1960), biographer Tom Mahoney says a fellow Mormon obtained permission from Mexican President Porfirio D¿az for Romney's great-grandfather and other Mormons to establish colonies. But some commentators have said that Mexico did not permit polygamy at the time, and that the new colonists had promised to be law-abiding.

"If true, [Mitt Romney's great-grandfather] then knowingly arrived in direct violation of Mexican immigration law," Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, writes in his blog.

Among the reasons legal and illegal immigrants come to the United States today is to escape persecution and strife.

Since George Romney's parents were American citizens, having been born in the United States, they had a legal right to return. But it was easier said than done. The Mormons negotiated with the revolutionaries for safe passage for the women and children to reach El Paso by train. The men took to the desert on horseback, rebuffing armed attack, and crossed into New Mexico.

From El Paso -- does this sound familiar? -- the Romneys made it to Los Angeles. Mitt Romney's grandfather worked as a carpenter. The family was so large that the Romneys had trouble finding affordable housing, and some landlords refused to rent to them.

They and their fellow Mormon refugees were "the first displaced persons of the 20th century," George Romney later said.

What is identity? For example, the forebears of Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., a proud member of the Hispanic Caucus and a fifth-generation Coloradan, were long established in the United States by the time Romney's forebears re-crossed the border to take up their lives here.

The U.S. Census says Hispanic origin may include the "country of birth of the person or the person's parents."

On the presidential campaign trail in 1968, George Romney had to deal with his Mexican heritage. Some enemies referred to him as "Chihuahua George." They asked how someone born in Mexico could run for president.

McCain has occasionally faced the same question. The Constitution requires a president to be a "natural born" citizen.

In response, McCain's campaign, like Romney's before him, points to legal and academic interpretations that say "natural born" includes children who are born abroad to citizens. McCain has the added factor of being born in a zone that was under U.S. law.

In his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For," McCain includes a picture of himself on the day of his christening in Panama. He didn't stay long; his father was soon deployed elsewhere.

A person's identity might also include his favorite movie. McCain's memoir devotes an entire chapter to his. He first saw the film when he was 16 and living in the Washington suburbs. He has watched it many times over the years, meditating on its heroic and tragic themes.

The movie is called "Viva Zapata!" It stars Marlon Brando, and it is about a leader of the Mexican Revolution.

for link to Washington Post article, click title to this post.

*photo of Romney family (Mitt Romney's father third from the right)Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library, University Of Utah.

The Righteous Immigrant: What Makes a Good American?

U.S. & Mexican Flags






After a few weeks of being away from home, I looked forward to sitting in front of my computer and taking my time writing something about immigration - and my new perspective after having been in Spain a few weeks. The first thing I found, in the Washington Post was a group of essays on the 9500 Liberty Project - which was heartening. What a good way to let people know what the leadership of Prince William County is really saying.

Then I saw what I call the WP's apology post. It's an opinion piece by a Yale law professor who as a child immigrated from China. While she says she is pro-immigrant, her message belies her stated position. Her comments are disturbing. I decided not to mention her article in the blog. But after a night of thinking about what she wrote, I decided it would be best to deal with her ambivalence directly.

Her main thesis is that nation-states have to have a significant amount of cohesion and self-identity to survive. According to her, too many languages and different cultures are dangerous for a country - and cites what happened in Rome when the barbarians took over. While she denies Huntington's proposal that Latino immigrants are not becoming American enough, her response has an ambiguity that is easy to see.

Perhaps Rome came down because it was too geographically scattered and its populations were too different. Yet, how can she judge the life of a nation-state in 2007, with its overwhelming technological advances and globalization using the criteria that destroyed Rome a milennia ago? Even then, history has told us that populations generally revolt when there is gross inequality - what were the Romans doing to the barbarians?

As for Latino immigrants not being loyal to the U.S., why do so many serve in the armed forces? If they (we) don't identify ourselves as Americans quickly enough, how come the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants all speak fluent English? How can she imagine that the immigrants of the late 20th century and early 21st century do not want to be part of our nation? What makes her feel she is correct in her observations?

Her position is made clear when she tells of her mother being horrified that her daughter was making the dutiful visits that Girl Scouts make to soup kitchens. She must not know that we all did that as Girl Scouts. If her mother was aghast at this it was already her inherent concern that Chau not be exposed to the lower classes.

As for my own experience, being on a different continent for a few weeks was a great way to remind me that I am an American... never mind that my father was born in Mexico, that I actually like the Mexican flag, and love mariachi music. America has a solid grip on my identity - as I'm sure it does to all immigrants and their children. If not, we wouldn't be here.



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The Right Road to America?
By Amy Chua
Sunday, December 16, 2007; B01

If you don't speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami's population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America's urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America's "complexion" and replace what he calls the "white Christian male power structure."

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

The United States is in no danger of imminent disintegration. But this is because it has been so successful, at least since the Civil War, in forging a national identity strong enough to hold together its widely divergent communities. We should not take this unifying identity for granted.

The greatest empire in history, ancient Rome, collapsed when its cultural and political glue dissolved, and peoples who had long thought of themselves as Romans turned against the empire. In part, this fragmentation occurred because of a massive influx of immigrants from a very different culture. The "barbarians" who sacked Rome were Germanic immigrants who never fully assimilated.

Does this mean that it's time for the United States to shut its borders and reassert its "white, Christian" identity and what Huntington calls its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant "core values"?

No. The anti-immigration camp makes at least two critical mistakes.

First, it neglects the indispensable role that immigrants have played in building American wealth and power. In the 19th century, the United States would never have become an industrial and agricultural powerhouse without the millions of poor Irish, Polish, Italian and other newcomers who mined coal, laid rail and milled steel. European immigrants led to the United States' winning the race for the atomic bomb. Today, American leadership in the Digital Revolution -- so central to our military and economic preeminence -- owes an enormous debt to immigrant contributions. Andrew Grove (cofounder of Intel), Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems) and Sergey Brin (Google) are immigrants. Between 1995 and 2005, 52 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups had one key immigrant founder. And Vikram S. Pundit's appointment to the helm of CitiGroup last Tuesday means that 14 chief executives of Fortune 100 companies are foreign-born.

The United States is in a fierce global competition to attract the world's best high-tech scientists and engineers -- most of whom are not white Christians. Just this past summer, Microsoft opened a large new software development center in Canada, in part because of the difficulty of obtaining U.S. visas for foreign engineers.

Second, anti-immigration talking heads forget that their own scapegoating vitriol will, if anything, drive immigrants farther from the U.S. mainstream. One reason we don't have Europe's enclaves is our unique success in forging an ethnically and religiously neutral national identity, uniting individuals of all backgrounds. This is America's glue, and people like Huntington and O'Reilly unwittingly imperil it.

Nevertheless, immigration naysayers also have a point.

America's glue can be subverted by too much tolerance. Immigration advocates are too often guilty of an uncritical political correctness that avoids hard questions about national identity and imposes no obligations on immigrants. For these well-meaning idealists, there is no such thing as too much diversity.

The right thing for the United States to do -- and the best way to keep Americans in favor of immigration -- is to take national identity seriously while maintaining our heritage as a land of opportunity. U.S. immigration policy should be tolerant but also tough. Here are five suggestions:


¿ Overhaul admission priorities. Since 1965, the chief admission criterion has been family reunification. This was a welcome replacement for the ethnically discriminatory quota system that preceded it. But once the brothers and sisters of a current U.S. resident get in, they can sponsor their own extended families. In 2006, more than 800,000 immigrants were admitted on this basis. By contrast, only about 70,000 immigrants were admitted on the basis of employment skills, with an additional 65,000 temporary visas granted to highly skilled workers.

This is backwards. Apart from nuclear families (spouse, minor children, possibly parents), the special preference for family members should be drastically reduced. As soon as my father got citizenship, his relatives in the Philippines asked him to sponsor them. Soon, his mother, brother, sister and sister-in-law were also U.S. citizens or permanent residents. This was nice for my family, but frankly there was nothing especially fair about it. Instead, the immigration system should reward ability and be keyed to the country's labor needs -- skilled or unskilled, technological or agricultural. In particular, we should significantly increase the number of visas for highly skilled workers, putting them on a fast track for citizenship.


¿ Make English the official national language. A common language is critical to cohesion and national identity in an ethnically diverse society. Americans of all backgrounds should be encouraged to speak more languages -- I've forced my own daughters to learn Mandarin (minus the threat of chopsticks) -- but offering Spanish-language public education to Spanish-speaking children is the wrong kind of indulgence. "Native language education" should be overhauled, and more stringent English proficiency requirements for citizenship should be set up.


¿ Immigrants must embrace the nation's civic virtues. It took my parents years to see the importance of participating in the larger community. When I was in third grade, my mother signed me up for Girl Scouts. I think she liked the uniforms and merit badges, but when I told her that I was picking up trash and visiting soup kitchens, she was horrified.

For many immigrants, only family matters. Even when immigrants get involved in politics, they tend to focus on protecting their own and protesting discrimination. That they can do so is one of the great virtues of U.S. democracy. But a mindset based solely on taking care of your own factionalizes our society.

Like all Americans, immigrants have a responsibility to contribute to the social fabric. It's up to each immigrant community to fight off an enclave mentality and give back to their new country. It's not healthy for Chinese to hire only Chinese, or Koreans only Koreans. By contrast, the free health clinic set up by Muslim Americans in Los Angeles -- serving the entire poor community -- is a model to emulate. Immigrants are integrated at the moment when they realize that their success is inextricably intertwined with everyone else's.


¿ Enforce the law. Illegal immigration, along with terrorism, is the chief cause of today's anti-immigration backlash. It is also inconsistent with the rule of law, which, as any immigrant from a developing country will tell you, is a critical aspect of U.S. national identity. But if we're serious about this problem, we need to enforce the law against not only illegal aliens, but also those who hire them. It's the worst of all worlds to allow U.S. employers who hire illegal aliens -- thus keeping the flow of illegal workers coming -- to break the law while demonizing the aliens as lawbreakers. An Arizona law set to take effect on Jan. 1 will tighten the screws on employers who hire undocumented workers, but this issue can't be left up to a single state.


¿ Make the United States an equal-opportunity immigration magnet. That the 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants are 80 percent Mexican and Central American is itself a problem. This is emphatically not for the reason Huntington gives -- that Hispanics supposedly don't share America's core values. But if the U.S. immigration system is to reflect and further our ethnically neutral identity, it must itself be ethnically neutral, offering equal opportunity to Sudanese, Estonians, Burmese and so on. The starkly disproportionate ratio of Latinos -- reflecting geographical fortuity and a large measure of law-breaking -- is inconsistent with this principle.

Immigrants who turn their backs on American values don't deserve to be here. But those of us who turn our backs on immigrants misunderstand the secret of America's success and what it means to be American.

amy.chua@yale.edu

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is the author of "Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- And Why They Fall."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401333.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

What Makes a Person "One of Our Own?"

See letter to the editor at the end of this post:

What makes a boy "one of our own?" Is it because the young man was born here?

Would he still be one of our own if he was born in the U.S. and at age two he moved to Italy, and stayed throughout adulthood? What if in Italy he learned Italian, went to their schools, and even studied the history of the Roman Empire or played with an Italian soccer team?

Would that boy be American or Italian? What if he couldn't even speak English anymore? What if he could speak Italian only?
What if he was the president of the student body at his Italian high school? Would the Italians consider him one of their own?

Its kind of like being adopted... people adopt children that were not born to them, but they raised them, and the children know no one else as parents. Are they the children of their adoptive parents?

Because of NAFTA and other ramifications of capitalism and globalization, the DREAM ACT student found himself/herself in the United States. They might have been born in Guatemala, but soon after birth they were already in the U.S. - they know no other country.

The final question is, does a child become "one of our own" by growing up in a community and taking in the culture and traditions of that community? Or is he "not one of our own" just because he happened to be born somewhere else, and his parents didn't have the money and/or social status to regularize their residence in the U.S.?



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Letter to the Editor
It's time to take care of our own
Arizona Republic
Sept. 24, 2007 12:00 AM

Regarding the scholarship program for illegal immigrant students at Arizona State University:

Now, remind me, why my son has to take out thousands of dollars in a loan to finance his education and they are doling out scholarships to illegal aliens?

Tell me why ASU President Michael Crow is so bent on taking care of everyone else except our own.

We have plenty of citizens here in Arizona who could use these scholarships to further their education. I, for one, think it is well past time for the arrogant elite to step aside and allow someone to take charge who actually cares for our citizenry. - Brent Layton,Claypool

What Happens When You Cross the Border? Does Eugenio Become Eugene?

1922 http://www.search.com/reference/German_American

Does your name have to change when you cross the border? If you are born here to immigrant parents, should you be named Ashley instead of Araceli? Is an undocumented college student more likely to be detained if his name is Ricardo, rather than Richard or Rick?

Manuel Munoz writes with a sense of loss about the pressure for people to anglicize their names as they make their way into U.S. culture. At times it does seem awkward to see a Cameron Sanchez (or Diaz?). But the reality is that Latino families have been able to keep their names much better than other ethnic groups entering the country. That is one reason so many nativist Americans are upset....They are saying that Latinos are staying much the same after they become Americans... they don't change their names often enough, they don't speak English enough, they don't watch Oprah enough.

At one level I tell myself, a nation state would naturally want people to homogenize. This leads to increased patriotism, loyalty and a higher rate of military recruitment (so important these days to our gov't). The question really is: Does everyone in the U.S. need to be same? Do we have to become so homogenized?

It could be that Munoz is expecting something that is unrealistic. Culture and language are extremely fluid. Under any circumstances, there is always change. My grandfather who was born and lived on the Texas border with Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century was Eugenio to his parents, Gene to his employers, and Poppy Jujee to his grandchildren. His son, my mother's brother was Jesus Eugenio, who became Uncle Jim to us. The family (at least in their generation) still spoke Spanish all the time, the next generation spoke a little less Spanish, and the latest generation is having to go a Latin American country to learn Spanish. But that happens when you live in a country where the dominant language is English.

My son, whom I named Gregorio Jose, changed his name to Gregory Joseph when he was 16, now that he is 30 he is working hard at learning Spanish, and spends much of his time in a Spanish speaking Latin American country. There are all sorts of ways this fluidity manifests itself.

Munoz can see this as a travesty. But it can also be seen as the normal way cultural practices and languages circulate and evolve. We are always having to let some things go.

Where I must totally agree with Munoz is in how those who do not change their names are often singled out.... are you more likely to be profiled by an ICE agent if your name is Eugenio instead of Eugene? Will teachers give you a better evaluation if you are named John instead of Juan? Questions worth thinking about.



Leave Your Name at the Border
By MANUEL MUÑOZ
Published: August 1, 2007
New York Times

Dinuba, Calif.

..I count on a collective sense of cultural loss to once again swing the names back to our native language. The Mexican gate agent announced Eugenio Reyes, but I never got a chance to see who appeared. I pictured an older man, cowboy hat in hand, but I made the assumption on his name alone, the clash of privileges I imagined between someone de allá and a Mexican woman with a good job in the United States. Would she speak to him in Spanish? Or would she raise her voice to him as if he were hard of hearing?

But who was I to imagine this man being from anywhere, based on his name alone? At a place of arrivals and departures, it sank into me that the currency of our names is a stroke of luck: because mine was not an easy name, it forced me to consider how language would rule me if I allowed it. Yet I discovered that only by leaving. My stepfather must live in the Valley, a place that does not allow that choice, every day. And Eugenio Reyes — I do not know if he was coming or going.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/opinion/01munoz.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1