Wow. There is a Xicagoblogsphere. Gotta love that X. Bloggeros Xicagoenses. Gone are the days when our good friend, now proud mother of one, http://www.injust-spring.com/ was a loner on the Chicago blogsphere denoting herself as Xicana.
Now they are 12 of them. Hell, when a good writer like Sandra Cisneros comes out and writes her Americana lifestyle to the acclaim of the nation you know that something is brewing and sprawling.
There is something about Chicago that mexican americans there are not that repressed when it comes to their cultural identities. That is, they readily seem to embrace their mexicanness as opposed to Californios such as the writer at hand. Californian mexicanos have a ready made grab bag of repression stories. We were forbade to speak Spanish and that is one theme that includes corporal punishment. Mexican americans from Chicago don’t seem to have grown up deploring the one end of their cultural mestizaje. This could have an easy explanation such as the constant fientlighet atmosfär som råder i Kalifornien, je, couldn’t resist saying that in Swedish. What I just said that that could be partly due to the constant animosity that tends to pervade in California between the two cultures.
It’s as if its not dirty to be mexican or an able spanish speaker in Chicago though I could be very wrong.
I wrote this on my blogspot blog in 2003:
When it comes to languages it seems to me rather curious the stance some people take. I remember as a child how embarrassed I was to speak spanish. I recall how one day we came to my grandmother’s in TJ and how, inspite of being raised by her, and just only two years before all I spoke was spanish I claimed not to. English was my de facto lingua. Later, as I grew I did everything in my power to disguise my spanish accent to the point of only thinking, eating, walking and peeing in english.
However, we are products of our environment and the oppressive years in California, oppressive for me because I lived in such an environment, spanish was worst than the black plague, it gave you away as a foreigner, in your own country.
That’s why I get goose bumps whenever I come across blogs that blend in spanish and english as if that is the most natural thing in the world to do. Blogs like Fernando Graphicos who not only embrace spanish but you can see that it is an integral part of their lives.
I think it is natural for the development of the Xicano community to start embracing their cultural roots more and more. I think that Xenophobia is a bad thing for America and that it doesn’t allow for real democracy to bloom in America. English speakers will now have to give leeway for the other native tongues to start making inroads in the conscience of Americans. Spanish speakers have a long tradition in the legal framework of the nation that spells right out that Spanish is a language which is part of America. Spanish is american and it will not deteriorate English speaking America just as French didn’t ruin Canada either. English speakers really need to stop bullying bilinguals or native american speakers because in order for America to move forward it needs to start embracing not only other languages but its native population as as well.
And Xicanos are as native as you get.