Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel: Enchiladas All Round

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December 03, 2004

Enchiladas All Round

Okay, so I know that there’s lots and lots of Mexicans out there. And that at least lots of them end up with European women, and produce half-Mexican children like me. My mother’s met several; I met my first one tonight.

Again with the pleas of being painfully tired, but I can’t not write about it. Last night, AMP’s Swan Lake was on, followed by Enter The Dragon, I chatted to Sammi for about an hour, all of which made me glow for most of the evening. Chatting to Gina has been like having a mirror talk back to me and affirm that I’m completely normal. And, most importantly, that I’m not alone.

When I worked in the Arts Council, a few years ago, I was told that Latinos were such an ethnic minority that they didn’t even classify as an ethnic minority; therefore, apart from the odd guy hitting on me on the bus home, I’ve not met any other Latinos while living here in London, whereas Gina has lived here for four months now and seems to have a firm circle of Latino friends already.

Although my only friend at work is Portuguese, as you’ll know, I’ve been having a hard time lately reconciling myself to an unspoken expectation that I’ll be more English than I could ever be. I’ve been more specifically homesick than I’ve been for years, and have spent the last few days questioning what it is about me which makes me Latina, and what is so un-English about me. It’s extremely rare that any of my English friends make me feel like that, make me feel I have to question myself, even doubt myself.

So, this evening, Gina turned up, saw the Mexican and Guatemalan rugs in the bedroom and told me she was half-English, half-Mexican, from Mexico City; I told her I was half-German, half-Mexican, from Puebla. After chatting for an hour, she said she couldn’t see the slightest shred of German in me. I spent most of the hour in shock at meeting someone so much like me; I’ve met full-blooded Mexicans before, but as a rule, they don’t tend to have much opinion of half-bloodeds like me.

Christ, I can’t start to describe it. Nearly six years in this miserable, godforsaken country, alone, settling for being thought of as odd or just weird, but always alone. The closest I’ve met to a kindred spirit till now has been Ana, Colombian by blood but a Swede by upbringing. Gina’s upbringing has been the opposite of mine; whereas my brother and I were raised in England for the sake of education and opportunities, with regular trips back, she was raised in Mexico, with frequent trips here, specifically because her mother refused to spend any more than very brief trips to England. I’ve been raised away from the culture I feel the most affinity with; she seems to have the ideal arrangement of having been raised in the culture she feels the most strongly towards, and occasionally visited the other one, but never risking a conflict between the two.

I don’t want to gush, but it was so great to chat with her. I know full well that the last few years in London have changed me a lot, but that I still long for who I become when I return home. I really do hope I didn’t run on excessively with her, but mostly what we talked about is how to adjust to living in an English city when we’re so blatantly not English. At Network Rail, I was the office oddball. My own mother calls me weird; her friends, and friends of her friends call her weird. Why’s that? Probably because we’re more full of life than the average semi-comatose Englishman. Maybe it’s that we feel while others suppress. Or that we’re not afraid to enjoy ourselves. When I told her about my current work situation (she all but guessed that Fill is Portuguese, she knew he had to be a Latino), she said that of course I couldn’t survive there as I’m a Latina. My (Indian) boss thinks it’s fully acceptable to stick me in an office full of people who don’t talk (apart from one whose tongue I desperately need to rip out) and refuse to even tell me what my job is, much less give me work to do, whereas a complete stranger can understand immediately how it’s killing me. I didn’t need to even explain my Network Rail or Lewisham friendships, she just knew straight away what kind of work culture I needed, and that I clearly wasn’t there.

I’ve just spent half an hour falling asleep on the phone to Sammi, so I should finish this while I’m still vaguely awake enough to post this on both websites.

In 29 years, apart from a particular Dutch musician, and of course my mother, I’ve never met anyone else like myself before. I’ve never met anyone who understood me so automatically simply by recognising my background. I’ve lived in Honduras, she’s visited it; I’ve visited Mexico City, she’s lived there; I’ve lived in Guatemala, she wants to go there. For pretty much all of my friends, the first they’ve heard of Central America or Mexico is through me. Nobody else has ever seen my map of Central America in my hallway and made any sense of it, much less of its yellow tags. They see my rugs and wall-hangings, and they just think ‘colourful’; she knows the artesan market where I bought most of them from and most of my ceramics, also my dancer friends in the zócalo who I always meet up with every time I’m in Mexico City.

I’m just feeling so exhilirated to feel, well, so vindicated at last. The problem with living in England is that English people seem to enjoy treating foreigners as a freak of nature; I’ve finally met someone who has the same cultural crossovers as me, the same mix of backgrounds, and, like me, who doesn’t feel any less of a person for it. We talked about our own, and our parents’ situations – both of our mothers being the Mexicans – about how European men expect their culture to take precedence over our own. We’re half-Latina, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. If they can’t accept that, or meet us more than half-way, then that’s their problem. But nothing in me will let the non-Mexican half be manipulated to other ends.

Having met another like me, I’ll go into work tomorrow with a huge ‘screw you’ attitude, and hopefully spend the rest of the day exchanging jokes with Fill. Large apologies to everyone else I don’t get to email as a result.

Posted by chantal at December 3, 2004 10:21 PM

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