Chilena/Chicana

I'm taking a class on Chicano Art (capitalized.) and I already love how it's making me feel like I'm growing. We spent the first day wasting time because the professor had accidentally told the person who sells the course readers to come later than he meant. He asked us where we were from and what ethnicities we had in the class. I didn't get to tell him I'm Chilean which sort of bummed me out. Almost the entire class is Mexican-American...which is a term I found out quite of few identify with rather than Chicano. [I think two girls in the class are Asian, but I didn't really get a good look. One was sitting next to me, and the other was sitting in the back in a wheelchair. Those are definitely two situations when you cannot stare at a person to figure out if they are Asian or not.] A lot of the class had an opinion of what term they prefer to use when labeling themselves. I said that I identify as "latina" but, as the professor pointed out, that is such a weird phrase too.

I remember when we started doing state testing in elementary school and we were asked to fill in our ethnic background. I definitely knew what I wasn't, and then there was the word "Hispanic". First off, I wasn't Hispanic, I was Chilean. Once I was told that those two go together, there was another problem. The form looked like this:

Check one -
White (non-Hispanic)
Hispanic

Okay, well what if I'm both? I didn't really identify with other "hispanics" at school--even throughout high school--but I wasn't just White. I think I more often chose Hispanic just to differentiate myself from everyone else in SLO. Aside from that, I didn't identify with the term much. Here and there I'd teach my friends little bits about Chilean culture, but my mom was my only source of information there...I didn't feel much like a part of the culture.

Etching: "Libertad" by Ester Hernández

So now my homework is to read articles about what it means to be Chicano..even though I'm not. Still, I've always rooted for Chicanos over any other group in California and it feels important to learn about the culture and the activists that helped Chicanos fight assimilation into the mainstream "American" culture. When I'm learning about these things, I feel like I'm becoming much more educated than I do when I'm learning about psychology or biology. I'm excited because I'm also taking a class about prejudices in the American education system, and I think these two classes will help me become the type of educated person that I admire. I mean, if there is anyone who I envy for their knowledge, it is always someone who is knowledgeable about world cultures, especially third-world society and how minorities have struggled in first-world societies.



PS, I have a new bunny. His name is Bruce.