What Does It Mean? Being Latino in NOLA
Depending on where I am, who I am with, and what I am saying, wearing, or doing, I have been told that I am not Dominican, that I am (a local) creole, that I am a gringo, that I am a Mexican, and so on. Throughout the years it has always struck me how strange it must be to never be clearly identified. After all, as human beings we yearn for a sense of identity. Owning our identity gives is grounding. It tells us we belong to a group. We belong to a people. We belong to a way of life. It tells us, in short, we belong. So, if psychologists and sociologists tell us this, what does it say about Latinos in New Orleans, such as me, who confront such a wide array of opinions about my identity?
I think this is an issue that merits some discussion. Historically, immigrant communities have done their hardest to lose their cultural and linguistic heritages in an effort to assimilate and become more “American.” In Louisiana we have seen this in our history. Sometimes the effort to establish an “American” identity is forced on a community directly and other times it is forced indirectly. The English-only policies of the early Twentieth Century forced non English speaking communities, particularly the French in Acadiana and the Spanish in lower St. Bernard Parish, to adapt and assimilate by speaking English. As late as the 1930’s one could have paid a visit to lower St. Bernard Parish into Ycloskey or Delacroix and found only Spanish speaking people there who couldn’t read or write, or speak in many cases, English. When there aren’t strong English-only policies in place, the host community exerts its demand that all newcomers adhere to the host community’s way of life. So, immigrants such as the wave of Latinos that came to New Orleans in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s quickly learned that English was the only tolerated language and these new immigrant communities quickly adapted.
In having said this, I don’t mean to imply that learning English was a bad strategy for immigrant communities. Learning English is a must if an immigrant community is to thrive in the United States. What I do mean to imply is that the choice to maintain cultural and linguistic heritage was not explicitly supported, and many immigrants chose to blend in and lose these components of their identities so that the unspoken suggestions and questions about identity would disappear. Rather than maintaining a strong sense of their cultural and linguistic identities, modern Latino immigrants in the New Orleans area chose to become “American.”
So now, as we move into the 21st Century, and as we move into a new reshaping of the New Orleans area, I have to ask what to make of who I am as a modern Latino immigrant who has been raised in this community. In my personal experience, I underwent that same assimilation process I mentioned earlier about Latinos who have been here more than thirty years. We entered North American cultural spaces, business spaces, social spaces, and adapted to the ways and mores of our new homes. I was so good at this in my youth that I didn’t even speak Spanish for over ten years. The same could be said for many of my fellow children of immigrant families. Still, regardless if we speak our parents’ tongues or not, we embody something within us that is a combination of our former ancestral homes and our new homes. We begin to identify, as I have done, that we know and understand, on a real deep level, both sides of the coin. In doing this we begin to choose elements from each side that give us the ability to reshape who we are. We become both Latinos (in a renewed sense) and Gringos. We take on the character and spirit of the land where we live. We become Louisianans, and display the same loves and affections for Louisiana life and culture as any native born whose ancestors go back more than one generation. At the same time, we also maintain (or if we lose it, we end up rediscovering it) our original cultural heritage. As we choose from both we learn to adapt in a new way, to see life from two perspectives (sometimes more), and to understand differences and appreciate the subtlety of these differences. We become mediators, facilitators, and peace makers between the two or three different cultures we embody, sometimes explaining to new immigrants how to navigate the cultural landscape of their new homes or showing locals how to understand and relate to new immigrants from our home countries. In doing this, our understanding of our own identity expands. We are both Latino and “American.” We are neither just one or the other.
Our identity, becoming expansive as we grow into our lives in Louisiana, helps us bridge intolerance and misunderstanding, prejudice and bigotry. Our hybrid selves enjoy a special space in society, a space that shouts out to all that know us that we are indeed just like them (whomever ‘them’ happens to be) at the same time that we are ourselves, and it is okay. We prove to everyone that it is okay to be partial to both sides of our identities. We prove that we can be Latino and New Orleanian. We are as much from here as we are from Cuba or Colombia. We are Latinos in and from New Orleans, and through our experiences and relationships we bring to our community an enriching diversification that tends to bring out the best in our overall community.
So, at the end of the day, I believe that being Latino in New Orleans means to bear a certain responsibility to serve our community in a manner that aims to end racial division. For the majority of Latinos who have been in the New Orleans area for more than twenty or thirty years, it means that it falls on us to help expand the black-white divide, to help create and expand a more inclusionary dialogue about equitable opportunity. For those of us who are fully integrated into the community and yet maintain strong ties to our ancestral or parental cultural heritages, it falls on us to bring to others our hybrid perspectives. It falls on us to demonstrate a common space where all the different cultural, class, ethnic, linguistic identities can come together. That is what I believe I can offer.
When I am confronted by a bigot who generalizes ignorant statements about Latinos, I enter into a conversation with him and share my history. When I am confronted by a Latino bigot who generalizes ignorant statements about Louisianans, I enter into a conversation with him about my history in and among Louisiana’s communities. This is what it means to me to be a Latino in New Orleans. It’s not about isolating myself in my mother’s heritage and staying in a closed Latino society. It’s also not about assimilating so much that I lose my original cultural heritage. To be Latino in New Orleans in this recovery means something that is far greater than any one of us, but it will take each single Latino who straddles two worlds to join in the effort to expand the ability of our region to become a more welcoming, open place where newcomers and natives can succeed.
Tags: hispanic, hispanic community, hispanic community louisiana, hispanic new orleans, hispanic voice, immigrant, immigrant community new orleans, latino, latino community louisiana, latino identity new orleans, latino issues, latino voice, latinola