Multiple, Overlapping, and Often Conflicting Cultural Worlds = Me

I grew in San Diego, California, during the 1960s and 70s, on the periphery of the downtown area and on a hill that overlooked the magnificent San Diego Bay. My mother was an immigrant from Durango, Mexico, and my father, the son of an immigrant from County Cork, Ireland. His mother (my grandmother), Adela, was an immigrant from Nayarit, Mexico. My father was biracial, bilingual, and bicultural, quite comfortable in both the English-speaking and Spanish speaking worlds. Although my parents placed my sister and me in a predominantly-white Catholic school on the far edge our neighborhood, our street and the community that surrounded it, was racially diverse; yet most of the families I considered my neighbors were predominantly working-class and low-income Black. I say “Black,” with the voices of Malcolm X and James Brown in the background of my memory. I was 11 and the calendar in our home marked the year 1967. Daily body counts from Vietnam were shown every night on TV at the end of the news hour. Five months after my neighbor OD left for Vietnam, there was havoc in the streets—Dr. King had been assassinated in Memphis. Mom, dad, my sister, and I watched the funeral on our black & white TV. …. OD came home soon after, his coffin draped in the U.S. flag. My neighborhood was only one of many worlds I and my younger sister inhabited—but it was ground zero, home base (1959-1983). Too many worlds at one time for a little shy boy who had a difficult time getting words out of his mouth. Multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting cultural worlds also played out in the development of the my ethnic and racial identity, made difficult by the pull of assimilated white members of my dad’s kinship network, and the opposite pull of a Mexican immigrant mother intent on imprinting on her two children her native language, folklore, and values. The mouthing of racist remarks by whites toward Black and Mexican people was common, normative, acceptable; I heard the “N” word too many times. Watts, 1965, …34 people had been killed, 1,032 injured, and 3,438 arrested. LAPD Police Chief William Parker, commanding an army of white police, called the Black rioters, “....." ...Much too awful and pathetically racist for me to quote.