The question of identity, is a very interesting one for me. I have been asked whether I want to be identified as Latino, Hispanic, Salvadorian, American, Mexican American, Chicano, what? And, I have to tell you that I come from the smallest country in the continent, El Salvador. El Salvador has such a diverse mix of racial patterns that you don't have that many distinct communities. It's hard to find an African community in El Salvador, because the African genome root has been pretty much spread out almost evenly throughout the population. You find people from Palestine, from Japan, from Korea, from the US, from Germany, from France, from everywhere. The original inhabitants of my land where the Nahua. The Nahua Pipil themselves were immigrants that arrived some 400 years before the Spanish came. The Pipiles had migrated from Mexico and established their community there, in El Salvador. They called the land Cuzcatlán—the Land of the Jewel. When the Spanish came over, they brought natives from Guatemala and Mexico to help them conquer Cuzcatlán. It was not possible to subjugate them, so they created a separate land within El Salvador. The pipiles were running their own government within the country, called a Señorío. But in 1932, the president of El Salvador, General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, perpetrated the greatest massacre that we have known in that country, which even to this day it is referred to as La Matanza. He killed, in a matter of a couple of weeks, about 30,000 to 40,000 indigenous people. That level of repression, pain, and genocide, cut deep into the population and the indigenous people stopped showing who they were, the men stopped dressing in their all-white clothes, and the women stop wearing their colorful wipiles; they stopped speaking the language; they stopped teaching the language to the children. Now, there is an effort to speak it again, to learn it, to remember it, because only some of the grandmothers remember it. The grandchildren think that it is a thing for old people, and are ashamed to learn it. The men don't want to speak it, because the men go out and work with the Mestizo population, the Spanish speakers, the Christian population, and they find themselves discriminated if they were to be thought as indigenous, as Indians. So there are many efforts to teach Nahuatl in the schools, and a lot of the fathers don't want the children to learn Nahuatl. They want the children to learn Computer Language or English, because that's the future, they say. Nahuatl is the past; it’s gonna die with the grandmothers. The identity as cuzcatlecos or as pipiles is been forgotten.

So, I'm growing up in El Salvador in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with this feeling, with this trauma, this PTSD that encompasses many generations, that has caused genocide of many different languages, genocide of many cultures, genocide of what was the people of my land, and I find myself in this body that is the result of an invasion and a genocide.

I see my skin, whiter than a native, and I know that this color was raped into my ancestors. But I know that I also have in me the gene of the of the invader, the one that came here to conquer, and to oppress. And at some point, this Mestizo population, this mixed race, who were third class citizens at one point became the tools that carried out the oppression and administered the wealth of the white land-owners. During the colony, the class structure was more or less rigid. The European Spanish were the top of the food chain. Then there were the White Spanish who were born in this land, or the Ladinos. They had a lot of the privilege of the Spanish without being able to own the land. And then you had the Indians and the Africans, both enslaved. These two groups had no rights at all. They could be owned, oppressed, exterminated, or converted, which is another form of extermination. And then you had the Mestizos, the children of this encounter between the three races, the Mulato and the Mestizo.

The second-class citizens, who were the white people born in this country, created this independence movement all Latin America, to free the rich land owners of this land from the oppression of Spain and attain the freedom to continue oppressing the races that had no rights to begin with. But it is this Mestizo race, this mix of all things, that were the ones who were here administering, caring for the lands, working the land. . .. well, that was the black, native, and mixed populations. And we were the ones fighting the wars of the land owners. All acts of oppression had been performed by soldiers who were part of the oppressed class, who were part of the indigenous population, who were part of the of the black population, were part of the Mestizo population. All crimes against humanity were perpetrated on behalf of the few rich white families who owned the land.

It is as a result of this generational pain that that I was born. And in school, we’re rarely taught what happened. Just to give you an example, you learn Spanish in Latin America, you never learn the indigenous languages that were spoken here. But the Spanish that you're taught in Latin America is not the Spanish that we speak in Latin America. You're taught the Spanish of Spain. You're taught to conjugate verbs, you're taught to use the grammar that Spain approves, even to this day, not the grammar that we use in Mexico, El Salvador, in Chile, in Venezuela, and in Cuba. They tell us, too, that the right way to speak Spanish is not the way we speak it. We have different persons; Spain has tu and usted, but in El Salvador we have to usted and vos, these two. The vos is used in some countries, in Latin America is used in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and it is used in Colombia it is used in Argentina. But the Spanish we speak is not the Spanish they teach us. We are always taught that we speak incorrectly.

We are still taught the religion of the invader, as if it was my own. We are brought up by default, as Catholic. If my family is rebellious, they may become Born Again Christians, or any other variant of the imposed religion. There is competition between the Jehovah Witnesses, the Mormons, or any number of US-born religions, to vie for our souls. All the while, the indigenous ones are considered backwards, ignorant, barbarous. It was an insult when I was growing up, to be called Indian, to be native. It is synonymous with stubbornness, with ignorance, with violence, and with lack of intelligence. So, you grew up hating a part of yourself, you grew up ignoring a part of yourselves.

One thing was clear, however, when I was growing up, in terms of identity, is that I was Salvadorian and I was American. Because America, for the entirety of the population of this continent, from Canada, to the tip of Chile in the south, America is the whole continent. It's only in the US, that America is used to refer only to the people of this country. See, I always thought I was American, because I was from El Salvador, I was from the continent of America, just like a French person, British person and in a Spanish person are going to think of themselves as European. So I was American. Someone from Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa, they are Africans, right? I was American. But I am no longer considered American when I come to the United States.

In 1985 I had to leave my country. The US, under the Reagan administration, was sending the equivalent of $1 million a day to the army of El Salvador to oppress the people because they need to stop the country from becoming communist. That was the aim for the United States. What that meant to me is that many of my friends were killed, kidnapped, tortured, limbs were torn apart. That meant being electrified, getting electrocuted, being persecuted by death squads. It meant losing my family. It meant seeing my father go into exile; then my mother and my brothers. It meant being alone, as I was trying to graduate from school, as I was trying to have one year of college, at least, under my belt before I had to also fall into the violence of the country. It meant losing my best friends, to this violence. It meant many things that had little or nothing to do with the Cold War. The Cold War was a thing here in the US, it was cold in the United States. It was cold in Russia. It was full of lead, fire and blood, everywhere else.

One day, in 1985, when I was 19 years of age, I had to leave the country and come to this country, the United States. And all of a sudden, I was no longer American. I was not considered American. Most people thought I was Mexican. Mexicans knew I was not Mexican. They knew I was Salvadoran too, and for them that meant that I was barbaric, ignorant, the drunk, a womanizer and violent. I can assure you that I have never been a drunk. I lost identity. I did not know what I was.

I did not want to be here. My life belonged in that war torn country. I did not speak this language. I had a life there. I had a destiny. Even if the destiny was to die. I felt free in my country in a way that I never felt here. Yes, it was a military dictatorship. Yes, my life was likely to end, either by the government or by street gang violence. And yet, under all that military restriction, under months without potable water, under the threat of earthquakes, and war, not being able to go out at night, because there was a martial law in the country, something of my spirit felt free. Because I had a life and an identity. And here, I have lost that. What was I? They were calling me Hispanic back then, a decision of the Reagan administration. But Hispanic to me, I know enough Latin to know that Hispanic meant the countries that came from the Hispanic peninsula, from Spain. And, to be Latino meant that I was a descendant of those countries that emerged after Rome broke apart. So anybody coming from Italy, Spain, Portugal, or France, were Latinos. Latin America, they said, not Native America, not America, not the mix of chaos and encounters sui generis that this America was. It was not Cuzcatlan, not Turtle Island, not even simply American. I had to be Latin American, or Hispanic and I was neither. What was I?

One day, I am with my benefactor, a Yaqui Indian, who seeing a cut that I made on my arm and bleeding, asked me, “What is that color?” It’s red I said. And he said, “when I cut myself, I'm also red. That is the color of our race. We are not white, brown, black, or yellow. We're all red beneath the skin in what unites us,” he said. We are red. Our traditional path is the red path. And the community always follows the red path. So, when it comes to race, I think always that I am a human being. I always remember that the names of all the people, whether they are Nawa, Inca, Apache, Lakota, Tarahumara, or Mapuche, the name always means the people. The people of the lake or the people who run, or the people who resist, or the people who endure, or the people who hold the jewel of the soul. But it's always the people. We are always the people.

I am the people but I am also all those other things and the things that have been denied and the things that have been erased. I am those things. I am the forgetfulness of my people. I am the oppressor and the oppressed. I am the history that remains untold. What I am then, other than one of the people, other than a walker in the Red path, is a palimpsest. The palimpsest! The old document that has been erased and rewritten many times, its words faded, find themselves mixed with other words and other designs and other drawings from long ago—a stain here, a scratch there. And what has been erased re-emerges with a turn of the light, with a twist of the paper.

I am a palimpsest.

I am not a simple mix of races. I am not Latino. I am not Hispanic. I am not Brown. I am not my color. I am not even my tradition. For my traditions were imposed on my ancestors. I am the forgotten things. I am the things that emerge, here buried inside my throat. And they rise and emerge and appear to just take a glimpse through my eyes for a moment, to then be gone before they can become thought. I am my PTSD. I am my rage. I am my love and my poetry. I am everything that has been done to me and mine. I am what has been forgotten. I'm a palimpsest; one of the people of the Red.

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin (To all my relations.)

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I was raised specifically not to judge people based on the color of their skin. Because of this, I always felt like I was an ally. I was blind to all the ways I was not. I was also raised to believe that speaking “proper English” was very important. In my community, how you spoke indicated your intelligence. And intelligence indicated your worth.   There’s a lot to unpack in there. Like many middle-class white people with educated parents I was raised that there’s a certain way that you speak and that indicates your intelligence and your intelligence tells people that you are worthy. And I unconsciously adopted a stance that if you didn’t speak the way I did, you were less intelligent and if you were less intelligent you were less worthy of my consideration. It’s extremely humbling now for me to recognize how wrong that is. Not only is it wrong morally, it’s just plain wrong to think that people who don’t speak English the way I was raised are less intelligent. Throughout my life I have categorized people and become friends with people who speak the way I do. Eliminating a huge amount of the population including lots of black and brown folks who use English differently. I never understood until recently that AAVE (African American Vernacular English) was an actual language variation of its own. I’ve been dismissing huge swaths of the population because I considered them less valuable. I required black folks to code switch just to be my friend. I am sincerely sorry for my judgement and ignorance. I did not realize until recently what a white supremacist attitude this is.   I am quite literally opening myself to welcoming more diverse voices to my life. I wish to be be a better person to others. I am actively engaging with content from folks who speak AVEE to get myself more familiar and listening much more intently to a wider variety of voices.

When I initially became a therapist, I worked for a behavioral health agency where clients were assigned. I remember the many times walking out into the lobby to meet my new client and seeing the look of shock or disappointment when they realized I was their therapist.  Those initial sessions usually began with clients wanting to discuss my qualifications. One client could not move passed the fact that I was Black and asked for a White therapist. Her statement stayed with me, “did they not think I was good enough for a White therapist?” This was completely new to me. Growing up in NY, I was surrounded by many Black professionals but being in Tucson taught me firsthand about implicit bias and micro-aggressions.

I have had to prove to potential clients that my credentials are valid, my experience is valid, and I am valid. Often times I have the most education in the room due to working twice as hard to get into spaces that would otherwise be closed to me. I have obtained many certifications, advanced classes, constantly reading on new technology; I have several academic publications and completing my doctorate. I still have to prove to some clients that I am good enough or smart enough. I’ve heard statements like “you’re different than a lot of African Americans” which is often a question of my blackness. In professional settings with my non-black colleagues, when I’ve mentioned a small fraction of my Black experience the room tends to go completely silent and then they change the subject. There is generally no acknowledgement that my experience as a Black therapist is different than their own.

I had to come to accept that I will attract clients that I am meant to enter into their path. The client and I mutually choose each other. Until I feel it is time for me to move on, I will continue to be a healer in the desert.

I used to think I was such an ally, but now I realize that I can’t help but be indoctrinated with racist ideas, thoughts, and blind spots because I’ve been inundated with them my entire life — and that it’s my job to continually examine, confront, and dismantle those.

Fast forward and I’d become the stepfather to two Black teenage sons. That changed my entire perspective on both the world and myself.  I saw how differently my stepsons were treated almost every day, and they told me about the way they act differently around white people, me included, and how they can feel the white gaze pretty much all the time.  My older stepson is the best driver I know, yet every time he would borrow our convertible, he would get pulled over.  He even got pulled over by the Border Patrol, which I didn’t even know could happen!  He’s a much better driver than I am, yet I never, ever get pulled over.  Never.  But he got stopped and had the car searched for no reason except for the fact that he’s a young Black man driving a luxury car.  It’s heartbreaking — and compounded by the fact that any one of those unjust stops could easily end his life if things go wrong.

This launched me into self-examination about privilege, which in turn led to what will inevitably be a lifelong practice of disentangling myself from my own internalized racism.  I used to think I was such an ally, but now I realize that I can’t help but be indoctrinated with racist ideas, thoughts, and blind spots because I’ve been inundated with them my entire life — and that it’s my job to continually examine, confront, and dismantle those.

I do this in lots of ways: podcasts like Code Switch, CTZN Well, Uncivil, and more; books like White Fragility and So You Want To Talk About Race; frank and humble conversations with my BIPOC friends; documentaries; following important accounts on social media; Black journalism; deep dives into Black history; supporting and engaging in Black-led and Black-owned enterprises, etc.  I have to keep learning — and unlearning — and the more I do the more I realize how much I’ve taken for granted, how many times I’ve failed to be an ally, how many times I’ve fallen into old tropes like white saviorism or performative allyship, and how I need to keep doing the work.  And that work can’t be solely internal or solely external.  I have to do both, and be willing to be vulnerable, make mistakes, shut up and listen, and hold myself accountable.  This is a life’s work, and I believe it is something we all have to do because we’ve got centuries of white supremacist ideology to deconstruct.  We can’t help but be influenced by it, but we can devote ourselves to uprooting systemic racism both in society and in our own hearts and minds.

Being hapa means I have a complicated racial/ethnic identity. At times, it feels like my race is defined by the absence of a racial identity.

I am half-Japanese. My mother was born and raised in Japan, in Gunma-ken. She came to the US when she was 28 years old. On her side, I am the first generation born in the US. I have never met any of my mother’s relatives except one nephew who honeymooned in the US and stayed with my family for a week when I was 11. Now that my parents are both deceased, I have no contact with any of my maternal relatives.

My mother’s English was never very strong, but she did not teach any of her four children Japanese. I have always loved learning languages, and when I was 11, I asked her to teach me Japanese. She told me that she didn’t know how to teach. I told her she could just stop speaking to me in English, thinking that if she spoke only in Japanese, I would have to learn. She said she couldn’t do that because she would forget English. She then gave me some Japanese textbooks from the 1960s that had belonged to her first husband (my father was her second husband). I taught myself for a few weeks, learning the three alphabets, numbers, days of the week, common phrases. But I gave up when I tried speaking to someone in Japanese. I was trying to sound out the words phonetically, saying “EE-KAH-GAH DAY-SOO-KAH?” After my third unsuccessful attempt at speaking the words, I gave up. “I’m trying to say, ‘How are you?’ You know, in Japanese.”

My listener said, “Oh! You mean, ikaga desuka.” It sounded so different from how it had appeared to me on paper that I realized the futility of learning from books. This was long before the time of Rosetta Stone and Duolingo apps.

When I was 28 years old, I enrolled in a Japanese class at the community college where I was (and still am) an English professor. And that is where I was on August 29, 2006. I was sitting in the first day of that Japanese class at the exact moment when my mother–along with my father and twin brother—were killed in a car accident. I dropped the class that semester and was never motivated to take it again since I had no one to talk to.

My father was Irish, English, Danish, and German, with some Native blood mixed in with the German. When I traced it back with my paternal grandmother, we determined that I was 1/64^th “Delaware Indian.” That was the description written out in cursive writing on the old family tree she had.

To most people, I look white. I recognize that although I do not identify as white, I do experience the benefits of white privilege because white people perceive me as white, as belonging to their group. But I don’t belong. Do I identify as Asian? When I got to college and had to start marking my ethnicity on forms, I usually selected Japanese because to me, the 50% Japanese outweighed each of the 12.5% of the other four options. One day, when I was working as a tutor, the director of the writing center asked me how he should mark my race. I told him that I was half-Japanese and half-white, but that I usually just marked Japanese. He asked me, “Do you speak Japanese? Did you grow up eating a lot of Japanese food?”  When I said no to these questions, he told me he would just put me down as “other.”

I am too white to be Japanese, but I am too Japanese to be white.

I don’t feel a strong sense of belonging in either culture. I learned to forge an identity in other ways—through religion and spirituality, through the arts, through music and through writing. So, I will end with a poem I wrote several years ago, dedicated to my mother, Shizue.

Angle of Refraction

When a light wave travels across a boundary

between two different media,

the wave becomes bent.

Mrs. Warwick explained this

in my fifth grade science class

as she handed out plastic straws

for us to put into clear cups of water.

“See how the straw appears crooked?

This is because of the angle of refraction.”

English was my mother’s second language.

In this strange tongue,

her words came out bent, twisted, refracted.

Sara Lee sounded like celery.

Cataracts were Cadillacs.

She thought yield meant “go very fast.”

For emphasis, she would say, “I’m not telling you.”

Every sentiment of her was distorted

as it traversed the boundary

between okaasan and mother.

The words I longed to speak to her

were forever lost in the divide between

musume and daughter.

Her voice was most clear

in the silences.

There was no confusion

as her hands moved over mine,

folding the crisp lines

of a paper crane.

There was no need for translation

when she pressed her lips

against the tiny hole,

breathing life

into the belly of the bird.  

For the entirety of our Nation's existence, from our vaunted Founding to our present, we have both legally and illegally discriminated against people of color, most egregiously against those of African-descent. There is not one aspect of our current society that does not reflect this fact.  I will not rest until the national narrative around this injustice has once and for all changed and more importantly, until we institute a policy of national reparations to repair these injustices that have led to vast inequality between Black and White in our Nation. It is duly un-American to continue to ask African-Americans to solely bear the historical brunt force trauma of their enslavement, the Black Codes and Jim Crow. It is long overdue for White Americans to claim this tragic, violent history and its present impact by showing our support-monetarily, emotionally, physically and mentally- for the Black community.  Only when we as a Nation right these old wrongs, can we truly claim "Liberty and Justice for All”.

The struggle of my ancestors is something that I hold dear to my heart. Many have crossed the border while many have watched a border cross them. It’s this narrative that has have often guided my family in defining what it means to be living in this country and contributing to society.

I am a Chicano. I was not born in Mexico. I was born here in Tucson, Arizona. I’m an American of Mexican descent raised with an infusion of Mexican American customs on Tucson’s Southside. My life experiences are guided by the unique struggles of my ancestors, whether it be my grandfather finding out he was paid less than his White counterparts even though he was doing all of the work, or my grandmother being told to go back to Mexico. Thankfully, I have not experienced any of these horrific forms of racism, but I have family who did and decided that we would counteract with hard work at one’s job, contently grinding to be better,  respect for elders, and a yearning to make positive contributions to our community. All of which are values I’ve been raised with.

In separate settings I’ve been told that I act too White, and I’ve also been told that I act too Mexican. Which is it? Can’t I blast corridos in my car and go home and watch The Office without having my cultural identity in mind? Can I go through my experience of receiving a higher education as a 1^st generation college student without feeling left out?

I am my ancestor’s wildest dream, yet this is another borderland that many people in my community encounter. We’re neither here nor there. Can’t I be a bridge for my community into a world of what could be without being misconstrued for having a nopal en la frente? After all, when I’m settings where I’m the only Chicano I wear my nopal proudly to let these folks know who we are. It’s confusing, I know. But, when I find myself feeling weak, I turn to La Virgen de Guadalupe to pray, and I turn to my family for strength. I am Chicano.  

As African Americans, we are caught in this world which celebrates the culture but not the people.

I want to dare to dream. I want to watch my nieces and nephews grow old and be come astronaut and paleontologists. I want the sun to rise and set and not have to worry about trauma. Trauma that has been shared from generation to generation, passed like songs we keep collecting and resurrecting day in and day out.

I want to laugh loud in public without being looked at as the loud and boisterous black guy. I want to walk downtown without purses being held tighter when I walked by. I want the privilege to just dream. To dream like white kids dream to walk on Mars, I want to feel that in my neighborhood. I want the belonging I feel with people who look like me, I want to feel that with everyone. I just want my dreams to stop being my dreams.

I have a friend named Troy. Troy has a dog named Hank who is one of the most well behaved dogs I’ve ever met. I asked Troy how he trained him. When Hank was a puppy, Troy placed Hank belly up on the floor. He squirmed and whined but Troy held him down.

When he stopped squirming, Troy let go. Hank got to his feet and started walking away. Troy grabbed him, turned him over and placed him on his back again.

The dog squirmed and whined for a while then stopped. Troy removed his hand, Hank got up and the cycle began again.

Troy repeated the process until Hank stayed on his back when Troy removed his hand.

I have a nephew named Anthony. When Anthony was thirteen, he and

some friends were playing basketball on a court next to the projects when

two cops showed up in a squad car. They got out, walked up to the kids

and told them to get off the court.

Anthony asked, “Why?”

The officers said, “Get the fuck off the court.”

Anthony asked, “Why?”

“Get the fuck off the court and go the fuck home. Now.”

Anthony pointed to a sign that was attached to the fence that surrounded the court.

“The sign says we can play until dusk. It ain’t even two o’clock.”

One of the cops said, “Look you little bastard-“ Anthony shot the ball.

The cops rushed him and put him in a choke hold. Anthony did not resist.

One cop screamed, “Calm down!”

Anthony said, “I am calm.”

“Calm down!”

“I am calm. Why are you doing this?”

“CALM DOWN!”

Anthony said nothing.

The officers walked him to the squad car and slammed him on to the trunk. They frisked him and cuffed him. Then they threw my thirteen year old nephew into the back of the car.

The system is not broken. The system works exactly as it was intended.

The system is not broken. The system must be changed.