Mexicaness

MEXICANESS by Lorea Canales

Ten years in New York, two daughters, one gringo husband, no plans of going back. How do you maintain your Latino roots? asks Zarela. How indeed do I conserve my “mexicanidad” when my daughters are two “güeritas” being raised in New York City.

For one, I am always late. Just kidding! The best part about immigration is that it allows you to maintain what you really like about your culture.

For me, it starts with food. My daughters have a basic diet of tortillas, beans, rice, chicken and aguacate. They snack jicama con chile and cure their colds with “sopita de pollo”. For any other ailments there is “te de manzanilla”.

While most American mothers I know teach their children to be clean, orderly and safe, for me it is important that they can take risks, improvise and develop bacteria in their stomach. Ana thinks that the sweet tamales in the taco truck on west 96^th street are much better that any doughnut –and they are.

All generalizations will have exceptions, gaps and holes, but I have a sense that Americans protect their kids more, shield them until they let them go. Whether Mexicans expose them more, teach them to be resilient and never let them go.

Once at Petco, I saw a group of college students almost faint because the snapper turtle they were admiring ate a fish. Instead I went and bought fish for our heretofore vegetarian turtle to teach the girls about life and death, we’ve put twenty goldfish in the tank, there are eight right now. I strongly believe that death is a part of life and the more we acknowledge that, the stronger my daughters will be.

I give them Mexico through language. “Háblame en español”, follows everything they say. Their eyes roll and they breathe deeply searching for words in the back of their head, until they manage to talk to me in Spanish I won’t listen.

We sing songs in Spanish and I am fairly confident they know the standard repertoire from Alla en la Fuente, most of Cri-Cri, Doña Blanca, La Vibora de la Mar and Adelita. I can’t wait until we get to José Alfredo Jimenez.

I also keep a very close group of Mexican friends who I love dearly, but mostly it is our “mexicanness” that holds us together. Would I be close friends with each and every one of them in Mexico? probably not. Thankfully here it is our country that has brought us together and I would not change them for anything. Together we celebrate Mexican holidays, for six hears now we have done Día de Muerto, Posadas (I am in charge of the Ponche) and Rosca. We promote the friendship between our children who all go to different schools, so they have a sense of community and belonging, we need to remind them to speak Spanish between themselves, for unbeknown to us we are raising American children. How American or Mexican they will be in the end, the decision is theirs, all we can do is give them the tools. Siempre está el otro lado.

Lorea Canales is a lawyer, journalist and writer. She studied law in Monterrey’s Instituto Tecnológico and got her LlM at Georgetown University. After working for several law firms in the US and Mexico, she wrote about legal issues for Reforma Newspaper. She worked in two political campaigns in her home state of Nuevo Leon, where the PAN won its first race as an opposition party and for Felipe Calderon current President of Mexico. SInce she moved to New York ten years ago, she has continued to publish in magazines and newspapers in Mexico, and will graduate this May from NYU with a MFA in Creative Writing. She lives with her husband and two daughters in New York City

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