Ah, that Mexican-American friend of yours must be related to the border guards, US Marshals and Texas Ranger who took one look at my too-brown-for-Germany face and decided I was American. I imagine he would have considered many of my Colombian and Costa Rican coworkers “not Colombian/Costa Rican enough” and that seventh-generation US citizens of Chinese ancestry should get back on the boat… oh wait…
As for why a Mexican of Jewish religion or ancestry is more Mexican than a US citizen of Mexican ancestry, Little Nemo already explained it.
As for people who think that you can’t belong to a specific culture unless you have a specific skin color, I thought the general consensus in this board already was that they’re morons.
So, so true. God, I’m just gonna take this opportunity to rant a little. It makes me crazy because okay, I’m like, super white. But sometimes I have to go to Mexico for family stuff, which inevitably results in really stupid conversations. Like when I went to my cousin’s wedding a few years ago. This conversation nearly broke my brain.
Coworker: Where were you last week?
Me: Oh, I had to go to Mexico City for my cousin’s wedding. [Insert me telling them about wedding. BTW, my cousin’s husband is the son of a British KNIGHT, which is endlessly hilarious to the rest of my solidly middle-class American family, so of course I told my coworker about my cousin’s new parents-in-law, Sir D____ and Lady R______. So I guess my coworker had good reason to assume my cousin’s new husband was white.]
Coworker: Wait, how do you have family in Mexico? Are you Mexican???
Me: No, my aunt married a Mexican guy.
Coworker: Oh. Their kids will be so beautiful. Interracial kids are always so cute.
Me: Well…my cousin and her husband are both white, you know.
Coworker: I thought you said she was Mexican?
Me: She is. But her dad’s family immigrated to Mexico from Poland. They’re Jewish.
Coworker: Then…she’s Polish.
Me: She’s Mexican. And American, she has dual citizenship.
Coworker: How is she Mexican?
Me: She was born in Mexico and has lived there her entire life?
Coworker: But she’s white.
Me: Yeah.
Coworker: So she’s Polish.
Me: I don’t think she’s ever even been to Poland. Her grandparents left Poland 60 years ago. How could she be Polish?
Coworker: But how could she be MEXICAN? She’s WHITE.
Me: SHE IS A CITIZEN OF MEXICO WHY AM I HAVING THIS CONVERSATION STILL ARGHHHHHH.
I KNOW it’s about race and ethnicity because coincidentally, three of my other cousins are British citizens and I have never, ever, ever had anyone make weirdass comments about whether I am British or ask me how I could be related to British people. A white American having British relatives? Normal. Same person having Mexican relatives? INCOMPREHENSIBLE, apparently.
I think that the OP is confusing ethnicity with nationality. I have a Mexican friend who grew up in Mexico born of Mexican parents whose families have been there since for centuries who is white as is the rest of his family. While many Mexicans are of either indigenous descent or mixed race, not all of them are, and it appears foolish to think that someone born and raised in Mexico is somehow less Mexican than someone who was born and reared in the United States.
It’s because a lot of Americans, while they know that Americans can have ancestry from all over the world, refuse to accept that citizens of other countries can also have ancestry from all over the world. Their reaction to being told that someone from Mexico has Polish Jewish ancestry is “What? That’s not possible. Abort, abort, my mind is shutting down. Aaaaahhhhh!”
Wasn’t Frida Kahlo part Jewish?
Also Elena Poniatowska, the famous Mexican Journalist, was born in France and is of Polish descent. Not sure if she’s Jewish though.
I’m guessing that the availability of Kosher foods at my local Wal-Mart (I’m not a hypocrite; Wal-Marts in Mexico don’t suck) and Comercial Mexicana indicate that I’m in a Jewish part of the greater Mexico City area (I’m not really in Mexico City, but a suburb). In fact, I saw a dude in a yarmulke the other day, and he looked identical to any of the conservative Jews I’d see walking around in Southfield (a high-Jewish-concentration area in SE Michigan). I’m guessing he’s just as Mexican as the Catholic Mexicans, white Mexicans, Amerindian Mexicans, and Mestizo Mexicans that are in the area (I still want to go to Chihuaua to see the Menonite Mexicans).
The thing is, the vast majority of the Mexicans in the United States that are visibly identifiable as Mexicans based on racial characteristics are migrants or descendents of migrants. Why do migrants migrate? They’re poor. Why were they poor? Because they weren’t white, European land owners or their descdendants (granted, this is a broad generalization for convenience). There’s a large “white” population in Mexico, but Americans simply don’t notice them because they don’t suffer economic circumstances (or more and more often, a family tradition) that cause them to make a stupid decision to leave their country.
The area that I’m living in is an area nice, and so to me, it’s not even the “real” Mexico and the people (Mexicans, presumably) don’t appear to be “acting Mexican” in my eyes. There’re no taquerias or carnitas anywhere to be found (too ethnic for a “nice” zone).
For some real contrast between the different societies of Mexico City in and of itself, I recommend “Amores Perros” (fairly complete in itself) followed by “Y Tú Mamá Tambien.” Yes, they’re both works of fiction, but they capture several different cultures within the culture pretty nicely.
I had a similar problem with a co-worker, who could not believe that a red-headed student of ours was Mexican.
“Oh, he must be Argentinian,” she said. “Argentinians are white.” This despite the fact that the little boy and his parents had told us that they were MEXICANS from MEXICO.
“You do know that Mexicans can have ancestry from anywhere, don’t you?” I said. “Just like Americans can be descended from anywhere.”
“Oh, yes, but Argentinians are white.” Red-headed white child from Mexico just DID NOT COMPUTE in her brain.
And when they do migrate to the US, they’re not immediately classified under “Mexican,” a label which is actually a physical description and means “mestizo” until you find out where the “Mexican” in question is from.
One of the other PhD students in my graduate school once was asked how come he’d married a Mexican. Had they met while he was down on vacation or something? No… they’d met at the Universidad Autónoma de México, where they were classmates; they’re both Mexican. But he’s a blonde (for Hispanic standards, meaning light-brown hair) and she’s got the kind of looks that cause people to call her Lupe when they don’t know her name.
It’s completely impossible for me to ever read a thread about Mexico or Mexicans without thinking of Mexican food and being hungry for it. This does not occur with any other ethnicity, even though I like the food of pretty much every nation. I don’t think of Indian food when I read threads about India; I don’t think of Chinese food when I read threads about China; but every time there is any thread about Mexicans or even just a passing reference to Mexicans in anything, it makes me hungry. In fact, the very word “Mexican” makes me very hungry, much more so than “Mexico.”
No, no, too lazy to steal. Mexicans sleep under trees all day with their sombreros over their faces. You can tell the Jewish ones because they also have those little curls at the sides of their heads.
As a Mexican (not Jewish), I too would love to hear how I am supposed to act!!
Now concerning how Mexicans are supposed to look…
I am tall, light complexion and blue eyes. I have no indigenous blood, my ancestry is mixed northern European. My wife is what’s called morena clara. Two of her siblings have blue eyes and are very pale skinned.
Our oldest daughter has my skin, hair and eye color and is around 1.75m tall. On visits to the US people turn heads when they hear us conversing in Spanish. On several occasions in areas with small hispanic populations we have been asked what language we are speaking (actually we all speak fluent English) and when we tell them Spanish and that we are Mexicans we have even been accused of lying!
Once on a trip to the border I was complimented (in English!) on how well I speak Spanish by a “Mexican-American”. We all got a good laugh from that one.
I had a friend in grad school who was a Mexican American who acted like he was Jewish. He went to Hillel meetings and everything. A Jewish classmate of our was a little annoyed when she realized he wasn’t actually Jewish (both his parents were Catholic, he’d been brought up Catholic and had not converted), and said he’d been making her feel like a bad Jew because he walked everywhere on Saturday!
My God…I totally understand the OP. I am Jewish and my wife, also a Jew, is half Mexican. Her father and her uncle are both Jewish and are full Mexican. Though living in America, they are very nationalistic with respect to Mexico and do seem to look down on other (native) Mexicans. Both of them are first generation Mexican with Jewish parents that migrated from Poland. Judaism tends to place a high value on education, and indeed, both of men have degrees in Accounting and Dentistry, respectively. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the average Mexican in America is that of a lower class, uneducated day laborer, as you might find out in front of Home Depot looking for work, or picking produce in the fields. As educated Mexicans, they resent this image, especially since people might think this way of them. Consequently, I think they look down on other Mexicans because it reflects bad on ‘their’ country and believe these native Mexicans are a symptom of the problems the country is having.
On the boards maybe, but in real life it’s still alive and well. One of the biggest things I didn’t like about working in southern MA was the obvious hostility between my Anglo and Portuguese coworkers. I found the situation maddening, because I had white coworkers openly confiding how much they hated the Portuguese ones due to stereotypes x,y, and z without realizing that half of my mother’s family is Portuguese too. And the Portuguese coworkers assumed that I was entirely white, and would rudely speak Portuguese instead so they could bad mouth everyone else, me included. Little did they know that after 4.5 years of Spanish, I could understand a lot of what they were saying due to the similarities between the two languages.
I was able to get the white ones to lay off with that kind of talk (to me anyway) by introducing them to my very obviously Portuguese grandfather, but as for the rest… I didn’t look like them so it clearly didn’t count.
I didn’t know there was a big Portugese population…well, anywhere in the US, I guess. Ignorance fought.
Sometimes people break out with the Polack jokes because I’m very fair and blue eyed and I don’t look like my grandfather changed his name from Domanski.
To me Portuguese = white, but then to me Jewish also = white :). It always fascinates me how people divvy up ethnic groups, including or excluding differently based on regional preferences. My area has a lot of Portuguese as well ( we’re one of the biggest concentrations, with a lot of farming families, as opposed to the fishermen who settled in the northeast ) and you don’t seem to see that hostility. Indeed by being early farmers in the area before real estate values exploded, a number eventually qualified as local land-owning gentry out in the boonies.
But of course out here we have tons of Mexican and Central American immigrants to contrast with them, who typically aren’t considered white.