Community, Family, Identity: Autobiographical Reflections
What is ethnicity? Who decides what culture we belong to? These questions have been the centerpiece of some of my better known work, e.g. my novel-in-verse They Call Me Güero. Like many Latines in the US, I’m faced with competing models of what I must be in order to “qualify” as a “real” Latino. It’s exhausting at times, but perhaps my experiences can inspire others to stand up fearlessly and assert their identity.
I’ll use my most recent battle to illustrate the complexities.
This past Saturday, November 2, my paternal uncle Michael Garza showed up at a presentation my daughter Charlene and I were doing at the South Texas Book Festival in McAllen. When the moderator opened the floor to audience questions, Mike attempted to humiliate me publicly by disputing my identity as a Mexican American. The incident made the audience very uncomfortable, though they remained supportive of me and rejected his attempts to hand them photocopies of “evidence.” My daughter Charlene, for whom this was one of her first panels ever, was deeply hurt. And my other daughter, Loba, put her pregnant body in possible harm’s way, trying to diffuse the situation until security came to escort Mike from the event.
Yes, that was my Mexican American uncle from my Mexican American family telling me that I should not be calling myself Mexican American. And it wasn’t the first time he’s made the demand. He has harassed me on social media and gone to the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley, where I work, in hopes of ruining my reputation and perhaps getting me fired.
Now, Mike isn’t the most stable of men. A 71-year-old Vietnam vet, he appears to have struggled with mental health issues for most of his adult life. I witnessed him get violent with my father when I was young, and the family has shared stories of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. He and I once had a phone conversation during which I had to talk him off the ledge of severe depression and intrusive thoughts.
I know it sounds like I’m outing or dissing him, but actually I’m trying to explain why he may be lashing out at me. I don’t want to get a restraining order against him or sue him. I would love to see him get help and become healthy again. I include the above so that his children, wife, and siblings—when they read this article—will be encouraged to intervene for his own safety and wellbeing.
Why is Mike so angry at me? Because I have repeatedly referred to his father, Manuel Garza, as my grandfather.
To be clear, Manuel Garza did indeed raise my father, Mike’s brother. When my dad joined the Navy in the late 60s, he referred to himself as “David Bowles Garza.” To me and to everyone I ever saw him discuss his identity with, he called himself Mexican American. Though he bore the last name of his mother’s first husband, he insisted to me that he was not that man’s son. When as a young teen I asked him whether my abuelo Manny was his real dad, he sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. He’s never denied it.”
SPOILER ALERT!
Nope.
It turns out that my father was neither the son of my grandmother’s first husband (whose last name was Bowles) nor of her second husband (Manuel Garza). Instead, he was the product of an affair before my grandmother finally left one and married the other.
Ironically, I know so because of Michael Garza’s first two attacks on my reputation, along with a conversation with my oldest aunt, Marie (the blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter of my grandmother’s first husband), in which she said she didn’t want me making her father look like a “pendejo cornudo” (dumb-ass cuckold). This interference from family members who had long ago cut me out of their lives pushed me to get my DNA tested.
Like many people who find themselves in such dire straits, I discovered that my father’s family had been covering up an “infidelity” for decades.
You see, my paternal grandmother Lois Marie got married at age sixteen to a man TWENTY-TWO YEARS older than her. She immediately had a daughter (my aunt Elizabeth Marie). This happened in Mississippi in the year 1938.
It wasn’t until TEN YEARS LATER, on April 5, 1948, that Lois Marie gave birth to her second child, my father. His curly black hair, almost black eyes, and dark skin made it tough to believe that his red-haired, green-eyed mother had conceived him with her blond, blue-eyed first husband.
So my grandmother began to tell a story: in her husband’s ancestral home, there was a portrait of a dark-complexioned ancestor, and the newborn was a “throwback” to those traits.
I have no idea whether folks bought this story. What I do know is that two years later, Lois Marie got married in Reynosa, Mexico, to her second husband, Manuel Garza. Why Mexico? Well, readers, she clearly wasn’t divorced from her first husband.
[See what you make me do, Uncle Mike and Aunt Marie?]
The next year, Lois Marie and Manny had a daughter, my Aunt Linda.
Two years after that, Michael was born.
Three years later, my uncle Daniel Garza joined the family, which included, of course, the first two children my grandmother had brought with her from Mississippi: Elizabeth Marie and David.
Now, the first husband of Lois Marie was diagnosed with cancer and moved to South Texas to spend his final years close to his daughter … and, my grandmother always claimed, to his son.
Mr. Bowles finally succumbed in 1957. Thirteen years later, Lois Marie and Manuel Garza got married again (and legally), just four months after I was born. So Manny was the only paternal grandfather I ever knew.
[More after some photos of my father.]
Now, fast forward to 2018 when They Call Me Güero is published and begins to win multiple awards. Because parts of that book are fictionalized versions of incidents and people from my own life, word gets around to my uncle Michael Garza, who decides to take issue with my identifying as Mexican American and calling Manuel Garza my grandfather. His older half-sister supports him, though she does say I have the right to claim Mexican American as my ethnicity (thanks, I guess).
I need some proof to push back against these elders who want to erase something essential about me. So I take the test.
One of the fascinating things about DNA is that experts can determine what genes come from what parent. As a result, I know some important details about my father’s heritage.
Aside from other regions, his DNA is 16% Spanish / Portuguese, 10% African, 4% Indigenous (from the Yucatan and South America), and 2% Indian (from India). No genetic connection to the Bowles or Garza families. None of my dad’s paternal DNA comes from his mother’s blue-eyed, blond-haired first husband or her light-skinned Mexican American second husband.
Instead, it’s from a man I will likely never know, a dark-skinned Latino (you can double the percentages to get an idea) who passed on his black curly hair, almost black eyes, and brown skin to my father, if nothing else.
But if it weren’t for the antagonism of my uncle and aunt, none of that would matter. I’m Chicano. Punto. My father was principally raised by his mother’s second husband. He saw himself as Mexican American, just like his younger half-siblings. He raised me Mexican American as well …
… until he abandoned me and my brothers when I was 16 years old. At that point, his family ALSO essentially rejected us, and I spent the rest of my adolescence living in government housing and on food stamps.
I married a Mexican woman. I’ve raised three Mexican American kids. My life and work is deeply rooted in South Texas and our Mexican American community.
I.
AM.
MEXICAN AMERICAN.
I don’t understand what I ever did to deserve the hatred of my own uncle. And I don’t get how he thinks he has any knowledge of who I am or what I have experienced, given that he never bothered to be involved in the slightest in my life, even after I was abandoned by his brother.
But I’m not going to sit still any longer. He has threatened me one too many times, and now my children are suffering the consequences.
There are more wrinkles in this story left to be told. I’m writing a fictionalized version in novel form, titled Illegitimate. Keep an eye out for it sometime in the next few years.
Remember, you know your own identity. No one else does. It arises from your family, community, and the specific experiences you have filtered through the heart and mind that nobody has direct access to but you.
Stand tall. Live your truth.
