I'm a mixed race/ethnicity Chicano who has lived in the Portland metro area since 2010. I was born to a fair-skinned Anglo (German-British) mother and dark-skinned (muy Indio-looking) Chicano father en El Segundo Barrio, El Paso, Texas, roughly a mile from the Mexican border. I am technically the second generation born in the U.S. on my dad's side, but for three generations we have always considered ourselves firmly American, albeit Americans profoundly shaped by border identity and politics...un pie en cada mundo...story of my life.
My mestizaje has been a constant thread throughout. It's a daily prism through which I view my family, social life, career, and, of course, myself. I don't fit neatly into any box. No soy Mexicano pero I've never been a white boy either.
Truth be told, I often consider myself somewhat of a shapeshifter. Depending on who I'm standing next to, you could make any number of assumptions about my ethnic background. I've been labeled Mexican, Anglo, native (once even in Canada), Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Cubano, Arab...all depending where I am or who I'm hanging with. I call it "Lou Diamond Phillipsism" in honor on the Filipino-Anglo actor who became famous for playing Chicanos/Mexicanos in the '80s, but has also been cast as Navajo and Thai characters.
However, shapeshifters can all too easily turn invisible. We're everywhere and nowhere at once. Impostors in the eyes of others or, much more often, in our own view. What we claim and how we're claimed by others is constantly in flux for most of us.
In the mirror, I've always seen a Chicano looking back at me. My mom led the decision to give me a name that would shape my identity throughout my life. Alfredo, after my father, and Victorio, after a prominent Warm Springs Apache chief.
Alfredo Victorio Moreno is a helluva Latinx calling card. I know my experiences would have been dramatically different had I walked around this world as Allen Vincent Moreno.
But, like the boy named Sue in Johnny Cash's song, it was that name that made me strong and, combined with holidays/summers with my large, vibrant El Paso familia, forged my Chicano identity even while living in an all-white world.
My parents split up before I was 2 and in the third grade me and all my vowels moved to the blue collar timber town of Roseburg in Appalachian-like Douglas County, Southern Oregon. I enjoyed my mostly happy formative years there, but was always distinctly aware of my "otherness."
In early '90s Roseburg, I could count one one hand the number of people who self-identified (usually somewhat reluctantly) as Latino or Latina. Those of us who did were always better served to blend into the mainstream Anglo dominated social structure. You often looked the other way on off-color jokes or dumb stereotypes and you didn't make a big stink about getting your name butchered by teachers, coaches, and acquaintances. Survive and advance (and deal with your guilt about that later).
My senior year, however, I decided I was done with all that. While I didn't really mind my Anglo-friendly nickname (Al), I firmly reclaimed Alfredo Victorio and made sure everyone knew who I really was. Among my all-white good friends (some of the best people I've ever met), I was embraced and for the first time in a long time, felt a sense of wholeness.
That continued in college, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where I found many ways to quench my cultural thirst. In New Mexico, a place of historic cultural crossroads, I grew deeply interested/obsessed with ethnic/cultural fusion and how people like me not only navigate, but thrive in this world of boxed categories.
Now back in Oregon, that personal work continues.
A recent career change has dramatically expanded my previously all-white professional and social circle in Portland, and I've discovered (once again) the joys and angst that comes with life as a shapeshifting Chicano.
I feel both supremely qualified and a total poser while advocating for mi gente. My Anglo wife and friends both support me wholeheartedly and struggle to relate to what I'm feeling. New friends I've meet who struggle with similar identity issues have become some of my most prized relationships.
I guess, I'm still piecing together my four-plus decades of thoughts on it all...and I think I always will be. Es la vida.
But as long as I continue to embrace and celebrate the beauty of my mariachi-country-tamale-sauerkraut identity, it's gonna be a damn good one.