I Just Want to Be From Somewhere

I am a dad

I am a husband

I am a Latino

I am a struggling Catholic

I am a male

I am a Midwesterner

I am a 2nd Generation American

I am bi-lingual

I am education

I am Max Delgado

Seared Memories

My father was Mexican and my mom was a white girl from Toledo, Ohio.  My father was originally from a small town outside of Mexico City called Oaxaca, and while my dad was growing up, his family didn’t have electricity until he was fifteen.  My father met my mother in a hotel lobby room in Mexico City back in the 70’s.  She was down there studying Spanish and they fell in love and once they got married, they decided to live there, in Mexico.  They decided to move up to the States so that I could be born and become an American citizen.  After I was born, we then moved back down to Mexico. So all my first memories of life were down in Mexico until my family moved back to Toledo, Ohio to live with my grandma when I was six years old.

The lifestyle in Mexico was radically different.  I remember the transition from Mexico to the U.S. because I was already in the first grade.  A lot of those memories got seared into me and I think one of the biggest things that caught me by surprise was the amount of white people here.  When I was growing up, I remember my mom was an oddity in Mexico because she was Irish-American.  Then when I moved up to the States I remembered being shocked because a lot of people looked like my mom.  Also, I noticed my dad was much darker than everyone else, so it was very different.  The food was different, the language was different and all that kind of stuff.  It took me about a year to acclimate as kid and I learned English very quickly, but I remember not speaking English until I was in first grade.  My dad also had to learn English too and it was interesting to watch while I was growing up because it was really hard for him to learn.

Radically Different Lifestyles

What happened was that the economy collapsed in Mexico in the 80’s1, which made it very difficult to have a job.  We needed to sustain our family and the one piece that we had was that my mom was an American citizen and her network in America would help her earn a living, if we ended up moving there. Her earning capacity was much higher in the States than in Mexico, so we moved here for that reason primarily.  All I could remember at that age was that money was tight and change was a necessity.  Both of my parents were very educated, both received their master's degrees.  My mother worker as as a teacher for ESL2, while my father worked as an engineer at Wright Patterson Air Force Base3.  To be honest, people would be shocked about my father’s occupation because some people would assume that his job level was that of a janitor or something.

Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  Source at bottom.

There were lots struggles for my dad while transitioning from Mexico.  At times it would be really disturbing yet really interesting at the same time.  For me, I mean I pass as white kid, but when I was little, sometimes people would look at my darker features and they would ask themselves, "Is he Italian? Or is he Greek?"  But in general I think that I do pass as a white person, but I wasn’t.  As a kid I was able to access the white privileges in the sense that I knew that people were treating me differently when I was with my father.  For instance, if I was going to the store with my mom, she would be treated in a certain, polite way by the store owner. However, when I went with my dad, the store owners would talk down to him and be rude.  As a kid, I didn’t know how to articulate it, but as an observer, I felt like why are you talking to my dad that way, you can’t do that!  I remember this one instance where my dad got pulled over and he got guns drawn over him by police because he fit the description of a Latino who had just done some crime.  My father was really rattled by this and I think back then they would have pulled over any Latino they saw driving a car.  It was just very different back then.

                                           

Canary in a Coal Mine

As the years went on, there were a couple instances where I didn’t know how to put my racial diversity together.  I think when you pass as white, but you identify as a person of color you are able to identify as multi-heritage. You kind of become a canary in a coal mine, where you’re able to kind of pick up on things in different ways.  I’ll go into situations and I can sometimes read it like a person of color would and when I am with a group of white people, they would say things that they wouldn’t say if there were a person of color there.  And I’ll be there and I’ll be like, “wait a minute, what about me.” You know, that kind of stuff would happen growing up and it wasn’t until I got older that I was able to articulate who I was.

Some physical things that were new to me were Halloween because unlike now, they didn’t have Halloween when I grew up in Mexico.  Santa Claus didn’t come to our house during Christmas time, in Mexico it was Three Kings.  All and all, I noticed that America was super supersaturated in Catholicism and Christianity.  My mom tells a story about how she was embarrassed by me because I was amazed by the automatic opening doors.  So even as a kid, there were still many things that were very different that I had to get acclimated to.  

The  Golden Ticket

Once I graduated from high school, I went to a college in New York City called Fordham University.  I had a great time in New York and loved everything about it, but kind of on a whim, my friends convinced my to buy a plane ticket to California when I was about twenty.  I had never been west of Chicago and when I was on the plane, I remember looking out the window and thinking to myself that I was making a big mistake because I only knew one person out there and I had no job.  In the end, I ended finding a job and the whole trip kind of formed me into the man I am today. It helped me expand my worldview and introduced me to people that felt radically different than I did about social and political issues, which put me entirely out of my comfort zone.  This gave me a big opportunity to kind of reinvent myself and I had such an enthusiasm to do it.

One of the more important parts of my journey was that I met my wife in California, who     was from Minnesota and she told me that Minnesota girls always move back home.  At first, I thought she was crazy, but then when I proposed to her four years after I meet her, the next year we ended up moving to Minnesota.  The move happened in 2007 and that was the first time I had ever been to Minnesota which was when I was about thirty years old.  After leaving all of these places, you get to a point when you're like, "I just want to be from somewhere."  Then once I got to Minnesota and had my beautiful daughter, everything seemed to fit.  I felt like wherever my family is, is home for me, and I love them and Minnesota.

Max Delgado and his daughter visiting family down in Mexico

Valuable Piece of Paper

  I forget how old I was, but I have this vivid memory of my father getting sworn in and I got the chance to watch him become an American citizen.  It was something that was really profound and because of it I didn’t take it for granted. So when my daughter was born, I was like thirty-two and I wouldn’t go to bed until I saw her birth certificate. I knew she was born in Saint Paul, she is obviously a Minnesotan girl, and she is definitely  an American citizen.  I also knew how hard it was for my father to get his citizenship and for my relatives in Mexico, not necessarily that they wanted it, but I just knew how much a U.S. citizenship would have meant to many Latinos.  It is just so valuable that I just wanted to see it because people take it for granted.

No Retaliation

As far as my ethnic heritage, I would say that microaggressions4 are a real big part of the racial oppression that comes with having different heritages.  At times racist comments are made unintentional, subconscious, and are invalidations of identity.  My friends would tell me Mexican jokes in high school and they would make false assumptions about my learning capacity.  Also, a  couple of times I remember being followed in stores.  For example, I was in high school and I was walking through a store and went to go use the restroom.  One of the workers came into the bathroom and he was like, “Oh Max it’s you!” I turned with a confused grin and it turned out to be one of my classmates.  He said, “My manager told me to follow you around and I’ll tell him that you are my classmate”.  Then I asked, “Why was he asking you to follow me around?” He responded saying “He wanted me to make sure that you didn’t shoplift.”  This kind of situation was not uncommon, and I thought it was very rude and disrespectful.

I think one of the insidious parts of microaggressions too is that for the person that is receiving them, there is this temptation to always talk yourself out of it, and think to yourself maybe it was just a misunderstanding.  But then when it happens again and again, you start thinking about how people are perceiving me right now.  Macroaggressions, as far as actual outright actions, usually occurred because the person didn’t know that I was Latino.  In many instances where I would be with white folks and they would just say off the hook stuff and I would just be like, “Oh my gosh like you can’t say that, that’s not true!”  In college, we were at a Pizzeria and there was this white drunk kid that was yelling at the worker behind the counter, who happened to be Mexican.  He was saying terribly racist things to the worker and I’m standing there like, what’s your problem, you know?  And even though it wasn’t directed at me, because I think he thought I was a white kid or maybe an Italian kid just standing there, I still felt very threatened and uncomfortable.  Through all of it, I actually didn’t retaliate, but it was very impactful.  So much so that I learned that the drunk kid was a football player, so I decided to write that coach a letter expressing my concerns.  The coach reached out to me and was very graceful and thoughtful about it.  According to the coach he read my letter to the team, and I think that was something that the coach handled really well.  All in all, I felt very heard, and this helped me feel more at peace with the situation.  However, I still think that there is still a lot of institutional racism in the way new American Immigrants are treated, and I strongly believe that this kind of microaggression is unfortunately still very present in today’s society.

Footnotes:

1. In the 1980’s, Pemex, a big Mexican Oil conglomerate that was run by the Mexican government, had a huge financial downfall.  This forced a huge countrywide economic depression and a lot of people lost their jobs because of it.
2. The ESL program’s goal is to improve student’s level of English, by enhancing language skills based on the student’s interest, abilities, and needs.
3. Mr. Delgado’s father worked as a EPA for the government, and eventually transitioned to working on military defense, and weapons technology.
4. Microaggressions are everyday verbal, nonverbal, unintentional to target a person solely based to ridicule the group that this targeted person is affiliated with.
   
   
   • Wright Patterson Picture Source:  http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/Missions/MilitaryPrograms/WrightPatterson.aspx
   
   

Contributors:  Tommy Greco, Roy Larkins, Thuan Thai