Tag Archives: Race

Aug 28

Not Hiring

It was culture shock when my mom moved away from hot, sunny, diverse Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas and arrived in cloudy, cool, tree-covered, monolithlically white rural Ohio. This was the early 1970s and she was likely the only Mexican in the surrounding 25 miles.

She struggled with her accent & people not understanding her–they told her in blunt and unkind terms.

My dad told her she didn’t need to work, but when my brother was a toddler, my mom was alarmed at how angry my dad would get if my brother left the lights on in the bathroom. He would rage. She decided that if money was so tight they couldn’t afford to leave the lights on by accident, then she needed to work. She had always worked. She is one of the hardest workers I know.

But her job search was fruitless. Someone she knew would mention that a factory was giving out applications, but when she arrived, they would tell her they were not giving out applications.

She would cry over her situation–she wanted to work so badly. She wanted to be able to support her family should something happen to my dad. People around her were applying everywhere, but she couldn’t even get an application.

She figured it had to do with her skin color or her accent…that was why she was being turned away. She recently shared a story with me that confirmed that idea.

My dad was on an unemployment. Both of my parents were factory workers in their early lives (my mom continued as one until her factory closed, but my dad moved on to being a cement truck driver).  I don’t remember why dad was on unemployment at this particular time, but occasionally there would be layoffs at the factory, but workers knew they would eventually be called back. In the meantime they’d receive unemployment.

However, one stipulation of unemployment was that you had to actively look for work. My mom says an unemployment office worker called our house and she heard my dad say he wasn’t interested.

“Who was that,” mom asked.

“The unemployment office,” dad replied.

“What’d they want?”

“Oh, Lawsons is hiring and they wanted to know if I wanted an application.”

“Why didn’t you take it?”

“I’m not interested in working there.”

“I would work there. Do you think they’d give me an application?”

My dad said he didn’t see why not, so they got into the car and he drove mom to the unemployment office.

He waited in the car as she went inside. Soon she walked back out and got in the car, empty-handed.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“They said they weren’t hiring,” she responded.

“Come with me,” he said and they walked in together.

He went to the front desk and said to the woman, “I received a call awhile ago offering me an application for Lawsons. I don’t want it, but my wife would like to have it.” Mom stood next to him, quietly. She told me you could tell the woman at the counter was flummoxed and looked back and forth between dad and mom. She finally said she needed to speak with her boss, so she went to a back office. Mom said they could see the two unemployment office workers talking and looking over at mom and dad. Eventually the woman returned and gave the application to mom.

Mom applied and GOT the damn job at Lawsons and worked there for a bit before getting a better paying job at a different factory, where she stayed for 30 years.

I love and hate that story. I hate that my mom had to deal with such stupidity and ignorance, but I love this show of solidarity between her and my dad in the early days of their marriage. My dad could be an intimidating guy, so I love imagining how pissed he was when he saw for himself the prejudice mom had to deal with, and decided to address it himself.

This story came to mind when I read in the NY Times today about Trump’s rental practices in the 1960s, and not allowing blacks to rent from his buildings. It is such a passive, bullshit way of mistreating people and making them feel inferior. It is infuriating.

Feb 4

Unflinching

Today I wrapped my hair in a scarf, pulling it all away from my face. 

I know this is No Big Deal. It truly isn’t. And yet it’s taken all this time to get here.

You see, I’m actively trying to accept myself as I am. Today. Not dependent on anything other than the fact that I’m here and this is how I look. Good/bad/indifferent. This is me.

I’ve lived most of my life completely taken in by the mainstream definition of what is “beautiful” and what types of women get to wear what styles of clothing.

I grew up brown and chubby in a rural midwestern town where the faces were primarily white, and beauty was genenerally defined as slender and/or petite and preferably blonde.

I’m astonished at how strongly such experiences hold on to us, even as we grow into adults.

I remember two comments from my teenage years that had a lasting effect on my confidence. One was simply a student in the lunchline pausing by my table and calling me n**ger lips and n**ger nose. The second was while at a neighbor’s house, and this lovely blonde girl telling me she wouldn’t mind looking like me, except for my nose, of course. She’d prefer to keep her own. (My mom has always felt self-conscious about her nose, believing it to be too flat.)

Here are my facts: I have a round face; it is asymmetrical; my nose is kind of broad; my lips are wide; my neck is short; I’m always on the verge of having a double chin. 

One way I dealt with (disguised) all these perceived deficits was through having long hair.

I like long hair, and I liked the way it framed my face. It was a security blanket for a long time.

Even as I’ve cut it over the years (and that decision took FOREVER, in spite of the fact that I longed for a long bob), the one stipulation to my fantastic hairdresser has been that I have to have long pieces around my face. I still stick to that rule, even as I shave the sides now. Still need that touch of security around my face.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve met friends who’ve encouraged me to question this notion that women need to look a certain way to wear certain styles. Says who? they ask. Says the mainstream culture, I say. And why should they get to dictate to us, if we like what we’re wearing and how we look? Excellent question. 

It’s taken so long to see that these are false parameters of beauty I’ve been setting for myself all this time.  There is no single definition of beauty. There never has been, though for many years we’ve been sold one and I bought it completely.

I don’t have high cheekbones, a thin face,  a long neck like so many of the women I see photographed wearing head scarves.. 

But I sure do like the look of head scarves, and that’s all the reason I need.

Apr 3

Identity politics

Catching up on Hitchens’ publications, I came across an article by him in the Washington Times called The Perils of Identity Politics. It was published in January, so I’m rather behind in responding to it (a trend in my life these days). In the article he writes,

Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton’s heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same.

What are we trying to “get over” here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a “white” American. He is as distant from the real “plantation” as I am. How — unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so — does this make him “black”?

Well, his history does not make him “black,” but the people’s perception of his skin color does. I mean, this seems pretty obvious. It’d be great if people stopped making assumptions about people based on such things, and much of Hitchens’ article argues the reason why race and skin color shouldn’t matter, but that doesn’t change the fact that it does matter for many people. People may not go out in the world with the intention of making assumptions about others based on skin color, but it happens (dare I say it happens all the time?). [My mother is convinced that people see her and hear her speak and assume she is an illegal alien. I doubt this very much, but who knows?]

Of course, all this leads Hitchens to say he will not be voting for Obama or Clinton, and that his not voting for them has nothing to do with race or gender. I believe him when he says this, but it hurts to know he’ll be voting for the Republican nominee (though I’m far from surprised)

O, Hitch! Why? Why must ye torment me in this way?

Mar 29

thinkin’ about kulchur

According to my Oxford dictionary, the second definition for “culture” is “the customs, ideas, and social behavior of a particular people or group.” I’ve been thinking about this because it feels like I’m experiencing some cultural friction at the day labor center. In my experience, this friction nearly always stems from the issue of language, and, to a lesser degree, gender. Brian, over at Incertus, recently published an Ask a Mexican question and answer youtube video. In the answer, Arellano made a reference to “symbolic ethnicity,” which is a phrase that works well with my experience. When I was a part-time photojournalist at the Dayton newspaper, my boss was trying to help me get a full-time job at the Florida sister paper. One of my “selling points” was my being a minority. I remember conferencing with him in his office, and discussing whether or not I was bothered by the fact that race could play a role in my getting the job. I told him I’d prefer to have the decision based less on that and more on the work I submitted. He said he believed it was important for a newsroom to include voices and faces that accurately reflect the community it’s covering, and I shouldn’t be bothered if my race is a factor in the hiring process. A diverse community demands a diverse newsroom, he said. I remember thinking (though I don’t think I said it to him) that hiring me was like hiring any white Ohioan because I was raised in a Midwestern culture, surrounded by my paternal (Caucasian) family and had little to no connection with the Hispanic culture at all. I may have had run-ins with racists on occasion, but my mentality was white, working class Midwesterner. Anyone looking to hire someone as representative of the Hispanic community was doing a disservice by hiring me; however, if they only wanted a face that fit the profile, then, yeah, my face fit.

I’ve only recently realized how much I’ve been missing by not paying attention to the maternal side of my ancestry and am trying to make up for lost time. As a kid, my world was Ohio, largely due to financial constraints that kept us from visiting Texas and Mexico with any regularity. Now, as I fumble with Spanish, or interact with workers by speaking English, I occasionally run into a bit of friction with some of the guys. Typically, the workers are amused with or surprised at my inability to speak Spanish, or interested in practicing English. But sometimes there is friction and attitude. When I’ve asked mom about this (my own, personal Ask a Mexican cultural reference), she speculated that some of them may view it as me denying my heritage—by not speaking the language, I’m trying to remove myself from the culture. This all relies on visual identifiers and assumptions, of course, which is problematic. It assumes that if one has a particular look, then one must have a particular experience (she looks Mexican, therefore she must speak Spanish). It doesn’t take into consideration the possible cultural combinations people embody.

When asked, I describe myself as Ohioan—in spite of my Hispanic look, in spite of my Irish name. Perhaps I don’t place enough importance on culture because my family did not focus on it when I was growing up. We had each other, we had our holiday traditions, we had our occasional trips to visit mom’s family, but, for better or worse, we grew up in a vacuum that didn’t dwell on culture or ancestry. So, as an adult, I’m miffed when people get miffed with me for not speaking Spanish (why would I? I grew up in Ohio), and I get miffed when people make assumptions about me based on my appearance (Once, after leaving the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, I realized I forgot a camera lens and returned to pick it up. As I was walking toward the hotel entrance, some guy came up to me—totally out of the blue—and asked, “Are you here to pick up your check?” Ummm…no, asshole. I don’t work here. Another time, in the courthouse (again, taking pictures), a woman turned me into security because she refused to believe me when I told her my (Irish) name).

In 2008, with all the hoopla over immigration, visual identifiers are as significant as ever. When I’m in the day labor center, I blend in with everyone else there. It was this observation that made me realize the disservice I’ve been doing to myself by not paying attention to this side of my heritage—the one most people would use to categorize me. The qualities that distinguish me from the workers are qualities not discernible by the eye. I may identify myself in a particular way (Ohioan, Midwesterner, etc.), but does that make any difference when so much of experience is based on the visual identifiers others use to identify you?