I'll admit, when I first read this title, I thought that the author himself was half Black and half Mexican. I know that that sounds stereotypical, but we’ve been talking about personal narratives and writing our own experiences, so I jumped to conclusions.
I find Richard Rodriguez’s opinion very intriguing in his article. How he brings up the points about the gringos making all of these “classifications” for everyone. But I don’t necessarily think that these “classifications” become a big deal unless we make them a big deal. For one, on an application, why does an employer want to know our race, who cares, especially if we are good at what we do. And it becomes a big deal when segregation is involved, which I do believe is outrageous and completely wrong by the way. If our country wasn’t as integrated as it is….I wouldn’t be the same person I am today. Some of my best friends were not born in the United States, but they are Americans. Some of them were born in America and their parents are from other countries, and they too are Americans. My best friends are Korean, Indonesian, Black, and Hispanic. The funny thing about my Black and Hispanic friends, they prefer to be called that over African-American and Mexican. I’m not sure why, but they do. Except my Latino friends. I cannot call them Hispanic or Mexican, they are Latino….It really depends on the person.
When Rodriguez was asked what his nationality was, what he considered himself to be, he said Chinese. He said this because that’s where he had been living for quite some time. I really think that him saying that really does bring the meaning to the phrase “Home is where the heart is.” People use that phrase all of the time, but I think that they use it out of context. You cannot classify a specific place as your home if your heart wasn’t there or isn’t there. I cannot classify the Czech Republic as my home, I can only separate the fact that that is where my ancestors come from, but my home is in the United States, wherever I’m living while I’m there, as long as my heart is in the right place. I really think that that is what Rodriguez is saying in that paragraph.
It also caught me off guard that it was a little girl who said she was, along with her parents “Blaxican.” I didn’t expect it to be from a little girl, like I said, I thought it was our author himself. I have heard this term before, several times. It is a way of “reinventing”; a new race, a new stereotype, a new form of racism itself, that shouldn’t be experienced. It is wonderful to know that the little girl saw her parents together, and not as separates, it’ll make her stronger in the future, but other people will take it wrongly, which isn’t fair. We shouldn’t see people for their outside, we should see them for who they are inside. Not their intestines, but their personality, their heart, their mind. Shouldn’t we be colorblind? Shouldn’t we accept the difference in each other? Rodriguez mentions people being more acceptable to the unfamiliar than we once were. He seemed happy by it, and why shouldn’t he be? We live in a culture full of diversity and cultural influences. And there are many different influences that make us who we are. So who are we to judge others because they are different?
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