Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Daisy Machado - Rethinking the Melting Pot

Daisy L. Machado is Associate Professor of History of Christianity and Hispanic Church Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2003, she was the Luce Lecturer in Urban Ministry at HDS. Her most recent work is A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (University of Texas Press, 2002). This lecture was presented on April 24, 2003, at the conference Rethinking the Melting Pot: Immigration, Race, and the American Dream, organized by Harvard Divinity School's Office of Ministerial Studies. A response from another of the participants, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, will apear in the next issue of the Bulletin.

The novelist Carlos Fuentes is reputed to have said, "The United States has no history; it only has movies." To this, Arturo Madrid, a professor of humanities at Trinity University, has replied: "My statement would be that the United States has no history; rather it has images and stories that have dissembled a history. These images and their accompanying stories predate the movies. Notwithstanding the continuing struggle to eliminate them from United States culture, they continue to be present. They continue to be present in the consciousness of the citizenry of the United States and to manifest themselves in their outrageous forms and in more subtle but no less nefarious ways."

As an historian of Christianity, I know very well what both Fuentes and Madrid are trying to say. Their focus is not that there really is no history, but that history in the United States, the national historical epic that is at the heart of United States self-identity, is not so much about fact but about what is being called an historical "imaginary." For Fuentes this imaginary can be found on movie-theater screens, and for Madrid it can be found in the many images and stories that are embedded in the national consciousness—stories about those who Madrid calls "aliens, misfits, and interlopers."

I would like to examine critically just one slice of those images and stories that make up the United States national consciousness. I want to talk about the Latina/o reality in its many manifestations, and personally, experience has taught me that being Latina or Hispanic can mean very different things, depending on where you live in the United States and who is defining you. In some parts of the country, we are a community of political exiles; in other places, we are "wetbacks" and "illegals"; in some areas, we are a community riddled with crime and high drug use; and in yet other parts of the country, we are little more than the hands that pick the fruits and vegetables or prepare the chickens found in any supermarket.

I sometimes find that I identify with Alice in Wonderland, who, when she falls down the rabbit hole, finds herself in a world where things are not what they seem and where life gets "curiouser and curiouser." This is how I sometimes understand life from the Latino perspective—that is, from my social location can see you, but do you really see me? I know my story, but how do you as a non-Latino tell my story? How do you define me?

It seems as if the Latinas/os in the United States embody a series of contradictions that evoke from those in the mainstream of this culture, surprise, anger, acceptance, rejection, celebration, and displeasure. That is why I like a phrase from the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, who in writing about North American blacks said, "We are more than we seem." Du Bois was describing the reality of a double consciousness for African Americans in which there is "a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others."

That may, indeed, be the reality shared by all ethnic people living in this country, but nevertheless we can affirm what Du Bois claimed: "We are more than we seem." I like that idea that all persons have a depth to their being that must be uncovered layer by layer. You may look at me today and know about the schools I have attended, or my publications, or where I have taught, but I am more than I seem. You may know that I am living in Texas, but I don't sound like a Texan. You may know I am Latina, but I may not look Latina to you. I am, indeed, all these things, but, still, I am more than I seem.

I am a big believer in the power of social location and how it shapes us. As an historian of Christianity, particularly in the North American context, I want to invite you down the rabbit hole with me. I want to invite you to follow as I guide you to examine the realities of who I am. Cherrie Moraga, a Chicano writer and activist, says that we build bridges by telling our stories, and I'd like to begin to do that with all of you here today.

I am Latina, born in Cuba, raised in New York City, more specifically in "Crooklyn," as the filmmaker Spike Lee has called that large and interesting borough. I am not part of the first great wave of Cuban refugees that began arriving in the early 1960s at the port of a then small and insignificant Southern city called Miami. My father and mother did not flee Castro; they fled hunger and unemployment and government repression. Like the millions of immigrants from Europe before them, they believed that in the United States life would be different and perhaps even better. I am also not Roman Catholic. I am a second-generation Protestant. My parents chose to leave the Roman Catholic tradition and become Protestants—specifically, Pentecostals—as a result of the great waves of missionary work performed by many North American denominations in the Caribbean throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. They are that second and third generation of new converts to Protestantism, representative of what some missionaries called the "spiritual harvest" that resulted from the great missionary enterprise that began in Puerto Rico in 1899, right after the Spanish American War. But there is more.

I am also an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), where I have been a member since 1972. I have actively participated in that community called the Latino or Hispanic Disciples, and I consider the Disciples of Christ to symbolize my denominational home. Yet, I am also representative of the ever-changing and diverse world in which the Disciples and all other church bodies in the United States live. For although I profess to belong to a North American denominational body, I was not born in North America. I was not raised a Disciple. As a matter of fact, my father's mother practiced santeria, which is the modernday Cuban expression of the ancient Yoruba religion of the West African slaves brought to the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I currently teach in a Disciple seminary, and I have served as a member of the various national and regional boards of the Christian Church. I have always ministered in the margins of my denomination, however, because I minister in an urban context, which is not the place where the Disciples were formed or where they have historically served. I have always ministered to the economically disadvantaged and neglected communities of Latinos in Spanish Harlem, in southeast Houston, and more recently in the North Side of Fort Worth, Texas. My ministry has taken place among people who usually did not speak English, who sometimes lived on public assistance, received food stamps, had children who belonged to urban gangs, and had family members who were victims of urban crime. Many could not read, while others were considered illegal by the federal government or were migrant workers. Most lived on salaries that were well below poverty level. These congregations struggle to keep open their doors, not because they are dying or losing members, but because the members' income levels are not always sufficient to cover the expenses of an inner-city parish. Most of these congregations occupy buildings that have been abandoned by Euro-American congregations that wanted desperately to leave communities that were changing racially and ethnically.

Now that I have given you this piece of personal history, I would ask you ponder: What's wrong with this picture? What does my story tell you about me and my community? How can an individual be so close, yet be so far? If you have listened carefully, you will have learned that I am a mestiza and that my mestizaje is a reality that is not limited to my racial hybridity. If you have listened carefully, you will have noticed that the history I shared with you is about belonging and not belonging, about centers and margins, about national identity and national rejection, about how others see me and my community and how they interpret our existence.

I have given you a glimpse into the many ways Latinas/os cross borders in their everyday lives in the United States. We are daily border-crossers who must learn early on to interpret life from both sides—life in the dominant culture and life in the Latino community. This is how we learn to survive and how we are able to be truly ourselves. It is in this very paradox—of belonging yet not really belonging—where the history of Latinos begins to be understood, not just nationally, but within our own denominational histories as Protestants and Roman Catholics. It is also where we need to begin our analysis of what this paradox implies for the twenty-first-century United States.

This very event here at Harvard Divinity School is a public affirmation that the demographic "browning" of this country is taking place. The numbers don't lie, and they tell us that the Latino population will grow from its present figure of about 30 million to what demographers estimate will be approximately 36 million in 2010 and to 46 million in 2025, or almost 25 percent of the total United States population. Despite what the media may portray about what this browning of the United States means, I can clearly state that there is more depth and complexity to this process than "yo quiero Taco Bell" and Cinco De Mayo.

Despite this browning, however, Arturo Madrid, writing about race and the Latino community, says that we are still in a particular place in the national consciousness: "The U.S. communities labeled Latino are a diverse set of populations whose roots grow deep in the soil of the United States. Their members, however, have not either as individuals or as a collectivity ever been considered part of the 'imagined community of this nation.' We have been consistently defined out. … That is the subtext of the question all Latinos are asked: 'And where are you from?' We are not perceived as being 'from here.' Rather, we have been considered to be a 'foreign other,' regardless of our individual or collective histories. Moreover, our imagined 'otherness' is shaped by deeprooted images and stories concerning our ancestors, concerning our ancestry. … We have been imagined and we have been found wanting."

Let me add to what Madrid says by sharing some pieces from the writings of Richard Rodríguez, who was born and raised in California in the 1960s. I want to use his work to begin to analyze the connection between national history and national memory, how they intersect and shape Latina/o life in this country, and also how these realities ultimately affect how Latinas/os are imagined in the United States. Here is one excerpt:

Rodríguez is telling us about how life north and south of el río grande is really a continuation each of the other; and while the border exists for the INS patrol and for the United States government, the Mexicans, however, remember that they never moved. The border was forcibly moved in an act of military violence overnight in 1848. They had to choose between leaving their homes to "return" to the newly configured Mexico, or stay in what was familiar but become strangers in their own land. Rodríguez also connects the land to history and history to memory, yet this memory has been re-imagined. Listen to what he says about the immigrant experience: "The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor—the melting pot. Fall into the melting pot, ease into the melting pot, or jump into the melting pot—it makes no difference —you will find yourself a stranger to your parents, a stranger to your own memory of yourself."

Listen now to Pat Mora, Chicana poet and writer, as she describes her own experience of borderland life and what some Latino writers have called "life in the hyphen":

Able to sit in a paneled office
drafting memos in smooth English,
able to order in fluent Spanish
at a Mexican restaurant.

American, but hyphenated, viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic, perhaps inferior, definitely different; viewed by Mexicans as alien (their eyes say, "You may speak Spanish, but you're not like me"), an American to Mexicans, a Mexican to Americans.

Fernando Segovia, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University, has described this reality of Latino life in the United States as being the "eternal Other." The Latino community in North America is both citizen and foreigner; it has been conquered and colonized. The Latino community in the United States is an imagined community, and by this I mean a community that has been created or imagined by those outside our community. Let me give you an example: The term "Hispanic" as a racial category was developed in the late 1970s for purposes of the census. It is a political creation, a way to describe difference in race and culture. Prior to the invention of the term Hispanic, persons living in the United States who came from a Spanish-language culture were categorized as Caucasian. All this has changed, however, and as a result of the creation of this new category by the federal government, the only place in the world where Hispanics exist is in the United States.

This is how Richard Rodríguez describes the creation of the term Hispanic:

There is much of what Rodríguez says that I agree with, but there is a piece of the Latino reality he is either ignoring or dismissing. While it is true that Latinos are a mosaic of pigmentation and mestizaje; while it is true that there is a distinctiveness to our cultures; once we enter the shores of this nation, we share a common history and we are imagined by the larger culture in particular ways that turn us into an undefined mass. In her book This Bridge Called My Back, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua comments about this external imagining of who Latinas/os are: "Who me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me." We were removed, split from the category of Caucasian —something the Jews and Italians and Germans and Irish and Swedes never stopped being. I think that Rodríguez misses this.

The Latino history is in many respects similar to the story of all immigrants, but it is also different in very particular ways. In truth, Latinas/os never stopped being foreign to the Euro-American citizens of this nation. That is why to talk about race in this nation is to talk about more than just the black and white racial dichotomy. For the Latina/o, to talk about race is to talk about nationhood, to talk about being imagined by the dominant culture, and to discover that we have been left on the margins as Other.

This is how the sociologist Suzanne Oboler explains it: "The struggle for Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans for civil rights and equality before the law has necessarily taken a different form from that of the African-Americans precisely because, at least since the Civil War period, the exclusion of blacks has not been couched in distortion stemming from xenophobic portrayals of them as foreign born. Indeed, the experiences of Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the United States (legally fellow citizens since 1848 and 1917 respectively) exemplify the ways xenophobic nationalism and domestic racism have been conflated since the early nineteenth century."

As a result, the Latina/o has been historically imagined as Other, foreigner, non-native, even if that Latina/o was born in the continental United States. This is an example of domestic ways of excluding.

To help you visualize the power of being imagined in this way, I will describe a court case that dates to 1896. Ricardo Rodríguez, despite the guarantees of the Treaty of Guadalupe- Hidalgo, was denied his final naturalization papers. Rodríguez went to court. "[I]n making their case against Rodríguez, the authorities argued in court that Rodríguez was neither white nor African and, 'therefore, not capable of becoming an American citizen.' Noting that they wanted to keep 'Aztecs or aboriginal Mexicans from naturalization.' "This is a clear example of how the national imagination played out in the court system has supported the exclusion of Mexicans who not only lived on United States soil, but also were guaranteed the right to citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Here we see how domestic exclusion has been based on the racial understanding of the black/white dichotomy, which is seen as the legitimate racial distinction for the nation. This national understanding of race served to reinforce the idea of nationhood and nationality that has rendered "Mexican- Americans [and Puerto Ricans] invisible both as citizens and as native-born members of the nation." And, so, we are outsiders, the "eternal Other," the native- born foreigner.

And that is why we live as bordercrossers; this is the reality of life for Latinas/os in the United States. And these border crossings are not only about language, culture, race, and religion. We are also border-crossers in our intellectual development and in the expression of our faith. For Latinas/os in the academy, for those of us who have prepared to teach or are currently enrolled in doctoral programs in religion or theology, what we struggle with is how we are expected to function as teachers and scholars who have connections to faith communities. There is a newly emerging generation of Latina/o scholars in theology who are claiming the right to give voice to their experience and faith journey as an integral part of their academic voice.

Given the reality you have heard described by Richard Rodríguez and Pat Mora, it seems only natural that Latino theology is grounded in the practice of comunidad. This practice has been interpreted by our theologians in a variety of interesting ways. For example, Ana María Pineda, a Sister of Mercy who teaches at Santa Clara University, describes it as "the theology of hospitality," and Roberto Goizueta calls it "life in the subjunctive." Ada María Isasi-Díaz describes the theological task of Latinas/os as "a communal task." She says: "This means that we must resist the temptation to do theology as usual, not only by using different methods but also by resisting the temptation to follow the 'regular' themes and divisions of traditional theology. … In a way traditional theology, even the best of traditional theology, by insisting on the patterns established long ago … closes itself to the ongoing revelation of the divine. … It is 'ignoring the God-in-our- midst today.' "

Ana María Pineda says this about the importance of praxis in the theological enterprise: "The practice of liberation precedes any articulation of it. Seeing liberation is an undertaking which men and woman realize within their own concrete circumstances. How one strives for this kind of liberation is found within the specific situations of life, and is inspired and directed by the values of the gospel."

The core issue here is that the theological task for Latinas/os is not just about doing abstract intellectual reflection. It is that, but it is much more. It is about developing a "theology that helps our people in their struggle for survival [so it cannot be just] a theology that receives the blessing of the status quo because it follows traditional patterns." What Pineda, Goizueta, Isasi-Díaz, and other Latina/o theologians are challenging the theological academy with is the importance and value of difference or diversity in education. Isasi-Díaz explains it by saying, "Usually in mainline discourse, in traditional theological discourse, difference is defined as absolute otherness, mutual exclusion, categorical opposition. This is an essentialist meaning of difference in which one group serves as the norm against which all others are to be measured. … This way of defining difference expresses fear of … making permeable the boundaries between oneself and others, between one's ideas and those of others."

The approach for Latina/o scholars is one where difference is "a moral option" that allows the entire theological community the freedom to use diversity as a tool to help clarify and better understand our ideas and better interpret our historical reality. It is the ability to see diversity as an asset and not a liability. As a result, this way of understanding difference contradicts and challenges the dominant view of difference, whether racial difference or cultural difference. In the dominant worldview, difference is seen as departure from the norm and therefore not of value or even as a threat.

That is why intrinsic to the process of theology as a communal task there must be an integration of theory and practice. Therefore, because in Latina/ o theology the diversity of the community is a given—in other words, seen as normative—our theological task is one that must seek to balance reason or skill development and social justice. It is faith and it is praxis. And this faith and praxis are intimately connected to the economic deprivation found in our barrios; intimately connected to our mulatez as a racial category not yet understood in the North American discourse on race; intimately connected to the critical examination of the "unequal power relationships between men and women and the cultural behavior that controls and disempowers women." The Latina/o scholar is a border-crosser, moving between the demands of her or his scholarship and the need to articulate the faith of our people. A faith that has sustained and nurtured our communities despite the history of colonization, despite the poverty, despite the marginalization, despite the racism, despite the status of alien/other.

I have attempted to provide you with some of the reasons for the underlying complex tension between what I am claiming as Latino reality and the reality of mainstream culture, education, church, and society. I have used terms like "imagined" or "constructed" to help you visualize how external or imposed categories of difference lead to marginality and exclusion. Now I want to expand on the theme of the historical imagination and examine the process used to create the idea of "other" in the national consciousness of this country.

The Chicana historian Emma Pérez says this about the critical, reflective, interpretive process of historiography: "If history is the way in which people understand themselves through a collective, common past where events are chronicled and heroes are constructed, then historical consciousness is the system of thought that leads to a normative understanding of past events. Historical knowledge is the production of normative history through discursive practices."

This means that the historical discourse does not in essence necessarily produce new information, nor does it provide new knowledge about the past; both the information and knowledge about the past already exist as a precondition for the writing of history. The historical discourse does produce very specific interpretations that are developed from the information and knowledge to which the historian has access. These interpretations then become the substance of the historical narrative which is used for critical reflection. Important to this process is the fact that the only way of accessing any history is through language, and language is itself a social category that is constructed and shaped by means of the relations of power amongst humans, that is about domination and subordination in any given culture. In other words, language itself is always filled with the preexisting content that seeks to interpret the world and is at the same time shaped by that world.

This means that as the historian progresses from the archival work, or the research, to the historical narrative or the writing of history, she or he takes the facts and must necessarily interpret them, giving them meaning. This meaning (or interpretation) can never be truly objective or free from the "assumptions, the practices, and the rhetoric of the discipline…" or from the social location of the historian (gender, race, age, class, education, religion, etc.). These are the interpretive lenses which filter all historiography, and I am suggesting that when we analyze historical narrative, we must recognize that it is often very difficult to distinguish what is said from how it is said.

That is why the Chicana historian Emma Pérez identifies an historical consciousness as the process which is used to create a "normative" history, or what church historian Martin Marty has called a "useable past." It is how humans understand and interpret themselves as subjects of history. It is the self-understanding of a person or of a group or of a nation. In a very real sense, I understand this consciousness to be a type of historical imagination that takes facts and constructs a complex historical narrative that is about the past but is also much more.

This historical imagination is an interpretive lens the historian cannot disown and which is used to shape national identity. And it is by means of the facts that the historical imagination is enlarged so that it can now also become the source for the creation of our historical heroes (like George Washington who could not tell a lie, or the ever brave and daring Daniel Boone) and of the numerous self-perceptions that help to shape a national identity. This process is never static but continues to evolve as people and nations re-imagine themselves. This complex national historical narrative of the United States is today defined by historians as exceptionalism.

It is important for us at this point to ask how exceptionalism was constructed. How did it come into being? How did it become such a powerful and important force in the history of this nation? Enrique Dussell, a Latin American historian, seeks to answer these questions by uncovering the philosophical and theoretical assumptions that are used to construct historical consciousness, in this case how Eurocentrism is constructed. Dussell examines Eurocentrism because one of its primary productions is a very clear definition of Other. Dussell finds that there is an intellectual legacy that flowered in the Enlightenment which gave life to the idea of a clearly defined "center of history."

He begins his analysis with Kant's 1784 essay, "Answering the Question, What is Entitlement?" in which Kant says: "Enlightenment is the exit of humanity by itself from a state of culpable immaturity… Laziness and cowardliness are the causes which bind the great part of humanity in this frivolous state of immaturity."

Dussell says he would posit this question to Kant: "Ought one to consider an African in Africa or a slave in the United States in the eighteenth century to be culpably immature? What about an indigenous person in Mexico or a Latin American mestizo at a later period?"

At the core of Dussell's argument is that in the development of a modern Western European historical consciousness, the concept of a "center of history" is essential. This center of history assigned England, Germany, and France as core nations, true bearers of what Hegel calls the "world Spirit," while Spain, Portugal, and Italy are defined as peripheral nations. The importance of this for Dussell is that if Spain was itself seen as a peripheral nation to this original center of history, then the Americas, the people who lived here before the arrival of the Western Europeans, and the Spanish empire that developed, were relegated to an even more peripheral status. To show how entrenched this idea of a core of history still is, Dussell quotes Jürgen Habermas, who wrote in his 1987 lectures The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: "The key historical events for the implantation of the principle of subjectivity are the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution."

Why is this important to us? Because it is this historical consciousness that has served as the theoretical foundation for the creation of a national history of the United States. And like the Western Europeans before them, the writers of the national history of the United States continued to use the same categories of core/periphery, superior/ inferior, and continued to use race and religion as determinants of the worth of the Other and her or his culture. They made the United States the subject of history for the entire western hemisphere, while the other peripheral or marginal people, the Native people, the Mexicans, the Spanish mestizos, the Africans, remained the marginal objects of a history of conquest, colonization, and enslavement. That is why when we say America with a capital "A," everyone knows we are only talking about the United States. United States citizens are the Americans with a capital "A," despite the reality that Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and Canada also make up the Americas.

I am focusing on not just the truthfulness of the historical story, but also the way that that story imagines people and nations; how it constructs heroes; how that history imagines and then gives value to the Other; how it uses language to tell the narrative within the complex reality of human relations of power, of domination and subordination, of conquest and colonization. In this very process of historical imagination, which is all about the historical construction of identity and worth, we find that specific borders have also been created. These borders are created through the use of categories that define and assign difference. They are social and political constructions that use the language of difference to separate.

This is where I want us to pause and reflect. The historical consciousness of an individual or a nation also contains the means to exclude and devalue. The feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott argues that "positive definitions depend on negative, indeed imply their existence in order to rule them out." It is this very language of difference, with its many layers of meaning, that has produced the well-known historical dichotomies such as superior/inferior, strong/weak, winner/loser, civilized/ savage, chosen/outsider, and blessed/ cursed.

Why is all this so crucial for the liberation and empowerment of Latinas/os (as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans)? Because to continue to accept the new forms that American exceptionalism has taken—in the debate about bilingual education or affirmative action, the debate about the militarization of the Río Grande border or "work-fare" versus welfare—we also lose sight of some very important realities. By not engaging in a critical analysis of our historical location, we lose awareness of the systemic use of racism in the courts, corporations, and government of this country. We forget that there was a very intentional and planned program of ejection and extermination of indigenous people throughout this nation. When we allow others to use the criteria of progress as the only way to measure the worth of a person or a group of people, and simply dismiss those who do not measure up as useless, we become part of the problem.

This attitude also will not allow us to see with clarity how interconnected we all are. There can be no understanding of the slavery issue without also understanding the results of the mass dying and killing of indigenous people in the Caribbean by the Spaniards years before there was a slave trade in this hemisphere. There can be no understanding of border issues and immigration without examining the political and military maneuvering of the United States government in the unstable government of the newly formed República de México of 1821. To fully capture the meaning of Castro's influence in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America, there is the need to also examine the foreign policy of the United States, not in the last 40 years, but at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Spanish American War of 1898, the warning made to Simón Bolívar, Latin America's most famous liberator, by the Monroe government in the 1820s to stay out of the Caribbean, the making of Puerto Rico into a colony, all these historical realities involved a U.S. political world view that was fed by earlier notions of exceptionalism that I have mentioned.

The same scenario was played out in the takeover of the Mexican territories by the United States in the nineteenth century. The colonization of Texas is a clear example of the thinking that takes place in order to create the clean slate necessary for the national myths of this country. By devaluing Roman Catholicism and seeing it as mere superstition, it became much easier for Stephen Austin to falsely pledge allegiance to the Roman Catholic government of Mexico when he entered the northern borderlands of the territory then known as Coahuila y Texas. Austin and the first Euro-American settlers, who in the early 1820s moved into what is today Texas, not only displayed little respect for Roman Catholicism but were just as demeaning towards the mestizo people they encountered. The metizaje of the Tejanos, the mixture of indigenous, African and Spanish blood, was believed by Austin to produce a people who were inferior, depraved, incapable of governing themselves, and sexually promiscuous. In a letter to his sister, Austin wrote, "To be candid, the majority of the people of the whole nation as far as I have seen them want nothing but tails to be more brutes than the apes."

Some of you may be asking what this have to do with us here in this comfortable, safe room? All that history seems so distant from the multicultural world in which we live. Social historians have been busy for over two decades recovering the memories of communities all over this country. Today we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday. February is Black History Month. Cinco de Mayo has become a statewide holiday in Texas, even though most Texans, Anglos, and Tejanos don't know that they are celebrating an event in the history of Mexico that has nothing to do with Texas. The media has even focused on the Chinese New Year, providing us with some history and a glimpse at community celebrations around the country. The United States wears the badge of multiculturalism as a means to show that Americans (with a capital A) have progressed.

But is this really so? How comfortable are the Euro-Americans in this country with the reality of diversity or multiculturalism or racial inclusiveness? An even more difficult question is, How much are ethnic people willing to give up in order to be accepted by those in the majority? What is the ultimate cost of this loss for the individual and for the community that he or she comes from?

I think that the Latina/o community of the twenty-first century is in a very unique place in its historical journey. We are no longer a people who can claim ignorance or innocence. The time has come to use the learnings from our collective journey and begin to imagine ourselves. If knowledge is indeed power, and if history, as historian Joyce Applebee says, "exercises that power by awakening curiosity, stretching the imagination … and complicating one sense of the possible," then we Latinas/os must boldly take possession of the knowledge of who we are as a people by recovering the diversity of the history of both Americas, which includes those of us who are not in the center.

This very important recovery and claiming is not just about political correctness; it is about the issue of power, the important power to imagine ourselves, to name ourselves. By daring to free ourselves from the restrictions imposed by the ideological imperatives of an idealized history which has imagined us as the eternal outsiders, we will have overcome one of the most daunting hurdles of our journey as Latinas/os living in the United States. By daring to imagine ourselves, by daring to refuse to be imagined by the dominant group, we will have contributed to our own liberation, and we will have begun to establish a foundation upon which the coming generations of Latinas/os will build their own identity and self-worth.

The history of the Americas is five centuries of the interactions of a diverse group of people who as a whole make us who we are today. It is about mestizaje, immigration, and about living a life that is not only good but has dignity. We the Latinas/os who have welcomed this new millennium can raise our voices and say "basta!" We are more than we seem. We are more than illegals and political exiles. We are more than homies and batos. We are the Americas. In our veins can be found the blood of people of all colors and races. We will not be defined as marginal, as other, or as foreigner. Nosotros también somos Americanos: We are the Americas.

I'd like to close with a poem by Pat Mora, "Desert Women." It describes the reality of Latinas who inhabit the margins, but even more than that, it talks about their value and the beauty they carry within:

Desert women know
about survival.
Fierce heat and cold
have burned and thickened
our skin.
Like cactus
we've learned to hoard,
to sprout deep roots,
to seem asleep, yet wake
at the scent of softness
in the air,
to hide
pain and loss by silence,
no branches wail
or whisper our sad songs
safe behind our horns.
Don't be deceived.
When we bloom, we stun.