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My ParentS are a chicano and a chicana. One was born in the United States and one in Mexico. Both were raised in El Paso, Texas, a town that predates the United States and was established by Spanish missionaries and conquistadors and their Tigua-Pueblo allies who fled the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Both my parents graduated from Ysleta High School in El Paso and were employed at a textile mill near their home that in the early 1970s was in the midst of a tense labor strike. As their economic standing became increasingly destabilized by that struggle, they decided to move with their infant daughter, my sister, a thousand miles away from the desert Southwest to the upper Texas Gulf Coast.Their destination was Baytown, a blue-collar town of roughly 50,000 residents twenty-five miles east of downtown Houston and around eighty miles from the Louisiana state line. My parents were part of a wave of migrants to Baytown all seeking economic opportunities in its booming oil-refining industry and contributing to Houston’s growth into the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan region. That wave included Latinos/as from across the U.S. Southwest as well as from Mexico and Central America, African Americans and whites from across the U.S. South, and black immigrants from Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Lucia, and Saint Croix. I was the first of my parents’ three children to be born in Baytown.The first fifteen years of my life, my formative years, were spent in a large apartment community on Baytown’s eastside built to accommodate the town’s booming working-class population. African American families were the predominant residents in that community, along with a handful of Latino/a families like mine, a few black families from the Caribbean, and a few white families. The demographic makeup of my childhood community was far different from the place my parents came from, a place where the vast majority of the population was Mexican, Mexican American, or Native American. introduction HyBrid SUBjectivitieS 2 Black-Brown Solidarity The social climate was also quite distinct. Baytown is a quintessential southern and Gulf Coast town, established originally by European settlement and the removal or elimination of the indigenous Karankawa. It is steeped in a history of stark black-white tensions originating in the mid-nineteenth century when it was inhabited only by white slave owners and black slaves on cotton and rice plantations. My childhood apartment community was just a stone’s throw from where the region’s largest slave plantation once operated and near the spot where one of the region’s and nation’s first and largest freedmen ’s settlements thrived after the emancipation of slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, still commemorated as Juneteenth. This particular setting of black history, culture, and politics bore a strong influence on how I experienced and understood the social significance of race in ways that made me different from my parents. Like many Latinos/as, a genetic link to the black diaspora was already a part of my family’s ancestry prior to Baytown, a product of slavery in Latin America. It was, however, the symbolic or discursive blackness of the South, derived from African American history—from the experiences, survival tactics, and cultural adaptations of the descendants of that region’s slave population—that most strongly influenced how I have envisioned and navigated my place in the world as a boy and man of color. The experience has made me marginally Chicano. It is also a reason that as a darker-hued Chicano I have commonly been confused by whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, and especially Latinos/as as a lighter-hued African American. The confusion, however, was more the product of performed rather than embodied signifiers of difference. My southern origins, evident in my accent, language, and other regional traits, have never been easy to conceal , even when I have attempted to do so. I moved from the South to the Southwest in the early 1990s and later to Southern California at the dawn of the new millennium, and I now live in the Midwest, in Chicago. My latinidad has been scrutinized by Latinos/as in these other regions as peculiar if not inauthentic. When I was a graduate student and activist on the West Coast in the early twenty-first century, these traits were commonly a source of suspicion for Chicano/a activists. I was never Chicano enough...

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