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| ix Preface Since 1924, Old Spanish Days Fiesta has been an annual summer celebration in my home town of Santa Barbara, California. The aim of the nearly week-long event is, according to its official website, to “celebrate the traditions handed down from Spain, Mexico and the California Rancho period.” This festive affair includes a historical parade, a children’s parade, rodeos, nightly dance performances, and mercados (outdoor plazas) filled with bands, dance troupes, and Mexican food vendors. The highlight is the evening dance performances, known by English and Spanish speakers alike as Noches de Ronda (Nights of Serenade), held on a stage outside of the town’s red, Spanish-tile-roof courthouse. The audience stakes out spaces on the lawn early in the day for prime viewing of the elegant dancers who don elaborate costumes and perform Spanish flamenco, Mexican ballet folklórico, and Aztec dances. Looking back, I realize that most, but not all, of the dancers were Latino/a, primarily of Mexican descent.1 I remember being a teenager chewing on a churro, enraptured by the dancers, and musing about how it came to be that most of the dancers on stage were Latino. Given the demographic makeup of Santa Barbara, one would expect a rough split between non-Hispanic white and Mexican-origin participants. Another point of curiosity for me was the question, Why do some Mexican Americans engage in culturally rich traditions and art forms whereas many others do not? Many Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites happily watched the performers. While being an audience member is arguably a form of engagement in one’s heritage for Latinos, certainly there is a range of involvement in Fiesta as a cultural activity for those whose heritage it is intended to represent and celebrate. So, I wondered, why are some people strongly identify with their racial/ethnic background whereas others are not? My nascent interest in social groups—and particularly in race/ethnicity —was piqued when I attended college on the east coast. While I loved my native state of California, I was eager to become familiar with another part x | Preface of the country. My informal education began even before I moved into my college dorm room in Princeton, New Jersey. As soon as my mother and I sat down for our first dinner after arriving at the Philadelphia airport, we noticed that I was the only dark-haired person dining in the restaurant that night. This was my first experience of feeling like a cultural and phenotypic outsider. This had never happened in my home town in southern California, of course, since I was a cultural insider to both mainstream white and Mexican American cultural worlds. In California, I enjoyed cultural trappings that I now realize are hybrid but are nonetheless (and importantly) embraced in that environment: my family and I had piñatas and pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey at birthday parties, we had Sunday barbeques at my grandparents’ house with chili beans and apple pie, and we attended Presbyterian and Catholic churches to honor both of my parents’ religious upbringings. My physical appearance lent itself to this bicultural status as well—pale skin, brown eyes, dark brown hair. In a town that is 78 percent white, 13 percent “some other race,” 4 percent “two or more races,” 2 percent black, 3 percent Asian, and 33 percent Hispanic/Latino (of any race),2 I literally “looked” like most of the town, fitting comfortably into the two predominant racial/ethnic populations of white and Latino. Also during my freshman year at Princeton University (1994), debates about Proposition 187 were raging in California. Proposition 187 was created to deny basic social services, including health care and education, to undocumented immigrants. In my intermediate Spanish language class— which should have already been an indicator that I am probably not a Mexican national fluent in Spanish—other students identified me as the person who would “know” about the Proposition 187 debates. They barraged me with questions about what life in Mexico was like and what my stance was on the California proposition, clearly expecting me to speak from the perspective of an undocumented worker as opposed to a U.S. citizen. When I left for college, I had no idea that in New Jersey, three thousand miles away from my largely Hispanic state of California, some would see me as an “all-or-nothing -Mexican.” This shocking categorical rigidity moved me to understand the power of race...

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