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Introduction: About the Authors
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9 THEIR STORIES, THEIR LIVES Introduction About the Authors This book is the culmination of personal journeys for each of us. One of us is a sixth-generation U.S. citizen, whose ancestors did not migrate to this country, but who became citizens by virtue of the annexation of almost half of Mexico’s territory to the United States in 1848; the other is a firstgeneration immigrant from Argentina. Below we tell our stories and how it is we came to be involved in a project that has fanned the flames of our intellectual curiosity and our personal passions. I, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, was raised in Northern New Mexico. A branch of my ancestors came from Spain and Mexico and, along the Rio Grande Valley, they mixed with local indigenous populations to form New Spain’s northernmost colony in the Western Hemisphere in 1598. Almost sixteen generations later, Spanish was still spoken in our home, and Spanish monolingual grandparents steeped us in a rich oral tradition that was as much Mexican as it was Spanish and Native New Mexican. In grade school, I was exposed to another cultural tradition, one that was brought to our patria chica (petite homeland)—which is what New Mexico became to our people after it was truncated from “Old Mexico”—by los americanos, those intrepid interlopers who brought us a new language, new laws, new ways of being in the world. Memories of our former homeland were gradually excised from our ancestral memory, at least the English-speaking portion of that memory, as we were socialized into believing that at heart we were pure Spanish and that claims to a Mexican cultural identity were best avoided lest we bear the stigma of Mexicannes, a stigma borne by the dark-skinned people that for centuries crossed the Rio Grande and other more abstract dividing markers to reach El Dorado, the promised land of plenty. Fortunately for me, my family crossed the Rio Grande in the opposite direction in 1949, when my father took a job with the U.S. government, joining a corps of reverse braceros—a cadre of “U.S. guest workers”—among them Southwestern, Spanish-speaking ranchers who journeyed to Mexico to help eradicate the infamous Hoof and Mouth Disease before it made its way to infect herds in el norte. In Guadalajara, Mexico, I learned to read and write the language of my ancestors, and I became enamored of all things Mexican. I came to understand that, notwithstanding our dearest held myth of pure European provenance, I was indeed linked in a very profound way to Mexico. But my 10 Mexicanos in Oregon Introduction interest in and love of Mexico was, if not expunged, certainly laid aside as I became immersed in the foundational myths of the United States to which we returned in 1950. Among them, I recall the infamous story of the Alamo, which made me feel ashamed of being Mexican. I would have to wait until my stint in graduate school to reclaim the education that had begun in Guadalajara when I was eight years old. As a Ph.D. student at the University of New Mexico, I immersed myself in the study of Spanish grammar and syntax and of Mexican and Latin American histories and literatures and I felt as if I had recovered a piece of my annexed soul. The Chicano movement of the sixties and early seventies also played an important role in helping me recover the fractured pieces of my identity. As my academic career evolved, I made the study of the culture and literary texts of the Chicano people of Aztlán—that part of greater Northern Mexico that, through political machinations, was transformed into the Southwestern United States—central to my scholarly endeavors. In my teaching role, I made a deep commitment to helping the next generation of “Hispanic” New Mexicans explore its cultural roots and reclaim an identity embedded in historical realities rather than in facile nationalist mythologies. This included entering into an honest dialog about our ties to Mexico and her people. In 1997 I left my homeland to take a job at Oregon State University. The two decades of scholarship I brought with me seemed out of place in the Great Northwest. Despite the abundance of water, I felt like a fish out of water—itself an inept metaphor for a desert dweller. During my first year at OSU, I team-taught a field course on cross-cultural issues in agricultural...