Growing up I had little awareness of social and class structure. I now understand that I spent most of my childhood living in a comfortable middle-class environment. But as my father says often these days, "It was a different time."
My parents migrated to this country in the 1905's from Mexico. My mother was 13. My father came when he was roughly 21 years old. While my mother was attending high school, my father was taking nighttime adult education classes at the same school. Somehow, through mutual friends they met, courted formally and supervised for eight years and got married. By the time they married, they had collectively saved enough money to pay for a nice formal Catholic wedding, go on a honeymoon immediately after the wedding, and come back from their honeymoon to move into a home. Before I was born, just a few years later, they were moving into their brand new second home. They had found the "American Dream"!
My brother, sister and I went to public schools. Our schools represented a very solid middle-class, and although within this middle-class there were some variances, they were rarely ever noticed. We took regular trips to Mexico to visit relatives roughly every three years. When we did, we definitely experienced some of the poverty indicative of the class system in Latin America. My siblings and I didn't have the awareness to understand it, even though my mother came from a very poor background in Mexico. But perhaps my mother's personal history is exactly what threw us off the most. You see, my mother's story of her family's struggles, the painful relationship between my maternal grandfather and grandmother, and how and why she and her six sisters traveled north to the U.S. had more to do with family dysfunction than class. It was like a telenovela. It was generally easier to attribute all poverty to some sort of family dysfunction. Looking back, I wasn't really that far off in my thinking, I mean telenovelas are completely based on the Cinderella story and social class and family dysfunction go hand in hand if we choose to look at our society as a family.
Later in life, in my early twenties, I relocated to Mexico City to launch my career as a recording artist. My manager convinced me that a wave of "crossing over" in the media was about to happen. This was the same time that Selena was preparing to cross over and right before Ricky Martin would be imported into the U.S. mainstream. It was an exciting time! But I experienced something outside of my career that was much more important.
Let me paint a picture. I was a complete anomaly to people while working in Latin America. Being 6'5", appearing to be "white" and "gringo" to them, yet being born in East Los Angeles to immigrant Mexican parents confused them to such an extent that they couldn't find a box to put me in. Even more confusing was the fact that I was performing Spanglish music, often with political undertones some would call "chicano". I broke rules without even trying. From a social and artistic perspective, this made my life interesting and fun, but from a business perspective, it made my life very complicated
It took me a few months to settle into Mexico City, which is one of the most populated cities in the world. I knew very few people when I arrived. I eventually settled in the Colonia Condesa, known for being an "alternative" neighborhood. My apartment was humble, yet artfully furnished. I didn't know it then, but I was very much a designer and everyone there considered me to be an artist. After a few months I decided to have a party. I thought it would be a great way to develop my new relationships. I had met many different people from different social circles in the months that I had been there, but it never occurred to me that they were from different classes...that is, until the party.
As my guests began to arrive, I quickly noticed cliques forming. This isn't really unusual at a party, I suppose, until one starts to notice a pattern. At first it wasn't obvious to me until I began introducing people to each other. I realized that quite a few of the guests knew each other at some level, but chose not to socialize with one another. Right in front of my eyes the class lines were being drawn between those guests in the middle class and those in the upper class. It was an uncomfortable party, to say the least.
After the party, I consulted with a few of my closest guests in order to get a better understanding of what I had done wrong. I was told I had broken some social rules and that I should expect some fall out from both sides. This is exactly what happened. But by the time I left Mexico City after spending seven years living there, I had successfully managed to bridge quite a few of those uncomfortable relationships and eventually also gained the understanding that I would have to compartmentalize the others.
Cut to twenty years later. I'm living back in my native Los Angeles, U.S.A. and I've been finding myself at "that" party again. I've hosted only a few of the parties over the past couple of years and have attended a few thrown by other people. But these parties are different. They are much more uncomfortable and complicated than they ever were in Mexico City during the nineties. I have sensed an element of pain, shame and fear that I never sensed while living in Mexico. A possibility of new class structure is threatening business relationships, friendships and families.
As I write this, I realize that I haven't thrown a party in a while and it makes me think back to the all of the fun parties that followed that first uncomfortable one I threw in Mexico City. Well, of the many things Latinos are good at, it's throwing a party and celebrating life, no matter what the circumstances are. This is what is going to get us all through this crazy economic roller coaster we're riding on. How the ride will end? It's too early to tell for sure, so let's give ourselves permission to be uncomfortable. Oh...and get ready to receive an invitation from me for my next party soon!