Yale Herald: El Pueblo unido

El pueblo unido: Latin American identity at Yale

BY DIEGO CUESY EDGAR 27 JANUARY 2012 NO COMMENTS

Iris Cano, PC ’12, now a member of the Yale Mexican Students Organization (YMSO), made no distinction among three of the prominent Latin American student groups when she first came to Yale. Hailing from a border town in northern Mexico, Cano settled on YMSO after attending the Cultural Connections pre-orientation program. But despite the ostensible similarity between three of the major groups—YMSO, the Latin American Students Organization (LASO), and the Movimiento de Estudiantes Chicanos de Aztlán (MEChA)—Cano would soon learn that the organizations not only have vastly different ideologies, but that membership in any one group can be a strong indicator of background or social status.

When upperclassmen who regularly interact with LASO, YMSO, and MEChA refer to the relationship between the three groups, they inevitably recall a party that was planned two years ago, but never came to fruition. This divisive event revealed to the entire campus the differences between the Latin American student groups.

In the last two years, there has not been a noticeable clash between these groups. When interviewed, however, members of all three organizations mentioned conflict. Four years ago, tensions between MEChA and YMSO came to a head over a Mexican Independence Day celebration. El Grito, as it is called in Spanish, is an event organized annually by both organizations. Before the traditional singing of the Mexican national anthem, MEChA passed around sheets of paper with the lyrics to the anthem of the Zapatistas, a leftist rebel group based in southern Mexico. Lyrics of the Mexican national anthem were not available at the event. Some members of YMSO were surprised by the absence of these lyrics and perceived it as disrespectful. The discomfort went no further.

“It may just have been that someone forgot to make copies; it was not a political, guerrilla-type attack. I don’t see MEChA doing that, ever,” Edgar Díaz-Machado, PC ’11, a former member of MEChA’s national board and of MEChA’s Yale chapter, said in a Herald interview. Moreover, Díaz-Machado claims that the Zapatista anthem can be part of a Mexican Independence Day celebration, given its importance to some of the Chicano activist community. Historically, the Zapatista anthem has been sung at Yale’s El Grito celebrations, and the incident did not impede co-sponsored El Grito events in the years that followed.

But in 2010, a controversial mixer called “Colonizers and Colonized” was co-organized by LASO and the Yale European Union. MEChA members, other Yale students, and faculty did not consider colonization an appropriate theme for a party. The debate led to the cancellation of the party, and to a dialogue hosted by the Cultural Connections program. After Díaz-Machado wrote an article in the Yale Daily News expressing his discomfort in regards to the party, the YEU and LASO apologized and stated that they had not intended to offend any members of the Yale community in choosing the name. They also claimed that “there is no innate, universal ‘common sense’ that allows one to judge whether something will be considered offensive.”

Alejandro Gutiérrez, CC ’13, former president of MEChA, feels a personal link to the party theme. A commenter on Díaz-Machado’s article urged the groups to keep it behind them. “It’s history, we are in another chapter,” he said. But the article itself noted that “many members of La Casa still reel from the negative effects of colonization.” Gutiérrez attributed these differences in opinion to the broader phenomenon of migration and inequality.

Díaz-Machado grew up in a diverse neighborhood in a suburb of Chicago. His parents came to the U.S. from small towns in the northern state of Durango. Today, unemployment and poverty in these towns force many young men and women to migrate in search of better economic opportunities elsewhere. Díaz-Machado is the first member of his family to go to college.

Lissy Giacomán, MC ’12, a former president of YMSO, grew up in San Pedro Garza García, one of the wealthiest municipalities in Mexico. In her high school, the American School of Monterrey, there is a strong tradition of encouraging the best students to seek college education in the United States. Historically, Mexican students at Yale—as well as other Latin Americans—come from similar schools. Many members of Giacomán’s family have college degrees.

At Yale, though, Díaz-Machado and Giacomán lead similar lives: long study hours in crowded libraries, meetings with their respective organizations, calls home on the weekends. They both know Toad’s aroma of cigarettes and beer. Here they are only Yalies, and outside of the bubble everyone can characterize them as such.

All of the members interviewed agreed that the socioeconomic environment in which one grows up is relevant. Different backgrounds explain diversity in mindsets. Cano asserted that even when these differences result in an argument, the overall feeling is not confrontational. She went on to say that sometimes extremist views from both sides get blown out of proportion and do not represent the general feeling of any group. Murat Dagli, PC ’14, YMSO president and member of LASO, claimed that frictions between organizations should not be translated into personal conflicts. Furthermore, he said that friendships are stronger than any “institutional” disagreement.

MEChA distinguishes itself by a strong political component that neither YMSO nor LASO has, and is also registered with Dwight Hall Center for Public Service and Social Justice. Giacomán agreed that YMSO and LASO are more focused in cultural themes, rather than social activism. Gutiérrez stressed that MEChA is a nationwide political organization that advocates for civil rights. The Zapatista anthem that sullied 2008’s El Grito is closely tied to political struggle and oppression in Mexico, and is relevant to anyone who identifies him or herself as Chicano. Viewing MEChA as a political organization and YMSO and LASO as international student organizations explains much of the organization’s contentious recent history.

In spite of these clashes, MEChA and YMSO— and, to a lesser extent, LASO— work together extensively. “The aim is always working together,” affirms Diego Salvatierra, PC ’13, and president of LASO. Taking into account the differences among the organizations, it is a given that they will pursue different objectives and interests. Both Giacomán and Gutiérrez, former presidents of YMSO and MEChA respectively, spoke about the collaborative events they have organized. They worked together when celebrating the bicentennial of many Latin American nations’ independence days, and YMSO is currently organizing a symposium called “Convergencias 2012: Mexico’s Roadmap Forward” with assistance from MEChA.
All of the members interviewed agreed that conflict is not intrinsically part of the three Latin American student organizations. Cano said that clashes could occur between any groups at any level without transforming into perpetual conflict. Díaz-Machado called it “cold war politics.”

Both Gutiérrez and Díaz-Machado agreed separately that if more Latin American students from a wider variety of socioeconomic environments came to Yale, underrepresented groups would grow in number, broadening mutual understanding.

“I have grown and learned so much these years,” said Giacomán. She highlighted the common work of the organizations and mentioned Mexico as an inspiration. Because these groups share an unquestionably strong link to Latin America, working together goes beyond political differences and economic backgrounds. The different ways they express Latin American identity are the differences that nourish Yale’s diversity. “We can be very diplomatic and respectful with each other,” Díaz-Machado said. “We don’t have to have a battle about our disagreements.”

–Cuesy Edgar attends Yale through the Visiting International Students Program

from: http://yaleherald.com/features/el-pueblo-unido-latin-american-identity-at-yale/

Narcotics Control and Connecticut

In June 2011 Connecticut became the 14^th state to pass a bill decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of Marijuana. It is no longer a criminal offense that will land individuals in jail and leave a stain on criminal records. Legal reform like this marks the changing attitudes towards drug consumption in the United States, and encourages more pragmatic approach for the future of drug control in this country, but I encourage you, as consumers, to look beyond our borders and consider the effects of our decisions.

The passage of laws like SB 1014, fewer individuals from our communities will end up with criminal records that prevent them from seeking employment. I encourage cities like New Haven to implement proposals like Good Samaritan Drug Policy (recently passed in New York), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the reality of the American drug market.

According to Professor Mark Kleiman at UCLA, 80% of drugs consumed within the United States are consumed by 20% of the population of drug users. He estimates that about 1 in 10 users actually becomes addicted to Marijuana, whereas 1 in 3 become addicted to Tobacco. This is important information for law makers to take into account when they develop drug laws, and while I support these efforts to keep more people out of jail for minimal offenses, I do believe that discussions like these are all together too isolationist to give consumers the full picture of what is going on in the narcotics market.

I can tell you, as someone who has lost family members and close friends to the violence of the Drug Wars, there isn’t a clear way out of this for Mexico and Central America. With homicide rates reaching 40 per 100,000 people in Mexico, and in some of the most violent parts of El Salvador 80 per 100,000 people, this violence becomes part of the reality that each new generation lives and breathes everyday. Imagine a world where teenagers talk about how many bodies they passed on the streets on the way to their one room, abandoned school house. That is what a day in Cuidad Juarez looks like. Or where people depend on others tweeting about which streets in Veracruz have been shut down by the cartels to plan their daily routes to work.

While the cartels are have expanded their economic holdings, 60% of their profits come from selling just Marijuana in the United States. Mexico is now the second largest exporter of opiates in the world, and the largest exporter of synthetic drugs. Yes, we can pretend that all of the marijuana on campus comes from small farmers in California who sell to the medical marijuana stores in Venice Beach, but I can promise you that this is not true. As it is, California is a border state and a major transaction point for narcotics. Look at the cartels in Tijuana that fought so hard for control of that point of entry.

The conversation surrounding drug enforcement in the United States does need to change. All together too much money is spent on ineffective prevention and enforcement projects that put individuals back into a repeating cycle of damage. But I am also here, asking that you consider where your money is going, and do not just see these reforms as an opportunity to take up the habit.

Split Families, Split Personalities

ENRIQUEZ: Split families, split personalities

BY DIANA ENRIQUEZ

GUEST COLUMNIST

Thursday, September 1, 2011

‘Listen. My boyfriend is in a hospital just outside Guatemala City. He doesn’t have enough money on him to pay for his medical services in cash, like they asked him to. I have never done this before and the money needs to get to him today. I have time to run to the bank to take out money and then run over to your store to wire him the funds, but I do not have time to go back and forth a few times so I need to know exactly how much I will need to take out to pay for any transfer fees and the difference in exchange rates so that he will receive $200 from me. Can you help me?”

I don’t have a boyfriend in a Guatemalan hospital. Nor do I usually make phone calls and demand information from people I don’t know personally. I am not really as emotionally distressed as I sound, except for the fact that I have had to call the same woman three other times, change my accent and my story, and request the same information in different ways. I like to call this one my “entitled” voice. It is the one that I fall back on when personalities one through three fail to get me the data I need.

I spent the summer working on a research project comparing remittance costs from different cities across the United States to various Latin American countries. This means posing as someone who wants to send money to family abroad and comparing transfer costs.

Remittances account for $60 billion that go to Latin America every year, but most migrants are sending home somewhere around $200 or maybe $500 at a time. The differences in exchange rates from the daily rate give some of these companies a chance to significantly boost their profits without disclosing these hidden costs.

Remittance tellers are usually happy to tell you about initial fees, even when they vary from different sending locations, but they will not tell you the exchange rates without careful prodding. The exchange rate from one company in particular means that 10 percent of the money sent to a family in Guatemala really goes to the transfer company. But they would rather not have that information out there.

When I asked for that exchange rate in my first, “very pleasant, Spanish-speaking local with family back in Guatemala” personality, the remittance teller told me she could not give me that information and hung up the phone. The same woman told me that I would have to come into the store for information when I spoke in my “very spacey, city-girl Chilanga” accent. She told me that she could not help me over the phone, because it was against their policy, when I called her in “desperate Spanish,” pleading for her help because my mother was sick and needed me to send her money so that she could buy her medication. So the “entitled American English” voice came out and I finally got the information that I needed.

Sometimes people answer the phone and ask me what company I am calling from before they hang up on me. Most migrants do not call remittance locations beforehand to compare prices and select the best one. I am lucky in that usually one of my personalities gets something out of them.

The Frank-Dodd Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act includes provisions that require that remittance transfer companies disclose all information regarding transfer fees, exchange rates and taxes in a simplified and easily comprehensible format. Companies like Western Union and Moneygram disclose all of their information online, making them the most transparent but not necessarily the cheapest services. The challenge, in future years, will come from trying to regulate money transfers between two countries, like Guatemala and the United States, that have different levels of technology and financial structures used to reach their clients. For now, families will have to find their own way to navigate through the fancy wording, hidden fees and transnational exchanges.

Diana Enriquez is a junior in Saybrook College.

Sometimes a lost culture

This summer taught me a few things. Including what it means to love without boundaries. To trust people completely without fear. And based on my background, both as a refugee to the United States and from living in cities for my entire life, this was a really breath taking experience.

On our first day in Huixcazdha, we met a woman with a face that had wrinkles carved into it from smiles that reached all the way across her face and years of telling people the truth about what it meant to be loved by her and to live with her taking care of you for every moment that she was with you. Everything with cariño. She had a mind of her own and was sharp as a tack, though she had very little if any schooling. But life was led with ganas. Everything, from picking the figs from her trees to bringing us her salsas and frijoles and tortillas was done with love that curled off the top of her heated dishes and into your heart. You could not help but love Doña Pau. No one could.

She would come and hug you deep into her chest until you were swallowed by the warm of her voice, clucking and telling you to come and asking you where you had been that morning. She would tell you honestly, no tenemos mucho, pero estamos feliz. And while this came with a sadness that clung from one corner of her cheek but a glow through her eyes. Life is not easy, and she more than others knew it. As her family spent their days in the milpa, pushing old iron blades through dry earth, hitting rocks again and again and bringing life through green into their worlds, you knew she was right there with them. Each line in the earth another line on their faces. Each line in the earth, another son sent to the United States, to send readmittances to a family that they swore they would never forget and as the years go on and the distance grows you see time slowly pulling at the bonds that made their struggles her struggles.

Love. Warmth. Sadness. And Chile.

So much Chile. When you asked Doña Pau to make it spicy, she would make salsas that made you sit there and sweat. Agony and ecstasy. But doesn’t this explain how Mexican culture works? In pain and suffering, there is beauty and joy through another sort of experience. In knowing that you are alive. And knowing that there is something else through all of this and feeling cleansed in that moment of burning. Burning.

Doña Pau showed me what it meant to find beauty in the darkest of days. And at the end of our stay in this magical world, where people loved because it meant living, and everything you have was something more that you could give to those you loved, she felt tragedy. And this tragedy was enough to see the sunlight leave her rounded cheeks. The lines on her face sunk deeper. And it literally melted my heart that I often fear may be made of ice.

How easy it is to forget, when there is distance. As I write this now, I sit with tears streaming down my face and a heartbeat with each thud that makes me both smile from the bitter taste of missing someone so far away in so many ways and knowing that if I went back there tomorrow, Doña Pau would invite me into her house, sit me down and feed me the frijoles and tortillas she made that morning for her family. And she would remind me what it means to be more than I thought I could be.

Hosted by La Casa

“Am I Latino enough?” Voices rang out from each part of the room in response, each one echoing this experience of becoming more Latino after leaving his or her home community to come to Yale. “Am I Latino enough?” My own voice stayed silent. I had walked in with so much confidence that I was Latino that the whole concept of the event made me giggle on the inside. Yet, I walked out those same doors slightly confused. It hadn’t occurred to me before then that, upon leaving home in the South Bay of San Diego, a predominantly Mexican community, to others I had become less Latino.

I’m not sure if I was the only one in the room to feel that way, but in the spirit of false uniqueness, I assumed that was the case. I decided not to speak up, choosing instead to imagine a conversation in my head where I boldly contested the ubiquity of the issue and sparked a more heated conversation about what it really meant to be Latino. Instead, I let the idea slowly cook in my head, and I think it’s time to pop it out of the oven right about now.

My experience upon arriving at Yale seemed to be one of becoming less Latino. I remember as vividly as human memory allows that exact moment my sophomore year, while working at the Intergroup Relations and Development Lab, that I (to my own surprise) surprised the graduate student I was working with by telling her of my Mexican-American background. “I didn’t know you were Latino! You don’t really look it.”

Oh?

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. It wasn’t the first time I had run into this kind of statement back home, but back home it was so much less bothersome. At a school where the majority of students were either Mexican-American or Filipino, I had gotten “Asian” a lot. But I always brushed it off. I wasn’t “Asian.” I am pretty damn Mexican, thank you. I like my tortillas, I won’t eat anything without hot sauce on it, and it goes lime, salt, tequila for me.

Granted, that’s talking about behaviors and preferences. Fine, let’s talk about appearances. Did I look Latino? Well, first of all, what does it mean to look Latino? And if you come down the rabbit hole I’m trying to take you down (please do), I want to ask you, do you know what it means to look Latino in San Diego? Because for me, it meant a variety of things. It meant going to the local hardcore shows with my straightened hair, where the majority of the scene kids were Mexican-American. It meant severeal hours of headbanging at local metal shows where the majority of the all-black-wearing metalheads I was with were Mexican-American. And it meant looking like a fool while I tried my damn hardest to ollie even one inch off the ground at a skate park where most of the sk8r bois were Mexican-American.

So after I came to Yale, I was pretty surprised to find out I hadn’t been an easily identified Latino. Just like back home, I assumed everyone just knew. And because you just knew, you could move on towards constructing other parts of your identity. So that’s why I assumed everyone would just understand why I said that the dining hall enchiladas didn’t enchilarme enough.

Oh.

Yet, just short of having a full blown cultural-anxiety-induced identity crisis (I have enough anxiety issues for now), the event helped me to re-affirm my identity. “Am I Latino enough?” I’m sorry for bringing that up again, but it needs to be there so I can mention that I’ve realized that the voice in those quotes was never really my own. Though the event provoked a few considerations about what it meant to be Latino and how one would “become” Latino, I realized that I’ve been Latino all along. I think most of the other voices in that room would agree. Because no matter if you don’t look it, act it, eat it, speak it, or dance it, I’ve realized that those same things I’ve mentioned have, for some odd reason, become the implicit standard for what it means to be Latino. And despite the fact that I don’t look it, act it, or dance it, I am Latino.

Reclaiming My Names

When I moved here it meant making a few changes. I had to learn English. I was no longer going to eat lunch at 3 pm with my family when I came home from school, because now we had a 20-minute lunch period in the middle of the school day. Cheetos no longer had spicy pepper on them, and candy was suddenly sweet. But it also meant that my name was suddenly very different from what I was used to.

“Is die-ann-uh En-ree-qw-ez here?”

When I was six years old, I rejected it. I told people that I met here that my name was die-ann-uh, and because I have several last names, people often thought that my middle name was Enriquez and my last name was Schneider. I became Die-ann-uh Schneider. It used to offend my mother, and one day she asked me what I told people that my name was die-ann-uh. I told her that it was my name here. I wasn’t Diana anymore.

And so the battles went through the years. As my English and understanding of American culture improved, my name went from Diana Enriquez Schneider, as it was on my school documents to just Diana Enriquez, and eventually just Enriquez, which was all that I wrote on tests and papers by the end of my high school career. So where did Schneider go?
I get a lot of, “Diana, what an interesting pronunciation…” This is followed, most often by questions like: Where is your family from? How do you spell that? And here at Yale: What is your ethnic background? But you don’t look Mexican… I know. Yes, I am white. Yes, I am also Mexican. And yes, there are people who look like me “where I come from.” I picked it because Enriquez speaks for itself. It was the one thing that was clear and defined, not ambiguous about its background, and while it was often cut to pieces in English, it was clear and straightforward, and people didn’t have as many variations of it (though I was once called “uhn-rih-qwezzt”). So I liked it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my name. Diana in all of its pronunciations, from dee-ah-nah (a much softer sound, slipped out of your mouth and left to float in the air), dee-aw-nuh (the more east coast American accent, a little more rough and solid but easily heard in a crowd), the joking dee-jaaa-nah (coined by a friend, who (jokingly) told his mother once that I would “cut her if she called me die-ann-uh), or the familiar d’yah-nah (the pronunciation of my name in the state that my family comes from in Mexico, it becomes reduced to 2 syllables). It’s all become a part of me, because it explains so much about what I have become.

I cant pretend that I am one thing. No matter how much I want to be just Mexican, I’m not. And part of that was accepting that Diana will always have several pronunciations. With this realization it became time for me to invite Schneider back into my life. In my time back in Mexico this past year, it was easy to have it back in the picture, except now Schneider was the verbal barrier to saying my name and Diana Enriquez was nothing out of the ordinary. Back in the U.S. there were new questions about my identity and my last name: is Enriquez your middle name? What is Schneider? But we’re all here to stay, my friends. I have set out to reclaim my names to the fullest. Though it means I will never fit nicely into a category, and both cultures of my family will always have trouble with part, if not all, of my name, I think I like being a little out of the ordinary.

Defending Birthright Citizenship: YDN

Enriquez: Defending birth right citizenship

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By Diana Enriquez

Guest Columnist

Friday, February 4, 2011

The recent elections have been a cause of concern for me and many of those close to me. This apprehension is not specifically related to the question of who will steer our government for the next couple years, but rather the growing rhetoric in favor of repealing birthright citizenship. Even here at Yale, I have spoken to people with ethnic backgrounds similar to mine who are not opposed to limiting citizenship to those whose parents are also citizens. As such, I would like to present a frank and first-hand look at the issue.

I am bi-racial, and with that comes the luxury of having an American mother. I left Mexico under complicated circumstances as a child, and we arrived in the United States hoping we would soon return. The political climate of Mexico made it such that we could not, but unlike most people who flee their countries to escape violence, my brother and I did not have trouble obtaining paperwork to live in this country. I grew up in a Mexican household, but I went to school in an American society.

Compare my case to that of a friend of mine, whom I met while I was working as a translator at a legal office in Cambridge, Mass. She was born in Cambridge, but to El Salvadorean parents who fled their country in the 1980s during a period of civil war. She speaks broken Spanish, listens to American pop music and has never been to El Salvador. She considers herself American and wants to be a teacher. Her parents both work very hard, but they have trouble finding jobs because of their legal status. It means that work comes and goes with the seasons, and they sometimes work a few temporary jobs or nothing at all. They speak English at home, for their children, and have very limited contact with El Salvador themselves.

The repeal of birthright citizenship would mean that people like my friend could be deported to a country to which they feel no allegiance beyond a few romanticized stories shared by relatives. She does not speak the language, she has very little idea of how the government works or what rights she would have as a citizen of El Salvador, and she calls herself a proud American. She knows more about the American legal systems than most Americans do. She scored a 5 on the AP English Language exam and will continually work while she studies in order to help support her parents. She is someone who celebrates American culture and actively contributes to society. Is this not the kind of citizen that the United States honors and promotes?

I would not say that having an American mother made me any more American than this friend, and yet I am blessed with the security of legal status. We are shaped by the societies that we are exposed to, and more often than not that is where our allegiance lies. Loyal American citizens are born here every year to undocumented or immigrant parents, but they, too, embrace the culture of this country and stand willing to serve in our work force, our military, our schools and our communities. Political rhetoric that uses terms like “anchor babies” only serves to promote hatred of people who left their homes for reasons similar to my own. So yes, many do leave their homelands to provide their children with a better tomorrow, but many of these children will grow up with similar experiences to your own. I came to this country as a child, and despite the culture of my household, I have many things in common with the other people who grew up in my neighborhood. This is also true for my friend.

This country is the product of immigrants and we take pride in being a “melting pot” because it allows us to draw ideas from a more diverse and creative group of individuals. Getting rid of birthright citizenship would partially cut off the flow of ideas and people that make this country what it is. We have a nation that was made stronger by the flow of immigrants into this country in the 19th and 20th centuries because they gave back to this nation. I give back to this nation. So do my friends. Politicians call them “anchor babies” and “illegal aliens”; they call themselves Americans.

Diana Enriquez is a sophomore in Saybrook College.