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Thank you very much for having me here tonight. When I got an email from Lori asking me to give a speech, I felt honored by the invitation, but I was also feeling a little nervous, nervous that I would mispronounce words or say something embarrassing. But then I heard a rumor: somebody told me that there would be free wine tonight. So I just sat back and relaxed. Of course, I also realized that not everyone drinks, so then I thought, if the Governor of California can give speeches, then so can I.
I would like to talk to you about my immigrant experience, not just in the US but also in Bolivia, where I originally come from. Yes, in a sense I was an immigrant in my own country, because being an immigrant is more than simply coming from another nation, having a foreign passport, or speaking another language. Immigrants are those of us who left what we called home behind, voluntarily or involuntarily, alone or as a group, and later tried to start our lives afresh in a new place. In some cases this move happens across national borders, while in others it takes place within the same city. For some, moving is easy, but for most of us adjusting to a new place is hard. Picture me, for instance, in my first day as a Spanish teacher here, trying to explain the word ''sonrojear'' to my students. I told them that ''sonrojear'' comes from the word ''rojo,'' which means red. ''Sonrojear es cuando tu cara se pone roja.'' They didn't get it, so I gave it away in English. "It means flushing,'' I said, ''you know, red face? Flushing…'' They seemed confused, some of them chuckled. Later Jason Cummings pulled me on the side at the end of class to deliver the bad news: ''I think you meant blushing.'' It was a glorious a start to my teaching career…
I bring this up because much of my experience as an immigrant unfolds in the space of words. In one sense, language is a hurdle in my way to adjusting to the life and culture of this place. I never stop learning new words to express myself correctly and understand what people say. In fact, I don't know how I managed to get through four years of college in the US without knowing words like ''slimy,'' ''tacky,'' ''bff,'' ''chick flick,'' or ''booger.'' There is a story to how I learned that word, but this is not the appropriate venue for me to tell it, so I will just leave it to your imagination...
But language is also important in another sense, as a lens through which I make sense of the world, of the things and the people around me, and of myself. It is in this sense that words have shaped my immigrant experience the most, first as a kid in Bolivia, and later as an adult in the United States.
My mother is a third generation Italian from the south of Brazil, where she met my Bolivian father when they were in college. My sister was born in Brazil, a week after carnival, but a few months later my parents moved to Bolivia to build their lives there, so I was born in La Paz, at twelve-hundred feet above the sea level. This was the land of the Quechuas and the Aimara; around 55% of the Bolivia's population descends from one of these two groups, while 30% are considered mestizo, half Spanish and half Aimara. My father is a mestizo, his dad was an Aimara Indian who married a creole woman, a Bolivian person with Spanish blood. So, if anyone asks me today about what my ethnic background is, about what I am, I sometimes say: I am a fruit salad.
After a year in La Paz, we moved to small town called Riberalta located in depths of the Bolivian Amazon, which is what I now call home. It was a wonderful place to grow up in; it was summer all year and I felt very close to nature, so close in fact that anyone who visited my home thought we ran a zoo. I grew up with many pets, some conventional and others less so. I had several dogs, but I also had turtles, fish, parrots, alligators, and monkeys. One day, when I was around six years old, I spent my entire afternoon playing soccer barefoot with my friends in a dusty soccer field. My mother got upset at me because it was dinner time and I had not showered yet. ''Victor,'' she said in a serious, motherly tone, ''Look at yourself. You are so dirty that your skin has turned brown. Come shower right away!'' As I poured water onto my bathtub and began to scrub the filth off of my legs, I asked my mother: ''Mom, did dad take showers when he was a kid?''
It was an innocent question, coming from a curious child. It is the earliest moment that I remember talking to my parents about my skin color. I don't recall my mother's answer, but I can imagine her explaining to me that my father was simply born that way, but that it didn't matter. I don't think it mattered so much in elementary school either. Teachers didn't discriminate students based on their skin color; they treated everyone equally unbearably…
But as I got older I began to notice the meanings that went along with the color of people's skins. White people in my town were seen as ''la gente buena, civilizada, or de sangre pura'' (the good, civilized, or pure-blooded people), meanings that can be traced back to our colonial past. By contrast, brown-skinned Indians were described as salvages, flojos, clinudos (savages, lazy, disheveled people), while mixed-blooded people, or mestizos, were somewhere in the middle, some of them claiming to be white by rejecting their indigenous roots. In high school my friends and sometimes teachers used to pick on me because of my father. To them, my father was never white enough. By contrast, people used to praise the fact that my mother was Brazilian. They would say things like ''You don't look much like your father. I am so glad you came out just like your mother …''
My need to fit in, to feel like I belonged, was so strong that I sometimes felt embarrassed of my dad. I didn't really understand why at the time, but I remember that when he would show up at school events to take pictures of me and my sister, when often wished that he hadn't. I spoke with one accent in the streets and my school, but spoke in a different accent at home, my father's accent, which is heavily influenced by the Aimara language. So, quickly I began to live in two very separate worlds, and I had somehow internalized the subtle ways in which my father was ostracized in the community we lived in…
It took me years of living abroad to disconnect myself from the local politics of race. First I attended an international high school in Norway, where 200 students represented 100 countries. When I graduated, I lived among Tibetans in the north of India, working as a teacher for refugee children. These travels opened my mind to a world much more diverse than I ever knew, and they also triggered my curiosity about my own roots. I went back to Bolivia and traveled the country, from east to west, from the forests to the mountains. I also spent some time in Riberalta, and after all these travels and wanderings, I at last found my father and came to fully respect him and value him for who he was.
So when I came to the US, I became fascinated with the labels that people in this country used to make sense of people with whom I share a similar story. Hispanic, Mexican American, Latin American, Latino, Borikua, Brown, Chicano, so many words, and so many meanings and connotations. After considering all of them, I decided that I was going to be a Latino, one of the 43 million who make up roughly 15% of the US population. We will be half of your population in (pause, look at your watch), two weeks…
Of course, I also learned quickly what stereotypes are linked to these labels. For instance, I found out that many people think Latinos are lazy. First of all, we are just as lazy as anybody else. Secondly, even if we assume that this stereotype is true, I bet that for every person who thinks Latinos are at fault for taking a siesta, there is also one Latino thinks Americans are the most stressed and caffeinated people on earth, not to say anything about your heart problems. It's true. People love coffee in this country. And in large amounts. When I first went to Starbucks to get some coffee, I couldn't find any cup size that read ''small.''
Another idea I encountered here, one that is outmoded in academia but still alive in some corners of this country, was misconception that Latin America's woes like poverty, political instability, and dictatorship, are not the result of complex historical processes, but the outcome of a defective, nonwhite blooded people who simply lack the self-discipline or and brains to succeed. As Catholics, the argument goes, Latinos lack a Protestant work ethic, and our tropical climates further discourage economic activity with debilitating heat and too many sensuous satisfactions--like mangoes, papayas, and passion fruit-- growing on trees.
Needless to say, this is a skewed and racially charged interpretation of history, one that is easily rebutted by experience. After living in Latin America and the US, I can tell you that there is absolutely no inherent or natural difference in the average mental capacity of folks north and south of the border: both of us are equally capable of tremendous stupidity.
But my point is this: stereotypes cannot be entirely erased; they are like a short-cut to understanding somebody or a group of people when you don't have the time to get to know them. And even if they have a touch of truth in them, they only help us scratch the surface at best and most of the time they blind us from being able to see who someone really is or how a culture operates. I don't believe I need to accept every value of those who are different from me; relativism also has its problems. But to live responsibly in this diverse world of ours, I find that I must get to know those who are not like me before I can dare to judge their values, beliefs, or behavior.
Of course, I am not the first to make a statement of this nature. This country has a rich history of people who have tried to teach us this lesson. It is a hard lesson, but one that every parent here I am sure tries to instill in their children. It was Atticus Flinch, Harper Lee's hero in To Kill A Mokingbird, a man who risked everything to protect a black man charged with rape in the Jim Crow south, who put it most simply and eloquently to his daughter. He said: ''If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you will get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. That you can never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view; until you climb inside of his skin and walk around it."