This is another excerpt from my book. The context is that in the summer of 1960, my family and drove from L.A. to Mexico City.
Here I was in a city of nearly five million, larger than any US city except for New York, and it was run by Mexicans! the mayor, city council, bank tellers, merchants, even the president of the country
were all Mexicans. Mexicans, just like me but for the fact that
I had lived my life 1,200 miles to the north.
I was not “a regular American” nor would I ever be one
because I was of a different breed—a mestizo. An unsettling
and surreal sense took hold of me: I had come home. Never
mind that I had never lived there; the connection to the city
was unshakable.
That feeling never left me as we made our way north through central Mexico. Guanajuato and Zacatecas, cities
first settled by indigenous people thousands of years ago and
founded in the mid-1500s by Spanish explorers, left me
awestruck by their colonial splendor. When we pulled back
into LA, I was no longer a boy longing to be “a regular American.” Instead, I was an American intimately knowledgeable
of his roots and intensely proud to claim his Mexican ethnicity. I was forever changed.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 