Growing up in Orange County I got a healthy dose of all kinds of people. For a while, my family and I lived in areas like Tustin and Irvine; the more white, conservative parts of North Orange County. I never knew exactly why we moved to places like this where we were much further away from family and people who spoke spanish. Looking back I can see that it was an attempt by my parents to raise me “right”.
If you’ve ever been to a place like Irvine you know how plastic and manufactured it feels. Everyone’s pretty wealthy and if you’re not then you really don’t belong. Police around that area today make sure to find all the homeless people and kindly escort them to where they ought to be: Santa Ana. As a kid I wasn’t hyper aware of my status among my neighborhood friends. I had some black friends and some white friends; don’t recall there being very many Mexican or Latino families around.
My father grew up dirt poor in Mexico City. He went to school, played basketball, walked the straight and narrow and eventually became very successful. My mother was born into an immigrant family in Santa Ana and had always wanted better for her children and herself. I think that somewhere in their minds they associate “la raza” with being lower in social status. They had worked all their lives not to live where their people were, but to move up the social ladder and hopefully become more successful by associating with “gringos” and having their daughter do the same.
Today, I am glad I have had the opportunity to makes friends of all colors and social statuses. Luckily, my parents eventually moved back to more diverse neighborhoods like Orange and Santa Ana, which really helped me cultivate my Chicana identity, even if it is a little on the “white-washed side” as some would say. During high school, my mom was living in good ol’ Santa Ana, while I attended one of the best private schools in California. Living in a small, two bedroom apartment surrounded mostly with Mexicans, then going to school 2 miles away where white kids outnumbered us was crazy. But like back when I was a kid, I made friends and eventually looked past our social and economic differences. I hope, when I have children, to make sure that they live and experience a more diverse area than Irvine or Tustin. I understand my parents’ want to make sure I got the best life as a child, but I realize today that that was just never the place for me.