Hispanic Fanatic

I admit that I got bullied into it.

Yes, friends and relatives had raved to me about discovering their genetic heritage, but it all seemed a bit silly. As I understood it, you send your DNA sample to a lab, and a few months later, you find out that you’re 10% French and have a fourth cousin in Pennsylvania. What does one do with such knowledge?

However, after I received a DNA kit for my birthday—really, how random is that?—I went ahead and did the cheek swab. Recently, I received my test results, and they were intriguing. 

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I’ve mentioned my abuela before. She is 97 years old and doesn’t care what you think because you clearly don’t know the half of it.

The woman smoked into her 60s and drank into her 70s. She does not possess the bubbly, joie de vivre personality that psychologists tell us is necessary for long life. And as for stress, well, let’s just say that she’s witnessed more than her fair share of death, destruction, misery, and heartache.

And yet she is pushing 100.

How is this possible?

One possible answer is the fact that, statistically, U.S. Latinas just live longer. In fact, “at 84 years, Latina life expectancy is second only to Asian American women.”

Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. On a personal level, I have to admit that one of my favorite Latinas recently departed all too soon.

However, the statistics show that “first- and second-generation Latinos tend to have better health outcomes than U.S. non-Hispanic white counterparts despite their lower socio-economics in what has become known as the Hispanic Paradox.”

I’ve written before about the Hispanic Paradox, which despite all odds, is not the title of an upcoming Marvel movie starring Michael Peña and Zoe Saldana.

No, the Hispanic Paradox refers to the fact that Latino immigrants tend to be healthier, which many experts believe is tied to the cultural values of strong familial and social ties.

It applies less to Hispanic men, who have an average life expectancy of just 79.2 years. But keep in mind that this number is still better than the life expectancy of white men, or of African American men or women.

Now, before Latinos start planning for that lengthy retirement, please note that “the Hispanic paradox decreases with subsequent generations.” Basically, the longer a Latino family lives in America, the more likely its members are to pile on the bacon, lead solitary existences, or go 90 mph on the freeway (maybe all at the same time).

So the key is adopt the healthy habits of our ancestors — or is it?

Because the disappointing thing about adding extra years to your life is that all those bonus days tend to come at the very end.

As researchers have pointed out, “living a long life can be a double-edged sword— great if you’re healthy, but less of a blessing if you are ailing and feeling isolated the last 20 years of your life.”

And it’s not just the aches and pains of aging that can be burdensome. There is also the unpleasant fact that old age “can bring health and financial challenges, and Latinas tend to be poorer and rely heavily on Social Security for their retirement income.”

In fact, research shows that the “financial challenges facing Latinas are striking,” in that 25% of Latinas over the age of 65 live in poverty, “and without Social Security, the number would jump to 60%.”

So is living to be a wizened elder a blessing or a curse? We will have to ask our abuelas, because they will outlive us all.

Recently, my family suffered a devastating, unexpected tragedy.

It is at such times that we are grateful — more than ever — for our loved ones. We are grateful for friends, and we are especially grateful if we are fortunate enough, as I am, to be part of a genuinely close family (apparently, actually liking your family members is often, but not exclusively, a Latino thing).

This site has never been a confessional-type blog, where I express my feelings or reveal my innermost thoughts on personal matters. So I’m not going to start doing that craziness now.

Instead, I will repost, without additional comment, an article I wrote a few years ago about a very special member of my family.

Here it is:

Cousin #1 is the second oldest, after me, and in brief, she is the most popular introvert the world has ever known. Cousin #1 seems to be friends with everyone in our hometown, despite the fact that she would rather chew glass than call attention to herself. How then does she build this social circle?

For starters, she has an absurd amount of faith in the concept of humanity. She makes jaded vatos, stressed single moms, and nonplussed grocery clerks feel like they are the most fascinating people to cross her path in eons. This interest cannot be faked, and indeed, it isn’t.

She came to visit me once when I was living in LA. She took a Greyhound bus in, which anyone can tell you is routinely filled with the most deranged, shrill, deluded, and unstable individuals from the lower forty-eight states who can scrape together enough cash to attempt a new start in Southern California. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to take the bus, but she insisted. When I picked her up in downtown LA (itself a hotbed of shady individuals and wild-eyed schemers), Cousin #1 hopped off the bus with a broad smile, hugged one of her fellow passengers goodbye, and told me that she had “met many friends” on the journey. I thought she was insane for even talking to the assortment of thugs, drunks, and crazies who had hitched a ride with her.

Cousin #1 plays violin, and is by far the most musically talented member of our family. In fact, as a teenager, she performed a concert with our hometown’s symphony orchestra after being identified as one of the city’s promising young musicians. In her adolescence, she could be found intently practicing Mozart, although she was just as likely to be blaring KMFDM and Ministry from her bedroom.

Cousin #1 was a social worker for years, and she often went door-to-door in poor neighborhoods, checking in on recent immigrants and third-generation welfare moms to see if their children’s basic needs were being met. She put people in touch with the right agencies or translated documents or just listened to them whisper about how America was a much harsher place than they had been led to believe. In one especially tough neighborhood, she was robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight.

She doesn’t eat in Spanish restaurants because of the conquistadors’ cruelty to the El Salvador natives. And it takes little prompting for her to show off the huge Mayan warrior eagle tattooed across her shoulders. It is an inky proclamation of Latina identity and pride that forces those who see the tattoo to consider it a living entity rather than a mere design.

Because of her chronic compassion, the harshest insult she hurls is “boo-gee,” which sheapplies to items that strike her as inane in their bourgeois popularity. She is often caught between her fierce desire to solve all the world’s problems at once and her drive to accommodate others.

Cousin #1 is, in many ways then, your typical Hispanic, violin-playing, tattooed social worker who effortlessly makes people happy.

So as I have mentioned before, my mom is my personal hero.

This is not just because she’s my mom, or even because she’s triumphed over serious adversity multiple times. While those are major factors, there are many other reasons why I admire her.

Among them it is this: The woman doesn’t take anybody’s shit.

You see, in the city where I grew up, my mom is (as the kids say) kind of a big deal. Until her recent retirement, she helped run the town.

During her closing days of wrestling with municipal politics, she interviewed candidates for key city positions. And she was commuting to City Hall one morning when she encountered that most American of moments: road rage.

A young white man took offense at her driving and — as young white men often do — decided he had every right to let everybody know exactly what he thought. So the guy pulled up next to my mom’s car and made several obscene gestures, punctuated with the shouted comment, “You fucking Mexican!” Then he drove off at an unsafe speed.

By the way, my mom is from El Salvador, not Mexico. But I digress.

In any case, my mom brushed off the guy’s idiocy (she’s very Zen about such things), and drove on to work. Later that morning, she joined the rest of her team in a conference room for a group interview with a finalist for a job.

You probably saw this coming, but yes, the person being interviewed was the asshole who cut her off in traffic and yelled racial slurs at her.

Now, he didn’t recognize her. Guys like him never notice any details about the people they harangue. They just move on to the next person to castigate.

But of course, my mom recognized him. She was perfectly polite during the interview. She’s a professional, after all. However, when it was time for final questions, she asked the following of the young man:

“Would you say you are respectful of other people’s cultures?”

The man smiled at such an HR softball of a question. He gave a practiced, interview-safe answer that just about anyone in a corporate setting would offer. It was all very, “Yes, I have the utmost respect for every creed, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, vegetarian or carnivore, smoking or non-smoking, tall, short, fat, and skinny example of god’s creatures, blah blah blah.”

That was all fine and good. But my mom had a follow-up question:

“If that’s true, then why did you call me a fucking Mexican this morning?”

I think we can all agree, this is not your standard interview question.

The man blanched and gasped. My mom’s co-workers were intrigued. But my mom just waited for his answer.

The guy denied it was him, said it was mistaken identity, then doubled back and gave conflicting, incriminating statements that proved it was indeed him after all. Then he tried to justify his road-rage outburst, backpedal on his previous comments, and wound up floundering so hard it’s amazing the mayor himself didn’t walk into the room to just shoot the guy and put him out of his misery.

But of course, it was all useless. Because let’s face it, there is no good answer to the question, “Why did you call me a fucking Mexican?”

The interview was over.

The guy didn’t get the job.

And my mom got back to work.

OK, this will be a brief update, because I’ve been away for a little while.

I was back in my homeland of Wisconsin for my cousin’s wedding. That would be Cousin #3 by the way.

In any case, it was a great time, with music and food and dancing and, yes, a little wine and tequila here and there. Hey, it happens when my family gets together.

So a Latina married an African American, and there were lots of white people there and gay people and religious people and… well, I guess the wedding was pretty much America, wasn’t it?

Hey, that’s pretty cool, now that I think about it.

Mazel Tov!

So I was at the ophthalmologist’s office, getting my yearly exam to make sure glaucoma hasn’t kicked in, or that my retina hasn’t detached (again).

In any case, the nurse looked at my chart and said, “Hey, we have the same last name.”

Now, the only people I’ve ever met with my last name are cousins or aunts or some other semi-immediate family member. So this was a little surprising.

The nurse made me go through my family history, and we discovered that we have the same great-grandfather (!). Yes, I too am impressed that I was able to remember the name of my great-grandfather. Try it sometime — it isn’t easy.

According to my subsequent Google research, the nurse and I are second cousins. She was California-born, which makes sense in that the largest population of Salvadorians (outsider of El Salvador, of course) is right here in Los Angeles. And she assumed, naturally, that I was also a SoCal native.

“No,” I said. “I’m from Wisconsin.”

Consider her mind blown.

Yes, the nurse was impressed that our family name had made it all the way to the American Midwest. But then she added that some of her cousins (my third cousins?) moved to Melbourne a decade ago.

“I talked to them on FaceTime a few weeks ago,” the nurse said. “They have these El Salvadorian kids who have thick Australian accents.”

Well… crikey.

Later, I told my mom about running into my second cousin, the nurse. Mi madre really wasn’t that surprised.

“Your great-grandparents had eighteen children,” my mom said.

“I’m guessing they were very Catholic,” I said.

“Yes, so you were bound to run into a cousin someday.”

OK, that’s true. But I still thought it was kind of cool.

A year ago (actually, 16 months ago), I became a father.

I have purposely avoided writing too much about my son because that gets into, shall we say, less modest territory (the kid is awesome!).

In addition to my desire to avoid being a braggart, I also presumed that the last thing people want to read is another blogger ranting about how his/her kid is a supergenuis who will cure cancer and solve climate change before hitting kindergarten. Basically, it doesn’t make for good posts.

Also, there’s something a little creepy about putting your kid’s personal life out there on the internet, no matter how innocuous or anonymous.

So for all those reasons, you have not heard much about the little guy. Still, I will mention that my wife and I recently took him back to the Midwest to meet his extended family.

At one point, Cousin #3, ace photographer, took a picture of my son, my mom, my grandma, and me. The shot captured four generations, which I imagine is a pretty rare image.

The photo also captured the direct line from a tiny village in El Salvador to a bustling metropolis in America. And it will serve as reminder to my son that no matter what he accomplishes, and no matter how comfortable his life is, he should remember that he is descended from people who walked dirt roads barefoot, and who still have ties to a poor country that, except for a little bit of luck, could have been his home.

With hope, this will serve as a lesson in humbleness for him.

But of course, he doesn’t really need it, because the kid is awesome.

As I’ve mentioned before, I recently became a father. My wife and I were having one of those most natural of conversations, which was discussing what kind of person our son will grow up to be.

Somehow, we got into a “those kids today” rant about how cushy the Millennials have it. After all, my wife and I are Gen X, so we didn’t have the internet, iPods, and bike helmets. We didn’t have parents chauffeuring us around to special events geared just for our age group, nor did we have culturally enriching programs that told us how special we were. And of course, there was never the option of living with mom and dad indefinitely.

Yes, after talking about our childhoods, my wife and I were feeling pretty good about our toughness and resiliency. Look how cool we are!

Then we remembered our parents.

My mother grew up in a third-world Latin American country where she literally walked miles barefoot to school each day. Then she came to America, where she knew nobody and barely spoke the language. As for my wife’s father, he was a child during the Great Depression, and he went to sleep hungry most nights.

Yeah, that shut us up pretty damn quickly.

Yes, there’s been a bit of a gap since I updated the site, but as you can guess from the tenor and tone of the last few posts, there is an obvious reason why I haven’t gotten to the computer for a couple of weeks now.

That’s right. I became a father recently, and the past few days have been a pleasant and perplexing miasma of joy, exhaustion, and adrenalized activity.

Soon, I will get back to writing regularly. But until then, almost all of my attention will be focused on a certain young Latino who spends most of his time wailing nonstop.

And I’m pretty damned thrilled about that.

Recently, I wrote that I am about to become a father. And when I say, “about to,” I mean it. The baby is due in a few days, and he can arrive literally any minute — maybe even before I finish typing this sentence… what was that?

Oh, sorry, I thought I heard my wife going into labor. Never mind. Carry on.

But you may have noticed that I used the pronoun “he” to refer to the baby. Previously, I said the baby was a girl. Well, my wife and I received the ultimate changeup when the doctors announced that they had read the original ultrasound wrong.

That’s right. They got the wrong gender. So we’re having a boy now.

The doctors must have had a good laugh about that one.

We’re happy either way, although it definitely rocked our world to have the genders switch like that.

Regardless of his XY makeup, our baby will, as I’ve written before, be part of the fast-growing multiethnic generation.

Interestingly, his arrival comes at a time when birthrates in America are declining, especially among Latinas and immigrants. Apparently, Hispanics are learning that the Pope is not the ultimate authority on what they do with their bodies, and that they can use birth control just like everybody else.

This is great news, of course, and it can only help Hispanics improve their economic standing and educational levels.

Now, I would like to analyze this issue further, but you see, I’m too jittery to spend more than seven minutes on any one task, because the baby… wait, what? Sorry, another false alarm.

Check back with me in a few days.