Santa Cruz, California

My parents both came to San Francisco in the Summer of Love, Carlos was a Chicano abstract expressionist painter and Patricia was an English/Irish modern dancer. Carlos was studying at the Art Institute and Patricia was dancing with a cutting edge dance troupe. My father's family was as disappointed with the marriage as my mother's family was, both for cultural reasons. By the time I was four years old there was a lot of social upheaval happening in the form of mass demonstrations and full on riots, so my parents decided to move to Santa Cruz, an idyllic beach resort town just 90 miles south of San Francisco. Santa Cruz (Spanish for Holy Cross) was settled by Spanish soldiers, missionaries and colonists in the early 18^th century. The near perfect climate, Boardwalk amusement park and beautiful beaches made it a popular vacation destination for families all over the greater Bay Area. 

When I was a kid I had my mother’s blondish hair and mostly Anglo features, so the only way anyone would suspect I was Latino would be if they knew what my last name was. I ‘passed’ for the most part. In retrospect I can see where teachers may have discriminated against me because of my surname. 

The only Latinos I saw around me there were Mexicans, who I didn’t identify with at all since they looked nothing like my family. Santa Cruz prides itself of being ultra-liberal, but still most residents held pretty negative views of Mexicans, who were really the only significant minority population. Just twenty minutes south of Santa Cruz was the predominately Mexican/Mexican-American city of Watsonville. Watsonville always had a slightly scary reputation for dangerous Mexican gang activity. Just over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the East was San Jose, which is where the serious looking heavily tattooed Cholos that I encountered at the Beach Boardwalk came from. Anglos in Santa Cruz were predisposed to thinking of Hispanics as either poor and uneducated farm workers or scary criminal Cholos, so I think I also picked up these stereotypes. 

I remember in 4^th grade being called a Wetback by a kid on the school bus. In retrospect it’s pretty ironic that a third or fourth generation Irish/German kid would be calling a 13^th generation Spanish-American kid a Wetback. It was made pretty obvious to me that being Mexican was not viewed as a good thing.

     Each year brought more taquerias to the sleepy resort town, as Mexicans from hot dusty Watsonville started to encroach on the outrageously expensive beach town of Santa Cruz. It was clear that this massive influx of Latinos was quickly changing the cultural make up of Santa Cruz and this wasn’t a welcome change for a lot of native Santa Cruzans. The main industry in Santa Cruz County was agriculture (both the legal and illegal kinds) so Mexican farmworkers were essential for the economy. I don’t remember meeting any Puerto Rican or Spanish people during my time there, and I just never really self-identified as Latino. My father was a Chicano, but I had no context for what that meant. My grandmother told me that we were Spanish, NOT Mexican, as if that were a bad thing to be. She told me not to tell Mexican kids that I was Spanish because they wouldn’t trust me, because of Spain’s rocky history with Mexico. According to my father’s DNA test it appears that Grandma Pacheco had more than her fair share of Native blood after all.

    My father suffered from severe depression all of his life and was on SSI because of this. As a child I was ashamed of his situation, which I somehow also associated with the fact that he was Chicano. Carlos also suffered from severe social anxiety disorder and he always thought that strangers were staring and/or giving him dirty looks because he looked Chicano. Now I see that he might have actually been correct part of the time. I could pass for white, but he could not. My grandmother had married an Anglo man after my grandfather had left the family to start a new one with a much younger wife and I think she definitely saw the social benefits of assimilation/passing. She quickly converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism. Gandama Pacheco had porcelain skin and white hair, and spoke with a slight New Mexican sing-songy accent, but few suspected that she had a Spanish maiden name. Public school teachers told her not to speak Spanish to her children at home so that the kids wouldn’t grow up with a noticeable accent. This was very common in those days, and it still happens even today. Now I see this as the tragedy that it is.

 I had very mixed feeling about my Latino identity growing up. I was proud of the family's New Mexican culture, which I associated with my grandmother’s house where I spent weekends. Since the Spanish language was no longer part of our identity my grandmother (who never lost her own Spanish fluency) passed on her culture in other ways; she made her enchiladas flat, baked biscochito cookies and put out luminarias every X-mas, burned pinon incense in little Adobe house incense holders, had Don Quixote statues around the house, and she would give fresh pecan and pinon nuts as gifts after trips to New Mexico. She would tell me, “We don’t dance the Cucaracha or hit piñatas, we are SPANISH, not Mexican.” This may have only partly true, but it really gave me the impression that I had nothing in common with the Mexicans that lived around me in Santa Cruz. It has taken me decades to realize that I am in fact a Chicano like my father Carlos Antonio Valdez, and the fact that my mother is Anglo doesn’t dilute this truth in any way. 

This Chicano studies class has helped me see how all the pieces to my identity as a Latino fit together into a whole. Having a more better historical understanding of the struggles that Latinos in general and my family in particular have gone through has helped me to better understand my place in this society. I now see exactly how I fit into the greater Latino diaspora, whereas before I only saw my own family’s history and struggles. I now see my place in the world as it relates to my musical career, my own family, the Chicano movement, and to the future of my country. I no longer feel like so much of an outsider, who identifies only with a tiny ethnic/cultural group of Spanish settlers in the mountains of Northern New Mexico/Southern Colorado. I identify now with pinatas, burritos, ropa vieja, papusas, Dia de los Muertes, Paella, Flamenco music, Cumbia and Merengue as much as I identified before with green chile, adobe houses, chile ristras and the high desert. I've learned that I have much more in common with Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Central Americans than I ever suspected. In the past my Latino identity was something that was highly limiting and it kept me from appreciating the culture that was all around me. It was a badge of shame rather than something to be proud of. I am so glad that I've had the time to with this class to explore this newly expanded sense of Latino cultural identity. It has opened up a new world for me. It has given me more of a sense of purpose and direction as an artist and as a man.