Hate mail trolls inspired me to reclaim my Mexican name

Jean Guerrero, Tribune News Service

As a child, I learned to mangle my last name: Guerrero. Spanish for warrior. A mouthquake of a name, it mobilises the tongue’s full range — from its genesis near the gullet to the rolled “rr,” a windstorm by the teeth. My teachers compressed its three syllables to two, without vibration: “greh-roh.”

Groan instead of battle cry.

I didn’t mind. Like most girls in the 1990s, I was cultured to self-constrict. The early Disney Princesses, my introduction to American feminine ideals, were dainty and demure. My gale-force name and nature, I understood, needed taming. And like many children whose parents came from places denigrated as “Third World,” I studied US films for cues on fitting in. I identified with the mermaid Ariel, willing to surrender her voice to be “part of that world.”

My father, from Mexico, and my mother, from Puerto Rico, spoke to me in Spanish, my first language. We lived in San Diego during a decade of anti-Mexican hate in California, stoked by right-wing radio hosts and politicians like then-Gov. Pete Wilson. We often crossed the border to Tijuana for leisure. But then my father — who had once built ships for a living — became depressed and disappeared for a time. We mostly stopped visiting Mexico.

My mother had become a physician by enlisting in the National Health Service Corps, which funded her medical school in Puerto Rico in exchange for mainland service. She put me and my sister in a private Episcopalian school: pricey but a priority for her. There, the majority-white teachers forbade students — mostly children of immigrants — from speaking Spanish. If caught, we had to write “I will not speak Spanish” 100 times in detention.

READ MORE

Its better to blame greed for rising prices

Some of Trump candidates are struggling in primaries

The solid voice against injustice is echoing in NYC

Anxious to show my harried mother that her sacrifices were paying off, I worked hard to please the teachers. I largely stopped using my native language, which I saw as delinquent.

I became Jean “greh-roh.” My first name, “Jean,” was already in English — from my mother’s “Jeannette,” a product of colonial US policies in Puerto Rico that mandated English and cast it as superior to Spanish. As English supplanted my Spanish, I felt increasingly isolated from family, including my paternal Abuelita, who’d filled the hole my father left in my life.

She couldn’t speak English, so our conversations became shallow and strained. I grew distant even from my sister, my best friend; she embraced a gothic chola identity in middle school because unlike me, she couldn’t pass as white.

As one of the most gringa-looking members of my family, I had the luxury of persuading white people to give me a seat at the table. But this came with a cost. I became dissociated, split into warring parts. When I entered a mostly white private high school in a wealthy enclave of north San Diego, commuting an hour daily, the dissociation deepened. I binge drank and cut my wrists. I fought with my mother, monstrously pointing out when she made a mistake in English. (“Learn English!” I cried, weaponizing the education she was exhausting herself for me to have.)

The author Reyna Grande, from Mexico, describes a similar deterioration in her relationship with herself and her mother as she assimilated. It started, she wrote, with “subtractive bilingualism, the removal of my mother tongue, the psychological violence of tearing out a piece of my being.” She then took on the dominant culture’s disdain for her mother. “When our relationship to our mother tongue is compromised, so, too, is our self-image and our most natural way of interacting with the world,” she wrote.

Research shows weak ethnic identity is tied to worse mental health among Latinos and other people of colour, including increased risk of suicide and substance abuse. Yet, it’s commonly forced on kids, partly through “the renaming, denaming and misnaming of students from linguistically marginalized and ethnoracially minoritised backgrounds,” writes Mary Bucholtz, a linguistics professor at UC Santa Barbara.

It’s a timeworn tool of white supremacy. Anglo Protestant colonisers often robbed Native Americans and African Americans of their names. Later, English-language supremacists led many states, including California, to make English their official language. It became a requirement for citizenship. “The general promotion of English was rationalised to secure Anglo ‘American’ identity dominance, used to develop and maintain white privilege,” according to Reynaldo Macías, a UCLA professor of linguistics.

If the robbery of names has served racial subjugation, could reclaiming them reverse it? While the anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-China demagogue is no longer president, his white nationalist party continues its assault on nonwhite communities. As small acts of resistance, more people from scapegoated groups are reverting to original pronunciations of their names, using their complete names and otherwise reclaiming altered names. It’s a way of asserting “pride in one’s culture,” Carmen Fought, a Pitzer College linguistics professor, told me. “A single word can connect you to a whole culture and a whole heritage. It can connect you to another person in a way that’s very unique and special.”

In her new book “You Sound Like a White Girl,” the Mexican American writer Julissa Natzely Arce Raya writes of reclaiming her Indigenous middle name, Natzely. In “For Brown Girls With Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts,” the Nicaraguan American author Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez explains embracing her middle and mother’s maiden name, a Latin American custom. She wrote a letter to her future husband, a white man: “I expect you to at least hold my name, my entire name, with the same protection and care that has always been given to you due to the colour of your skin.”

I moved back to San Diego to be close to family and got a job covering immigration for public radio and TV. Signing off from broadcast reports, I considered saying my last name in Spanish. But I worried my white bosses would see it as provocative. I was one of the newsroom’s only Latinas. In her memoir “Once I Was You,” Maria Hinojosa recalls pondering whether to say her name in Spanish or English when starting at NPR. She chose Spanish because it reflected her “authentic self.”

But what was my authentic self? I’d said “greh-roh” most of my life in the U.S. I chose the Anglicized pronunciation and gave it little thought; within months, Donald Trump ran for president and won. Reporting on the consequences of his sadistic policies left little time or space for me to reflect on how I was saying my name. Saying my name requires code switching — and it’s in the code switch that I’ve found my center. But I don’t believe everyone has to reclaim their name or that those who do must do so exclusively. As the UCLA anthropologist Norma Mendoza-Denton pointed out to me: “For a lot of people there’s intergenerational trauma in not having access to their ancestral language or ancestral customs.” There are many valid and powerful ways of showing cultural pride. The beauty is in the fluidity. Ilan Stavans, author of “Spanglish,” points out that the hybrid language of Spanglish, which embodies that flux, is entering the mainstream, as in the movies “Coco” and “Encanto.”

Recently, I came across some lines by Assétou Xango: “I want a name like fire / like rebellion … A name Donald Trump might choke on.”

I know my name is one such name. And the more I say it, the more I recognise that I’m American, not despite it, but because of it.