When I was growing up, I remember my uncles and mother spoke in this slang, I could here only when I was around them and their friends. I could see when the spoke this way they looked powerful and full of possibility. They would pop their chins up, tilt their heads and cock an eyebrow, “Simón”, somebody would say with a nod; which meant more than yes. My uncles would wear a rolled bandana on their brows sometimes; mostly when they were going out to play basketball. They would say the name of our town with a strong accent on the U and pronounce the S clearly. Not like, the other people I knew; who said the whole word so lazily and uninflected, it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language.
They didn’t always sound like that. When we went to the store or when my mom had to speak with Sister Francis, the principle at school, which to my dismay was quite often, she sounded different. She sounded like them. In our home we could be different but when we walked in the world we blended in with them.
The walls of my grandfather's den were covered with a combination of black velvet paintings and scowling revolutionaries and banditos. That place was like a great cathedrale, it was never finished. To this day, many years after his death; it remains a shrine to his procrastination. Its floor still bare, our names etched into the cement still visible, the wood panelling bearing rectangular cut outs for light switches never installed, and pink panther colored insulataion hanging from the rafters where the ceiling panels are no more. The walls still hold the banditos and Emilio Zapata but the black velvet paintings are gone.
My uncles would talk about the Man, and the Pigs, and say things like chingada and cabrón. None of them were fluent, but their speech was spiced with Spanish slang. They didn’t sound like the Brady Bunch. I grew up relating to them and to the Brady Bunch. That isn’t such a comforting thought. I wanted to connect more to what they were but that was in the past, that struggle they grew up with was gone. My struggle would be something else entirely and it wouldn’t come until a decade or more had passed. When it would come I would go through it with such passivity; one might not consider it a struggle at all. On the Brady Bunch,
I smile when I think of my uncle David. His face is a reminder of where we come from. He looks like the colossal Olmec head from Tres Zapotes which I first saw at the Mexican National Museum of Antrhopology. I guess if you looked at all of use, unless you have lived in the
Through all of the years until mine, my family has been called Mexicans, refugees, immigrants, braceros, wetbacks, beaners, Hispanics, etc. In my parents’ generation, they began calling themselves Chicanos and this is what I call myself. I am a Chicana. Some people of my own generation and those after me may call themselves Latinos, Hispanics, Mexican-American or just Americans. It is a matter of the environment in which one was raised.
I didn’t watch the Brady Bunch for all of the 1970s; it was cancelled in 1974. Although, I may have watched reruns, I also tuned into the other shows of the time; Good Times, All in the Family, Maude, and the Jefferson. I was a kid at this time; I wasn’t learning politics at St. Francis of
