Whenever I meet new people, they inevitably ask me if I’m from Los Angeles. Of course, I am not. I tend to think that fact is fairly obvious, but maybe I’m wrong.
Most of the time people figure out that I’m not from Los Angeles because they begin the conversation assuming that I am. They want to know where in LA I grew up (they always assume it’s east of the river). That’s when I have to explain that I’m actually from Albuquerque. It may be hard to believe, but there are a lot of nuevomexicanos in Southern California. We’ve been migrating out here for centuries and the migration pattern goes the opposite direction too. My grampa talks about this all the time. Not all of us who look like Mexicans and call ourselves Mexicans historically came from the region that is now Mexico. I’m just saying.
Just a few months ago, a new acquaintance was so surprised when I said I am not from Los Angeles that she sputtered, “but you have that LA Latina look.” I remember thinking, Dang, already? I hadn’t even lived here for a year at that point! It must be your impeccable eyeliner, my amiga joked later. Very funny, funny girl, I’d responded. “What is the LA Latina look?” I asked. “Well, you know, all the LA Latinas have a little look,” the woman went on. “All the black girls in LA have a little look and all the Asian girls have a little look.” Hmm…I decided not to out myself as Chinese Am too—that might have thrown her for a loop. In case you were wondering, she was “Latina.”
In academic circles, people assume I’m from LA for three reasons: First–because where else would a Chinese American/Chicana be from? Second–because I study the histories of Chinese and Mexican people in Los Angeles. And third—because if you go to school in Tejas or the Midwest, why else would you study LA (as opposed to some city in the Midwest or Tejas)? But the truth is, I came to my project by asking a series of questions about the interrelatedness of Asian American and Chicana/o histories and how those stories took place in the context of overlapping processes of conquest/empire, questions that I have been asking since I was in college (and that was a long time ago). Those questions (and the railroad tracks) led me from Nuevo México to El Paso to Chicago to Tucson to San Diego (briefly) and finally to Los Angeles. Contrary to what some might think, I did not come here because I idealize Los Angeles’ multiracial populations or because I believe in the kind of LA/SoCal/Bay-area exceptionalism that I read about in the books and hear about time and time again in the voices of Cali brown folks who just miss their home.
I suppose it’s good for me to be able to articulate how I came to my project and my relationship to this here ciudad. Funny, when I lived in New York City, no one thought I was a (real) “New Yorker” and my mom grew up there!
sueñitos 