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Posts tagged ‘Racism’

Apr 8

On Growing up Mexican Italian American

[This piece was originally published in January 2018 by The Parent Voice, an online journal that no longer exists. The layout and some of the photos in this version are different.]

I became aware of the world around me during the Reagan era in a middle-class, conservative, predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles. Growing up Mexican Italian American in this context was difficult and dissonant for me. If I had grown up in a different place or class, my mixed experience might have been very different, but then I would not have this story to tell.

Phillipe, Elvira & Tia Dora

My mother is the youngest daughter of immigrants from Mexico, the first in the Chavez-Rios family to graduate from high school. Her father Philippe Rios crossed the border as a boy with his family in the late 19th century. They settled in South El Paso, Texas. Phillipe migrated to Los Angeles as a young man and worked his way up in the steam laundry industry. Years later, he married Elvira Chavez whose path to America was far easier than his was. In the 1920s, she simply boarded a train from Parral, Chihuahua to Los Angeles Union Station and moved in with a relative.

My father Gino, the son of Clinio Pellegrini and Edda Dal Bianco, was born during WWII in Lugo di Vicenza, Veneto. At seventeen, he immigrated to America to work and to pursue a career in the arts. He studied at various arts colleges in Los Angeles. He then attempted to obtain US citizenship by being legally adopted by his hosts, the Markham family. This attempt was unsuccessful, but he continued to use their name, feeling that Italian immigrants were still targets for discrimination and that he could secure more work in Hollywood with an Anglo-Saxon last name.      

My mother was engaged in a dance career and working full-time when my father came into her life. He was working in crews that prepared sets and painted backdrops for television shows like H.R. Pufnstuf and for movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. When they married in 1968, both appeared to be in pursuit of the American Dream. He was making good money. He would become a US citizen, move forward in Hollywood, and be credited for the work that he did. They bought a house in the suburbs, one with a family den and a detached two-car garage in which he could do his art.

My father, however, grew tired of his life in Los Angeles and of the idea of working for Hollywood capitalists that would continue to dictate the form and content of his art. So, my parents rented the house and moved to Italy so that he could create artworks that were more socially conscious and committed. Unfortunately, art projects that paid well were few and far between, and the lack of money increased family tensions. The family fell apart in 1972 when I was one.  My mother returned to Los Angeles with me. I am the product of this failed international, multiethnic marriage.

Back in Los Angeles, we lived in various apartments in the Mid-Wilshire district because the city was where my mother could find full-time work. I was happy living in the city. However, when it was time for me to start kindergarten, my mother decided to move back to the house in the suburbs for presumed better schools in a safer, cleaner, whiter neighborhood.

My best friend in kindergarten came from a somewhat similar mixed background as I. His mother was an immigrant from Argentina, and his father came from Sicily. We played on a few soccer teams together, and remained friends through the fourth grade. I liked to go over their house for playdates and holiday get-togethers. They had MTV, Atari, and a large backyard. The biggest problem with this friendship, from my perspective, was his older brother (three years older) who was totally into Duran Duran, and, for a short while, Mein Kampf. In my eyes, he was about a foot taller than me with thick, wavy, sandy-brown hair, a light complexion, and a bad case of acne. He wanted to be on team white, and he did not like to be reminded that he was part Hispanic and the son of a dark-skinned southern Italian. Spic and beaner were words that he casually used, and when he became annoyed by my presence and appearance, he did not hesitate to call me an ugly and stupid beaner too.

Growing up, I sometimes needed to explain to curious classmates and adults why my physical appearance did not match up with my Anglo-Saxon last name. Questions that they asked included: Do you have a stepdad? Were you adopted? Where are your parents from? If asked respectfully, I was happy to explain that my father was an artist and lived in Italy and that my mother’s parents came from Mexico, but my honest explanation typically generated expressions of miscomprehension, doubt, and an occasional that’s cool. In this time and place, the custom or norm was to [identify] others and oneself in monoracial, monoethnic or national terms. Hence, for want of others in this context willing to model or validate mixed and multiracial identities, the notion that I could publicly claim a mixed identity remained cloudy in my adolescent mind. I tended to vacillate in silence between the established monoracial, monoethnic, and national terms that were applicable to me.

As a kid, I yearned to spend more time with my Mexican and Italian relatives, however the money needed to travel was almost always lacking. Unlike some international, multiethnic Third Culture Kids (TCK) with professional-class parents, I was a latchkey kid with an absent Italian father and a mother who often needed to work two jobs to pay the mortgage and utilities. My Mexican grandparents unfortunately had passed away before I was born. Relatives from Mexico visited us every now or then, or we would meet them in between. Besides these few encounters, my knowledge of my Mexican family came from family photo albums, artifacts, and stories told by mother about her parents, aunts, and uncles. Regarding my Italian family, my father did not have much money, and he did little to help me stay connected. Worse, when I was in the third grade, he stopped writing letters, calling, and sending postcards altogether. Fortunately, my Italian grandparents called and wrote to me regularly, and I stayed in touch by phone with my uncle, aunt, and cousins. More significantly, my grandmother travelled to Los Angeles a few times to spend time with me. Her love and consistent communication with me via phone, letters, and photos helped me sustain a sense of also being Italian.

In middle school, I played on the basketball team, but I was also friends, not with the punk rockers, mod revivalists, heavy metal kids, Madonna wannabes, born-again Christians, or student leadership kids, but with the break-dancing crew. I sucked at break dancing, but I was good at carrying a boom box and at cheering on my friends who were good break dancers. The kids in this group, like my other few close friends after the third grade, were my complexion or darker. I liked being friends with these kids, especially when we would ride our bikes far away to parks and schools in neighborhoods far more diverse than ours to challenge other break dancers, play hoops, or to just hang out. 

In high school, I gradually withdrew socially as I became more aware and resentful of the ramifications of growing up poor with an absent father within the conservative, white, middle-class suburbs of Los Angeles. In my freshmen year, I accepted the view that the burly, Germanic-looking white men in positions of authority—coaches and administrators—were models of good American citizenship. However, I became fed up with their careless, condescending, or chauvinistic comportment toward minorities. Most of these white men became objects of my derision in my final two years of high school. I swore to myself that I would never become like them. Unhappy and angry about my situation, I continued to play basketball and run distance, but I was absent from school more and more. I did not want to be there that last year; I barely passed my required classes. Skipping my high school graduation ceremony was my final act of social withdrawal.

Fortunately, my desire to investigate and reclaim my entire heritage also grew exponentially during my final two years of high school. I was hungry for culture, and I was determined to embark on a personal journey of cultural reclamation by first tracking down my father and spending time with him and my other Italian relatives. Of course, I had to work as a temp for about six months after high school to earn the money that was needed to travel to Italy. The time I spent with my family and my father in Italy showed me that it was possible to develop an international, multiethnic sense of self.  Back in Los Angeles, I started college with this possibility in mind, expunging my old Anglo-Saxon last name from all official records, and starting down the path of forging a public mixed identity.  

Ivan Dall-Igna, mio cugino

Much has changed in the world since I was an ambivalent and angry mixed kid growing up in the conservative white suburbs of Los Angeles during the Regan years. For one, these suburbs are now predominantly Asian. Today I am totally at peace with the circumstances of my upbringing and my difficult mixed experiences growing up. I might not be in the good place that I am today without them. More importantly, they gave me purpose and motivation to create a mixed identity that has also been a means for me to engage and to have a public voice on issues such as monoracialism, white normativity, colorism, institutional racism, and other effects of the history of white supremacy. Moreover, I am now a professional-class parent with my own very mixed child who also has an Israeli grandmother and cousins. I feel privileged to be in a position to support her as she navigates through her own identity challenges in this age of Trump. My hope for the future is that as more people cross established lines of race, ethnicity, and nation to form unions with their loved ones, more communities, institutions, and nations will choose to validate and support the lived realities and identities of emergent multiethnic/multiracial families and individuals.

May 8

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A Review of One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval

Gino Pellegrini

Is Fanshen a noun, a verb, or an adjective? Is it a who or a what? What does it have to do with the history of race and racism? Or, as Grandma Cynthia puts it, “De next time you talk to your mommy an’ your daddy, ahsk dem for me – what in God’s name is a Fanshen?…Why dem give you dat name?”

These are some of the central questions that Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni addresses in her brilliant and timely one-woman show, One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval.

I am present for Fanshen’s debut performance on Saturday, March 9, 2013 at the Arena Theater on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles. The Arena is small, intimate, packed, and a few people have traveled across the country to see this debut. I sit in the front row with my good friend Rocco Robinson, and we notice right away that the audience is relaxed, friendly, and excited; the set is simple, arousing, and well thought out.

Fanshen is an educator, a writer, a film maker, and an accomplished actor who recently played a part in Argo, the Academy’s Best Picture for 2012. Fanshen is also well known within the nascent multiracial community for being the co-creator and co-host (with Heidi Durrow) of the award-winning podcast series, Mixed Chicks Chat (2007-2012) and of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival (2008-2012). Both projects have been instrumental in making the public more aware of the so-called mixed experience, and of the growing number of critical and creative works about multiracial lives and issues.

Both collaborative projects have also been a means for Fanshen and Heidi to come to a deeper understanding of their own mixed experiences and identities, which, in turn, has facilitated the development of their own creative works. Heidi was the first Mixed Chick to gain national recognition for her bestselling novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). Now it is Fanshen’s turn to deconstruct longstanding racial assumptions, traditions, and allegiances with her own hybrid, experimental work.

One Drop of Love emphasizes the history of the construct of race from the 1700s to the present. More specifically, the interrelated American history of race and the decennial Census constitutes the factual and visual backdrop against which Fanshen performs her own personal history and evolution. Fanshen plays herself at different junctures in her life and, using multiple dialects and gestures, fifteen other characters (including her family) of different ages, genders, nationalities, and ethno-racial-cultural backgrounds. Though the subject matter is difficult, her acting ability helps her engage, entertain, touch, and enthrall her audience. Considered altogether, her multiple character depictions and interactions expose into view how the history of race–in conjunction with a shared belief in static racial categories, values, identities, and traditions–impacts intimate relationships, social opportunities, self-perception, and personal growth.

One Drop of Love is also a compelling story that conveys many universal themes such as love, forgiveness, doubt, determination, and the daughter-father bond. The main conflict of the story is Fanshen’s misperception of her father’s failure in 2005 to come to her wedding in Jamaica. This painful event prompts her to reassess her relationship with him and to investigate her entire family history. This event also motivates her to think critically about her own complex and debilitating experiences with race and racism, and about the implications and possibilities of becoming multiracial.

Why does Fanshen need to reveal her painful and complicated multiracial experiences? The first answer has to do with education. Fanshen is an educator who cares deeply about others, and through her show she wants to challenge her audience to think anew about the history of race and its lasting influence on society, families, and individuals. Moreover, Fanshen wants to counter the widespread notion that multiracials like her are representative of an emergent post-racial America. In actuality, her multiracial experiences and the ways in which others read her ambiguous body evidence the evolution and continued presence of race and racism in American culture.

The second answer has to do with Fanshen’s struggle to assert, define, and develop her own unique mixed persona. This particular aspect of One Drop of Love correlates with the work of Rebecca Walker, the author of Black, White, and Jewish (2001) and Baby Love (2007), and specifically with a statement that she makes in a Conversation from the Cullman Center with writer Danzy Senna. Walker states “that [she] had to write the books that [she] did…to claim [her] own subjectivity…[and] to create a self-defining beinghood…” that breaks from the expectations and “mythologies” of the Civil Rights Movement that were “projected” upon her by her parents and by society (21:30-25:55).

Like Walker and Senna, Fanshen is a Movement child, the product of a 1960s interracial marriage between two socially conscious, liberal, idealistic, and well-intended individuals who resisted the racist culture of the black-white color line to be together. In the 1960s, they believed that through their interracial union, social activism, and mixed race children (Fanshen and her brother) they were helping to overcome race and racism, and helping to transform society for the better.

As Mama Trudy puts it, “And Fanshen. Don’t Forget. Your father and I made you on purpose.”

In light of their shared purpose, they named Fanshen after the title of William Hinton’s 1966 classic book about the Communist Revolution in China. This is one of the more surprising and thought-provoking moments in the show. Fanshen is a Mandarin word that literally means to turn over, free oneself, and stand up. Hinton’s book documents the redistribution of property, wealth, and resources to the Chinese peasantry, and examines the collective efforts among leaders to create new villages unburdened by racial and class beliefs, divisions, and antagonisms.

In naming their daughter after the book Fanshen, her parents projected upon her being and body their own Movement ideals and wishes. In other words, Fanshen was supposed to be a symbol of her parent’s late-1960s notion of a Civil Rights Movement Xanadu…By the mid-1970s they were divorced.

Unaware of the impact that race was having on her sense of self and belonging, Fanshen unknowingly followed in her father’s footsteps to gain his racial approval. In the 1970s, her father became a committed Pan-Africanist who believed in the idea of an authentic Pan-African Black identity. In parallel fashion, Fanshen, as an undergrad at the University of Michigan, joined the Black Student Union and asserted herself racially as Black. After college, 1993 Fanshen, like her father two decades earlier, felt the need to travel to Africa to reconnect with her African roots. She joined the Peace Corps and taught English to high-school age students in the Cape Verdean Islands, West Africa.

To her surprise, the local Cape Verdeans did not really recognize her Black identity. They were unfamiliar with the American history of race and with the one-drop rule, which defines an individual with any amount of African ancestry as Black. Indeed, she recounts an incident where one of her Cape Verdean students mistook the pictures of Malcolm, Martin, and Maya Angelou on the walls of her home for her father, brother, and mother.

Instead of leaving her with a stronger sense of racial certitude, belonging, and identity, Fanshen’s African homecoming rendered her more racially wounded and confused. Her actual interactions with the Cape Verdean locals exposed her and her father’s shared belief in the narrative of Pan-Africanism and in the notion of an authentic Pan-African Black identity as flawed and overly romantic.

In a like manner to Walker and Senna, Fanshen has come to realize after much reflection from 2005 to the present that her experiential lived life and ambiguous body have often been at odds with the narratives (integrationist and cultural pluralist) of the Civil Rights Movement which shaped the racial identities, values, goals, and practices of her parents and of countless other groups, personas, and institutions. Similar to the works of Walker and Senna, One Drop of Love exposes into view shortcomings and ruptures in these narratives.

Fanshen has also come to realize that racial identities are fluid, contingent, variable, and performed. Racial categories, meanings, values, and images are also subject to social, historical, and economic changes. Fanshen demonstrates that individuals can study and negotiate the construct of race, and work on its limits and meanings. For instance, Fanshen critiques and alters the established meaning of the one drop rule, which is based on racial hate, by replacing “rule” with love.

In conclusion, Fanshen and One Drop of Love are evolving from one performance to the next. She plans to take her show on the road to colleges, universities, and to other venues across the country. Her most recent performance was on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. One Drop of Love will also become a documentary that will include clips from her various performances and of audience members who share their thoughts on race and racism right after the show. Of minor import, the production team now includes Ben Affleck, Chay Carter, and Matt Damon. Don’t miss it. One Drop of Love is major.