Living La Vida Latina

By Maria Hinojosa/New York City

For me, the border was a place near Mexico, where I was born. For my children, the border may turn out to be on a different map entirely. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a neighborhood that was multiculti way before being multiculti was the thing. Every weekend when I was a child, all six of us in my family would shuttle from our spacious, airy apartment in Hyde Park to the overcrowded, bustling barrio of Pilsen, where Mami would buy carnitas, chicharron and, of course, fresh corn tortillas carefully wrapped in paper, all soft and steaming.

So my life changed dramatically when I arrived in New York City as a college student one night 22 years ago. There were no Mexicans in New York in 1979--none I could find anyway. It took me a month of deep-cover detective work to find out where I could buy tortillas. I had to take the subway 15 stops downtown to an old Spanish store, and even there all I could find were three-packs of frozen white tortillas. They were disgusting, and I was depressed.

After that, every time I flew home from school, I would go back to Pilsen and buy a box of 20 dozen tortillas that I would take on the plane and stuff into the tiny freezer of my fifth-floor walk-up on West 108th Street, where I was the first Mexican on the block.

Being Mexican in Chicago meant something. I had a barrio there; I had paisanos there; there were murals and and taquerias, rancheras and pinatas. The border was a long way away. It would take our family three full days of driving from Chicago just to get to Mexico--much less to visit our relatives in Mexico City, Tampico, Guadalajara and Yucatan.

New York taught me that culturally I was more than a Mexicana. There were Puerto Ricans and Dominicans on my street; I went to school with them, along with Cubans, Argentines and Peruvians; I bumped into Salvadoran and Chilean refugees in community centers. I began to see that I was part of a continent--from Patagonia to el Caribe. I still called myself a Mexicana, but I came to consider myself something bigger, a Latina without borders.

And by now I was also a New Yorker. Fast forward 10 years to the summer of 1989. I was working the overnight shift at CBS network radio and living in Spanish Harlem, in the heart of the Puerto Rican barrio. One steaming summer night at 4 a.m., on my way to work, I rolled down the window of the cab and heard ranchera music blaring out of a boom box. A small group of Mexicanos was singing along with a melancholy tune. My sleepy eyes popped open, my head shot out the window, and I gave a little grito. I was witnessing history: mis paisanos had arrived in New York City.

A few years later (and much to my family's chagrin at first), I married an artist from the Dominican Republic. In 1996 my son was born. Raul Ariel Jesus de Todos los Santos Perez-Hinojosa, we joked, would be the first Domini-Mex New Yorker. My boy is now 5 years old, and my daughter Maria Yurema Guadalupe de los Indios Perez-Hinojosa just turned 3 this past Cinco de Mayo (and, no, it wasn't a scheduled C-section).

These days I walk down Broadway, and I can find all the things I couldn't find before: salsa Herdez, blue corn tortillas and chile chipotle. My kids never know when I will stop to help one of the quarter of a million Mexicans who live in New York City today. Half a dozen times I have had to intervene when a paisano delivering pizza (or whatever else) is hit by a car or truck and knocked off his bicycle. Raul Ariel watches closely as I translate for the young men who used to tend farms in Puebla as they struggle to communicate with the rookie cops from Long Island.

My son will face different challenges than I did--just as he has different advantages. There will always be something of a border between him and his paisanos--as real as the border between him and his best friend Bruke, whose parents are political refugees from Eritrea; or between him and his classmate Attiyya, whose mother is a corrections officer in the Rikers Island jail and whose dad was shot to death in his livery cab. Or the border between him and his blond friend Lily, who loves to come to our house to eat tacos and dance merengue but who lives in an apartment three times the size of ours on posh West End Avenue. While his heritage may be the same as mine, his crossings will be different. Ideally, I hope my kids can be Latinos without borders.

Maria Hinojosa is urban-affairs correspondent for CNN and the author of Raising Raul: Adventures Raising Myself and My Son