what makes you you

For this paper, I decided to interview Jonathan Delgado, who I met in my writing class last semester. During our time talking, the three main themes that we discussed were family, education, and identity, so I will be talking about those things. The first thing that we started to talk about during the interview was about college and how he had gotten here. That lead to talking about his supportive family. Last, we talked about his identity, and why he doesn’t consider himself to be ‘Chicano’. These three themes were the ones I noticed that Jonathan really enjoyed talking about and had a great stories to tell.

Literature Review

As seen in the film ‘La Mission’ (Peter Bratt, 2009), family and family expectations are very important among Chicanos. Certain things are expected from each family member and many times the expectations depend on gender. In the film, Jesse, Che’s son, was expected to be macho, to be religious, and to live his father’s lifestyle. Whether that included dressing like a ‘cholo’ or ‘pachuco’, driving the low-riders, or doing the Catholic blessings, Che assumed that Jesse was like him, and wanted him to be and act a certain way. This shows the strong significance of family in Chicano’s life. ‘Machismo’ and ‘marianismo’ are key points in this as well, determining the roles of the different genders, which is very common in Chicano families.

Additionally, as stated in the presentation about ‘Family Matters’ (02/28/2014), Catholicism in the Chicano community is huge. Religion plays a large role in a Chicano’s daily life, from blessing each other to kneeling down for prayer at their home ‘altarcitos’. Of course, not every single Chicano is Catholic, and there are some who are considered to be ‘bad Catholics’....

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...ow have a more accurate and deep understanding of what he means by not being Chicano, but Mexican. What matters isn’t really the word itself, it’s the satisfaction one personally receives from knowing that nobody else is choosing what and who you are. You get to decide who you want to be, despite of what the politically-correct word might be.

I learned that you have to be proud of who you choose to be. Take Jonathan for example. People have made fun of him for speaking Spanish and for having an accent. They make fun of the things that he can’t control, things that he didn’t choose to have or know. The sad thing is that even when you’re with your “own people”, someone wants to be better than the rest, instead of being supportive of each other. However, it’s you who makes the decision to either ignore the pessimism and instead indulge in what makes you you.