How Did You Get to Be Mexican?: A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity

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Summary: A scholarly, yet readable book that needed to be written.
Review: As a mixed race Mexican/Anglo myself, I saw my own childhood as well as parts of my adult life in Dean Johnson's writing. While reading like an autobiography, this book is not lacking in scholarship. The numerous and current scholarly references for each chapter provide a wealth of resources for those who desire to learn more about the topics of which Dean Johnson speaks. I am enriched by having read this book.

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Summary: An excellent book about being mixed-race in America.
Review: Kevin Johnson's book "How Did you Get to be Mexican?" is an excellent book about being mixed race in America. Johnson considers life on the color line from the perspective of one who is half Latino and half Anglo.In so doing he considers many important topics including the limits on Latino assimilation and the construction of racial identity. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of race.

Rating:
Summary: A scholarly, yet readable book that needed to be written.
Review: Kevin Johnson's book "How Did you Get to be Mexican?" is an excellent book about being mixed race in America. Johnson considers life on the color line from the perspective of one who is half Latino and half Anglo.In so doing he considers many important topics including the limits on Latino assimilation and the construction of racial identity. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of race.

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Summary: A great story of being a mixed race American.
Review: Kevin Johnson's book took me into the world of both discrimination and success. I felt saddened, repulsed, and angry as I read how American society made him and his family feel and react. But, I came away with the feeling that the book was not about racism or discrimination. Instead, I felt that he had offered me a chance to step in his shoes, see the world the way he saw it. For that experience I am grateful and changed. Being so opene and willing to discuss such personal matters was no doubt very difficult. But the book steps into an important gap in the documentation of classes, discrimination, and racism in America.

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Summary: Identify This Book
Review: This is the story of a mother who dearly wanted to assimilate but couldn't - and her son, who could have but finally wouldn't. It is the story of a man of mixed White-Latino heritage engulfed in self-doubt about his place in a society obsessed with race. It is the story of a prominent young lawyer and college professor who can never fully enjoy his success because someone always pops up to accuse him of being a "box checker," a counterfeit Latino for affirmative action purposes.

Contradictions run wild in Kevin Johnson's autobiographical account of growing up racially mixed and emotionally mixed up. On one page, he rightly laments racial pigeonholing. On the next, he paints a painfully detailed picture of someone's racial history and physical features. The book is replete with mixed heritage characters who "identify" publicly with the racial tradition of one parent over that of another.

At first this approach left me frustrated (maybe I yearned for transcendence). But soon I realized that Johnson could hardly tell his story otherwise: the contradictions are not his but society's. Such is the sad - indeed the surreal - state of America's racial politics.

However sad and surreal race relations indeed may be, books like Johnson's represent a breakthrough of sorts for diversity and understanding. For most of our nation's history, dispossessed individuals were truly silenced - either by poverty or outright discrimination. As society began to allow different voices to emerge, pure outsiders got most of the attention. Now people like Johnson, who inhabits what the book jacket calls "the borderlands between racial identities," are receiving the call to tell their stories.

Before I run on any longer, I should reveal some modest secrets of my own. Johnson and I attended the same high school in Southern California. In college, in the late 1970s, we shared two different apartments on Berkeley's Haste Street, a student ghetto just south of the University of California campus. We remained friends as he progressed through the legal profession to his current position as associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at the University of California, Davis.

Johnson was born in 1958, the first child of a White father and a Mexican American mother. His parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up hopscotching from the barrio's poverty to the relative affluence of the beach cities near Los Angeles. Johnson's mother, a staunch assimilationist, neither taught him Spanish nor encouraged pride in his Latin roots. When she remarried, she attached herself yet another Anglo.

Following the advice of his politically savvy father, the adolescent Johnson began to ponder his Mexican American background. He began taking Spanish in high school. He continued in college. Meanwhile Berkeley introduced him - as it did us all - to heretofore unimagined diversity. Yet, to me, my roommate seemed most comfortable while slam dancing to the Dead Kennedys at the San Francisco punk club Mabuhay Gardens. White like me, I would have told anyone who bothered to ask about his racial identity (though I knew, of course, about his mother's background). Tellingly, no one raised the question.

My analysis at the time partly reflected my own lack of maturity and perception, but there's little doubt that Harvard Law School forced my friend unequivocally out of his Latino closet. Like other Harvard law students from modest economic and social backgrounds, he wondered whether he really deserved his place in the elite institution. Had the admissions committee let him in just because he'd checked the Latino box on the application? Even after he made law review, he could never convince himself.

During a tussle over affirmative action on the virtually all-white law review, Johnson took a firm pro-diversity stance. From that point on, he became increasingly outspoken about his Mexican American heritage - both personally and professionally. Though it might have been easier to blend in as white, he opted for a more rewarding, if rockier, bicultural path.

His chapter about Harvard, which opens the book, should be required reading for any undergraduate contemplating the LSAT. This isn't the first time someone has slammed Harvard Law, and it won't be the last, but Johnson's account makes the experience seem outright hellish for anyone with the slightest non-conformist streak. Pranks (probably innocuous to your average Yale man) resound with new meaning when aimed at a sensitive outsider. For his defense of affirmative action, Johnson earned a citation in a spoof yearbook as author of a volume entitled, "I Hate Whites." Nearly two decades later, the barb still stings.

After law school, Johnson plunged into pro bono work on behalf of Latin American immigrants and married a woman of Mexican American descent. Virginia helped him grow more comfortable with his identity, and together they try to provide a foundation of Mexican culture for their three children.

Policy discussions generally take a backseat in Johnson's autobiographical account. When they appear, they're grounded in personal experience - like his analysis of the "box checker" dilemma. The question is simple: what constitutes a member of an underprivileged group for the purposes of affirmative action? The answer is complex, if not insoluble. Under pressure to admit or hire individuals from certain groups, many institutions and businesses are keen to count anyone vaguely entitled to membership. Predictably, this has sparked a debate among civil rights activists over who qualifies to check the box. Individuals of mixed racial heritage, like Johnson, come under special scrutiny. The phenomenon is captured by the book's title, "How Did You Get to Be a Mexican?" A senior professor asked Johnson that very question during an interview for a position on a law faculty.

Johnson's book offers a partial answer, but no response will prove satisfactory as long as our society remains obsessed with race. Indeed, we can only put racism behind us when we no longer care about the answer.

* Bill Hinchberger is the editor of the BrazilMax website.

Rating:
Summary: Thank you to the author! Such an important book to write...
Review: When I saw the title, I knew I had to check out the book for myself. Since I am a bicultural person (of Venezuelan and Polish descent) I could relate to his struggle. A lot of people doubt you based on physical characteristics, surname and mannerisms when you come from a bicultural background. The situation was the same for Mr. Johnson, a lawyer of English and Mexican background. His last name, light complexion and elementary knowledge of Spanish hindered him in integrating into Mexican culture, while his non-Caucasian features separated him from his Anglo contemporaries. He wrote sensitively about his experiences and enlightened us about his process of self-discovery (finally marrying a Mexicana, having children with her, giving them Spanish names, etc). I reccomend this book to anyone who wants an education on the bicultural experience or has been through that process themselves. I can't tell you how many times, to this day, people still deny me my Latin roots because I don't look like the caricatures they have in their heads about how all Hispanics/Latinos are supposed to look (Dark skin, black hair, black eyes), and I don't have a Spanish last name because I was raised by my mom (Martinez, Morales, Rodriguez, etc). We have to get over our assumptions about people if we want the walls to come down in our thinking. It is the only way toward liberation.

Rating:
Summary: Thank you to the author! Such an important book to write...
Review: When I saw the title, I knew I had to check out the book for myself. Since I am a bicultural person (of Venezuelan and Polish descent) I could relate to his struggle. A lot of people doubt you based on physical characteristics, surname and mannerisms when you come from a bicultural background. The situation was the same for Mr. Johnson, a lawyer of English and Mexican background. His last name, light complexion and elementary knowledge of Spanish hindered him in integrating into Mexican culture, while his non-Caucasian features separated him from his Anglo contemporaries. He wrote sensitively about his experiences and enlightened us about his process of self-discovery (finally marrying a Mexicana, having children with her, giving them Spanish names, etc). I reccomend this book to anyone who wants an education on the bicultural experience or has been through that process themselves. I can't tell you how many times, to this day, people still deny me my Latin roots because I don't look like the caricatures they have in their heads about how all Hispanics/Latinos are supposed to look (Dark skin, black hair, black eyes), and I don't have a Spanish last name because I was raised by my mom (Martinez, Morales, Rodriguez, etc). We have to get over our assumptions about people if we want the walls to come down in our thinking. It is the only way toward liberation.