4.4.05

The Look parte dos

I don’t like how that last entry reads, but I had to write it because I needed to get the initial feelings off my chest so that I could keep digging through the issue. I don’t necessarily care what people think when they see Dan the Man and me together. It sort of shocked me to realize that we have in interracial relationship because I had never really thought about it before. He makes me feel like his equal in every aspect.

I think I only started looking around after my realization and after the aim conversation with L. L and I had coffee a couple months back. I argued with him over the use of the word Chicano and Hispanic and he pretty much believed I was some radical, crazy Chicana feminist who thinks the American Dream doesn’t exist. However, he still kept trying to keep in touch with me. I wasn’t really keeping in touch because I wasn’t exactly interested from the get go. I just wanted to make friends. Then around February, he said he wanted to take me out on a date. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, but whatever. So when I told him the D and I had moved in together, he asked what D looked like. That made me laugh and I said, “Why? Are you going to look for him?” Then of course, I told him he was white and that was the conversation killer, as Billy likes to say.

After that, I noticed that a lot of Latinos were giving “the look.” It is a little weird, and I think a lot of them think I am a vendida, like the guy at Mickey D’s. (I never go to Mickey D’s, but the choice on lunch on Saturday was hairy Burger King or finger lickin’ Wendy’s or Fatdonalds, so I chose the latter.) I was standing at the counter ordering lunch. The guy behind the counter was evidently Latino, he had a tattoo scrawled across his neck, I didn’t really look to see what it said. Anyway, he was waiting for my receipt to print out when he noticed my Oaxaca t-shirt and said, “¿Eres de Oaxaca?”

“No, soy de Cd. Juárez.”

Then he mumbled something else, but I couldn’t hear him. I asked him to repeat what he said, but then he looked at me, looked at Dan the Man standing right beside me and said, “Ahorita sale tu orden.”

Cracked Chancla is right in saying that “people should understand that there are certain restrictions that cannot be place upon the heart.” Y como el DT, people will do a double take on us, and perhaps some will think that I’m a vendida like Cindylu wondered in her own experience. But this will not continue to bother me, I just needed to write about it before I bid the issue farewell.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

i prefer wendy's, maybe the people there will be nicer. :)

under the red sky said...

oh come on...you're going to tell me that what some some cholo fracasado has to say about your relationship is going to affect you? I think that more than anything you are still trying to cope with your own feeling of being a "vendida." I really don't think people make that much of an issue. Anyhow, this kind of reminds of me when I used to shop at the GAP and I would feel like such a sell-out for buying sweatshop produced clothing (It was on sale damn it!).
P.S. You can always say that Dan the Man is some guerro from Los Altos de Jalisco. :)

under the red sky said...

It's actually spelled "güero" and I don't think I made it clear. No, you are not a vendida.

Gwen said...

Gustavo, you say, "I really don't think people make that much of an issue."

I think they do, though. Every day, all the time. Not everyone's as cool as you and me.

My BF is Asian (and I'm not). We get stupid looks from people of every color of the rainbow. I've learned to completely ignore it, but stupid looks can bother a person... without it meaning that that person is questioning her own decisions.

Sell-outs are people who are not in love, in my opinion. Prostitutes, basically. If you're in love, fuck everything else.