What I’m Missing
I feel like I’ve been missing a whole lot for a long time. Most of this goes back to 2001 when I first arrived in Houston, Texas from my hometown Brownsville, Texas. I’ve been removed from Brownsville for about 9 years and thats a lot to take for me. Some people would agree that there isn’t much in Brownsville to want to miss but to each there own.
I miss it for various reasons and for starters its where my parents currently live. I miss them extremely. In Mexican culture you grow up knowing without being told that we will take care of our parents when the time comes and not a nursing home. This is how I was raised. It would be blasphemous to ever let my parents be in a nursing home or something related to that. They’ve done so much for my brothers, relatives and friends that they’ve taken into their house at different times. They’ve treated everyone with respect as if they belong to our family. I miss them dearly. I miss my dad jamming out to his corridos on his stereo with his six pack of milwaukee best while my mom watches her tv shows or novelas but I hear there aren’t that many good novelas like there use to be. I could go on for the rest of my life describing how many things that I miss from my parents that I think about everyday. But most of this are memories that I would prefer to express with human emotion and not just in writing.
Being a first generation Mexican-American and growing up in a huge Mexican community as Brownsville or the Valley (South Texas) is a great pleasure I take in being. Its as if we brought Mexico with us to the USA. But in fact it has always been here before it was and actual or official city of the USA. None the less its a great community for me that I am proud to be part of. But being far away has been hard even though most people would say that Houston, Texas has a large Mexican population and it does but its not the only race that exist in this big city. That is where the differences start from the Mexican community that exist in Houston and the one in Brownsville. In Houston the Mexican population is exposed to other races and cultures which bring other identities into the mix and because of that it becomes more diversified. What that means is different ideas and different perspectives on how things are seen through the eyes of a person that is from the Houston Mexican community versus one like me from a almost only Mexican community. The racial makeup of Brownsville is about 90% Mexican background and thats just from my own knowledge of growing up there. The other races would include whites, asian and african american. From my perspective I saw everything from a one culture and one race view. I never could see it from anyones else’s perspective since I wasn’t exposed to it on a day to day basis. Now to go back to the perspective of a someone who is from the Houston Mexican community, they see it in a much wider perspective view that has been exposed to different ideas that were brought on by other races. An example would be the language itself. Most or a higher percentage of the Mexican community from Brownsville are bilingual, speaking spanish as there first language and english second because of the majority of Mexican population. As for those from the Houston Mexican community would probably have that reversed because of the exposure of other races.
Well I’ve gone off on a tangent there, but that helps to put in perspective of how different it is from my view point from where I’m from and where I currently live. That introduces things that I can’t relate to that I could easily feel comfortable in Brownsville. My first week in Houston was a mind blower when I started seeing other races much more than mine. It made me scared, nervous and angry because I was not use to this type of environment. I remember calling my parents from one of my advisors phone from college telling them that I wanted to go home. Of course I spoke to my parents in spanish since my school advisor would not understand. But after some calm words from my parents I had to suck it up and do best with the decision I had taken to leave Brownsville for college in Houston. But what all this means to me is that I’ve been exposed to so much in such a little time that it has over taken so much of me that I’ve felt as if I have started losing grip with my culture. I would assume because I have become very diverse and understanding of other races and how they work and do things. I’ve not really lost my culture but I can definitely agree that I have payed much more attention to all the others because it has become a learning experience and new to me. Almost an addiction of some sort where I would spend time searching through the internet discovering where some of this people came from. So through that time and pretty much since 2001 till now I’ve been getting absorbed discovering about everyone else and slowly not paying attention to my own. After pulling back the blinds that I created I’ve realized that it has left me very sad and lonely not being around my people. I miss that so much. Going into convenient stores, groceries, the mall, ex-cetera and seeing a common bond with everyone being that we all have similar backgrounds. We all are either from Mexico or our parents are from there. I could almost go to the extent that we are a big tribe and we can understand each other because of that bond we share. I’ve yet to have been able to find that here since 2001. I have my brother who without him here with me in Houston would have been so much tougher to get though it all. I have a good friend from Laredo who was my roommate for a while who also made it a much better experience here in Houston. But that is such a small sustainable piece compared to what I had lived with for 18 years of my life.
So whenever I get a few days off from work I never think twice as to where I always want to go to. I can’t wait to go back.
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