hasta la victoria siempre; or the Half-Jew Crew

[trochee]

I went running through the south Mission yesterday, wearing a bright red shirt with the UFW eagle on it, and

Apparently, after a three-day trip to the beach, I look Latino:

• two, maybe three dozen Latino guys in identical long black t-shirts stare me down as I ran by Garfield Square Park
• the littlest girl (perhaps three years old?) in a Mexican family of ten, out for a walk, tugged on her mom's hand, pointing at me, saying "¡mira, mamá, mira! César Chavez! Es César Chavez!"
• A Latino gentleman in his early fifties, walking the other way past the hospital, thumped his right fist on his left shoulder and gave me the V-para-victoria, shouting across the street: "¡Sí se puede! ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!". "¡Sí!" I responded, but he apparently took the hint that my Spanish isn't that hot, and he switched to English: "Yes," he said, "it is coming!"[1]

A benefit of being in the the "half-Jew crew"[2] is that we are treated as vaguely "ethnic" -- Latinos and Eastern Europeans and South Asians are all equally convinced that I'm some kind of distant cousin.

[1] how awesome is it that la revolución is still alive for a 55-year-old Latino man in the Mission?
[2] the half-Jew-crew's most famous members are the Gyllenhaals: where I get occasionally talked to in Spanish -- or quizzed by Indian immigration officials about whether I'm Pakistani -- Jake Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, gets cast as the Prince of Persia.

Comments

[lightcastle.livejournal.com]

Well, given that the diaspora pretty much guaranteed intermingling, it's not overly surprising.

Actually, as a half-Italian, and therefore also "vaguely Mediterranean", I can sometimes get a fair number of ethnicities myself. Given I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in New York, though, most people code me as Jewish.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

Latinos and Eastern Europeans and South Asians are all equally convinced that I'm some kind of distant cousin.

Are you implying that you aren't? ;)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

well, to a very specific Eastern-European nexus (where I have very few , if any, surviving kin -- thanks to the pogroms and the Nazis), I am a distant cousin.

And then, in the larger sense, all us H. sapiens are distant cousins.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

When people ask me if I'm related to someone, I always want to answer, "Well, in the Cavalli-Sforza sense, yeah."

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I had to look up Cavalli-Sforza, and my linguistics person inside goes "ugh -- that guy" but my evo-bio training says "out-of-Africa -- well, DUH".

So, bracketing C-S's perhaps trigger-happy alliance with Joseph Greenberg, Cavalli-Sforza seems pretty neat.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

Snap! I didn't know about the alliance with Greenberg (even I know that Greenberg's book is, um, "controversial"). But yeah, on the stuff that he knows something about, C-S is good. His work was the first that showed that the "European" "race" was the least "pure" of anything in the Old World--that Europeans are the product of two migrations, one from Africa and a slightly later one via Asia.

[lapartera.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the coolest story here is the 3 year old who knows enough of the symbols to connect you to Cesar Chavez!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

that is pretty cool, isn't it?

[chachachana.livejournal.com]

this post makes me very happy.

:)

Depends on what recessive genes are lurking about

[isolt.livejournal.com]

My sister has the same experiences you do; she's got dark hair and lovely olive skin and brown eyes, and therefore looks Exotic. Since we're from Detroit, a lot of people try to peg her as Arab.

I, on the other hand, have dark hair, but an otherwise fair and ruddy complexion, and blue eyes. Consequently, I don't think I've ever been suspected of non-WASPishness. People are usually clueless even about my Jewish background.