Quote:
Originally Posted by SunKneeMarie
what did you do for your kids in school? thinking back to 19 and 12 and 11 years ago, I can't remember if "other" was an option... or if you could leave it blank... your kids are younger... what did your schools require in the states?
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Well our son only started school in the U.S. last fall, you know, and our daughter has only just been registered to start kindergarten this coming fall, so we didn't have this experience before.
It's rather disturbing, however, to come back to your home country and see that there's more focus on race and more rigid attitudes about such things than there were in our lives in Mexico, for example. At least in institutions like the schools. People cannot seem to grasp the problem in answering those category questions with respect to our children, when the category is "white, non-Hispanic". These two must be separate entities, you know. And that's not even to take up the question of why they're always asking. We were never asked anything like this in Mexico, not to my knowledge, at least. Citizenship and language(s) spoken, but not racial/ethnic background.
Even something simple like naming. It's just inexcusable in this day and age that so many Americans cannot get their minds around as simple an idea as that a child might have 2 family names, in keeping with Spanish language cultures, and that the last one in the order might not be considered the principal one. This is not rocket science. Yet people continue to ask, in earnest,
OK, but which one is the LAST name? People are not even grasping the fact that the word
last has more than one meaning, in that context, or that there could possibly be culturally different practices with respect to naming. Then they take it upon themselves to insert a hyphen and name my kids something else -- Ryberg-González -- or they take it upon themselves to switch the order, to "correct" the "problem" of the principal family name not being the last name, or they ignore the entire issue, as if we'd never talked about it, and call me "Mr González" and so on.
If we were a tiny, insular nation somewhere in a remote corner of the world with no Latino population, that'd be a different story. But given our real situation and history and population, it's inexcusable not to know or be able to understand these things.
Steve