Andrés Martinez goes home for El Grito

Zócalo has launched a series where it invites writers to contribute pieces on going home, "wherever or whatever that may be." First up is Andrés Martinez, who helped spawn Zócalo while he was editor of the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times, before the dramatic fall. Martinez, now an associate editor of Zócalo, uses the occasion of the Mexican independence bicentennial to write about being Mexican and American in Los Angeles.

I wasn’t raised to hyphenate, or synthesize my Mexicanidad with my Americanness. I mastered both separately, undiluted, teeing up a choice. (Actually, Mexican law teed up the choice for me, since it barred dual nationality past the age of 18.) I always ate fiery, dousing spice with lime whenever possible not only because it is the Mexican way, but because I was so spooked by those descriptions of scurvy in “Mutiny on the Bounty.” I spoke with a norteño accent renowned throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the tenor of Pancho Villa’s Dorados. It’s that hyper-Mexican accent that makes people elsewhere in the world expect you to start a revolution, or at least sing a corridor about your horse.

I was also the güero obsessed with learning U.S. history, literature and politics. I was the kid in class who had no one to talk to about Holden Caulfield because no one else had read the book, or about how Americans could venerate someone like Robert E. Lee, who’d apparently managed to kill far more gringos than any Mexican general ever had. I couldn’t wait to go off to Exeter, Yale, and The New York Times, unaware that I’d only be swapping one exile for another.

But Los Angeles disturbs my ruminations about here versus there, about these distinctive, self-contained spaces separated by a fixed line running through my consciousness, as it does on the map. Los Angeles straddles my two worlds.

He touches briefly on his years at the Times and notes that "some of my colleagues who’d moved from the East Coast felt like expats in California, but for me Los Angeles offered the promise of hyphenation without dilution — an end to exile."