Pieces: Part Two

To read the first part of this post click here.

Keep in mind this is a very painful subject to me and although I'm not pointing fingers, it still makes me very sad.

Several years ago, after I had been living in Texas for more than a year, I met and dated my very first Cowboy.  He will also be my very LAST Cowboy. We had been dating a month and things were going well and I was beginning to think this might become serious when I met his parents.  Not surprisingly, they loved me.  (I never said I was humble)  I met his brothers and they had a similar reaction.  Even his sister-in-law liked me.  There was just one small problem...

Long after they met me and told the Cowboy how much they liked me his parents invited me to an event with them in San Antonio.  We had a lovely day and I met a lot of people who had known the Cowboy since he was "knee high to a grasshopper" (Texans have very strange phrases) and they all wanted to talk to me.

Well, you know me, I love people. I love talking to them and hearing their life stories and I love to tell them mine.  And I did.  And that's where the trouble started.

"Could you not tell them you're from California?" he said.

I remember thinking,
I can't help it- I sound like I am from California.  Why would I want to be anything else?

This is the face that I gave him.

"Would you please not tell everyone how we met?"

We met at college. He asked me out. I said no because he was a Freshman when I was a Senior and young and stupid. Two years later I decided to give him a second chance. 

"Stop telling everyone about your dad." 

What's wrong with my Dad? My Dad is awesome. 

"People don't want to know you're Mexican!"

Saywat!?!

From there he proceeded to drag me off to a quiet corner to tell me that I was embarrassing him by telling people I was Mexican.  But I am.  Half.  First generation.  Proud of it.  Still American to the core and still Texan.  He then informed me that his family liked me well enough and they were willing to overlook my genealogy if I would just shutup about it.  His words- not mine. I didn't know people like that still existed.

I reminded him that if we were to get married and had kids that those children would be a quarter Mexican.  He said yes and that was unfortunate but that they would still be half Czech.  (He was pure gold, Czech lineage, which mean he was shorter than average, stocky, had plain features, receding hairline and a grumpy disposition- and he was the good looking one in the family.)  I would love to compare his features to the males in my family some time but I'm not that mean.  He told me he wasn't racist and I told him then he was a closet racist.  He said he loved me but his love was tearing me to pieces.  Needless to say that was more or less the end of me and the Cowboy. 

Then a few months later I met and went on one date with another good old Southern Boy.  He was sweet, quiet, very nervous, but generally a pleasant human being.  After he made a few racist jokes (that I didn't get) my friend, the dancer, informed him that the reason I didn't get the joke was because of my ethnicity and she didn't find it funny.  He didn't call me again.  I consider it a bullet dodged. 

After that I took a year off from dating and I was quite convinced that all the men in Texas were racist.  Eventually I was proven wrong but now when a guy asks me out before I agree or disagree I state the following:

1. I am a practicing Catholic and I am proud of it.
2. I am first generation Mexican and I am proud of it.
3. I have a lot of brothers and I am proud of them.

Then I give them my age and ask them if they still want to ask me out.  It's scared away more men than I care to admit.  Then again, it's also shown me who deserves a chance. 

Racism is alive and well in the South.  I didn't know people like that still existed before I moved here and I admit that the lack of racism is one of the few things that I miss about California.  That and Disneyland.  And my family.  And real mountains.  But you catch my drift. 

It's taken me years to write about this, largely because it is still a very painful subject.  The last thing told the Cowboy before I stopped answering his calls was "You say that you want to love all of me, but you can't stand a piece of me."  I am beautiful and wonderful and I have the best crazy family a person could ever ask for- Mexican, German, British, Japanese, Ukrainian, Australian, Swedish, Irish, Scottish... the list goes on and on, but I am not made up of pieces. I am whole. I am loved. And I wouldn't give that up to pretend to be any one of those things for the world... or a cowboy.

So perhaps the moral of the story is that I don't believe you can love a person if you don't love pieces of them. You either love all of them or you don't love them. And if you don't love your neighbor, you aren't being Christian.