Becoming Bougie
“I only want my almond butter and jam sandwiches on brioche,” my son declared to me as I was making his lunch the other day.
Growing frustrated with her brother for spending too much time bouldering, my daughter turned to me to and explained her preference for the much taller climbing walls. “The auto-belays are so posh daddy,” she said.
“Are we going to Telluride or Moab this weekend?” asked my son.
These are all things my children have said to me in the last few months.
My son has a preference for nut butters AND he has a preference for bread types for different sandwiches! My daughter, at age three, uses words like “posh” and has her own membership at a climbing gym! They go on vacation—and not just to see family members out in the middle of nowhere!
In the past, on multiple occasions, some folks have threatened to invalidate my Chicano-card. I prefer flour tortillas to corn. I would rather have the fake yellow velveta cheese—San Anto style—on my bean and cheese tacos than queso fresco. And, I’ve been snow and water skiing before. But, my children are reaching a new level of bougie.
When I was my son’s age, there was white bread and wheat bread. I would beg my mother to buy us Iron Kids bread at the store. She always said no. Sometimes, when we went to the day-old-bread-store, she would let my sister and I take home a bag of 1-day-expired powdered sugar donuts as a treat.
And that was still better than what my parents grew up with. To this day, my dad swears that mayonnaise and jelly in a warmed corn tortilla is a tasty treat. I’ll take him at his word. I’ve never tried it. He used to eat it as a kid because they were so poor there was hardly anything to eat in the house.
Growing up, summer vacations weren’t really a thing. We spent a week every summer in El Paso, Texas with family. Every year. Every Summer. No matter what. El Paso. I heard that other people and other families went to exotic and fun places, but not us. Nope, just El Paso.
At times, I’m uneasy about the life of privilege that my children live. I have misgivings that are tied to troubled notions of authenticity. I’m apprehensive about narrative and timeline—both cultural and genealogical—that plots a line from poverty to pretentiousness, that celebrates consumption as a stand-in for success.
I’m worried too because eating barely-but still-expired donuts with your sister in the back of the car forges life-long bonds. Going to three Walmarts in small towns and bringing home something under a couple of dollars, teaches you that memories are valuable and stuff isn’t.
But at the same time, I’m happy that my kids know that there are more than two different kinds of cheeses—shredded or sliced, like my wife and I used to think. I’m happy they’ve had different kinds of breads. I’m happy that they’ve had experiences and seen the world that their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents could only peek at.
The Chicano historian, George J. Sánchez (no relation) wrote a book called Becoming Mexican American. In it, he explained that a generation in the mid-twentieth century born in the U.S. but to Mexican-born parents began to create a new culture, a new identity, out of two separate nations and cultures. They began the hard work of making a new world of possibilities for those who came before and those who came after. The “becoming” in the title emphasized that this was a process, a never ending series of actions meant to create and recreate the world of opportunities.
My kids aren’t putting on airs. This isn’t affectation. This is their life. Their chronology isn’t one of penury to pomposity. Instead, they’re part of a long historical tradition of creation and recreation, from being proletarian to becoming bougie.
Aaaron Sanchez is a professor, historian and editor at Commentary and Cuentos. Follow Aaaron on Twitter at 1stWorldChicano