Avenue of Mysteries

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Occasionally, Juan Diego would make a point of saying, “I’m a Mexican — I was born in Mexico, I grew up there.” More recently, he was in the habit of saying, “I’m an American — I’ve lived in the United States for forty years.” Or, in an effort to defuse the nationality issue, Juan Diego liked to say, “I’m a midwesterner — in fact, I’m an Iowan.”

He never said he was a Mexican American. It wasn’t only that Juan Diego disliked the label, though he thought of it as such and he did dislike it. What Juan Diego believed was that people were always seeking a commonality with the Mexican-American experience, and he could find no common ground in his own experience; more truthfully, he didn’t look for it.

What Juan Diego said was that he’d had two lives — two separate and distinctly different lives. The Mexican experience was his first life, his childhood and early adolescence. After he left Mexico — he’d never gone back — he had a second life, the American or midwestern experience. (Or was he also saying that, relatively speaking, not a whole lot had happened to him in his second life?)

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