Wednesday, February 19, 1997
SEGREGATION:
Place of birth not basis for defining one’s views or assessing
degree of one’s ethnicityBy Marjon Ghasemi
The contrived neighborhood boundaries which Mimi Guzman is so
fixated on appear to me to be a dangerous construct. For years,
leftist scholars, intellectuals and activists have attempted to
persuade their enemies  dogmatic bigots who are intolerant of
other races  that race is not defined by any one factor, be
it biology, language or religion. They strive to demolish the
pointless and often arbitrary "definers" of race in an attempt to
raise tolerance and unify cultures. Guzman, with her column in the
Daily Bruin ("Neighborhoods engender distinct notions of ethnicity
and class," Feb. 7), managed to retrograde their struggle. She has
now added one more arbitrary race "definer" to the list,
neighborhoods.
I am Iranian, and my parents now live in Orange County, two of
the most conservative countries and counties, respectively. Does
that mean that I am immediately to be labeled Republican or
conservative?
On the other hand, take UC Regent Ward Connerly. He came
straight out of the ghettos of Sacramento and into the right-hand
pocket of Gov. Pete Wilson. His skin is dark, he is from a dark
"neighborhood," yet his politics are whiter than my Irish
roommate’s rear end, if you will  who, by the way, fights the
power as much as if not more than any person of color that I have
met despite the fact that she was born in Redneckburg, USA.
If one is born in Rosemead as opposed to "East Los," does that
immediately make her or him not "Mexican" but "Hispanic?" Is that
why Guzman deemed Roxane Marquez "Hispanic"? Is the reason she
placed herself a couple notches higher on the hierarchy of
brown-ness as a "Mexican-Hispanic" based on nothing more than her
family’s transitory residence in "down" Montebello? I would be
curious to know if Guzman has ever spoken to Roxane (I highly doubt
it). Has Guzman ever asked Roxane if she calls herself a Chicana, a
Hispanic or a Mexican? Does she know anything of her political and
social views beyond what she may have read in Roxane’s five Daily
Bruin columns last year? Does Guzman know what Roxane hopes to do
with her life or to what organizations she donates money and time?
According to Guzman’s rationale, all those questions are
non-issues. She defines people’s ethnicity, or lack thereof, by
what part of town they’re from. I argue that this can have serious
repercussions.
Take the predominately white male policy makers and politicians
who run Los Angeles. They too define neighborhoods by color Â
just look at their distribution of funds. The whiter the district,
the more money its schools, streets and facilities receive.
Conversely, the more brown or black a district tends to be, the
less it receives.
I suggest that I am more than just Iranian, that Ward Connerly’s
politics cannot solely be defined by his skin color, that my
roommate should not be looked down upon for her 90 percent white
hometown and that Roxane Marquez is no less Mexican because her
parents did not live as far east as Guzman’s. We are instead
defined by all these elements and more, the least of which are the
arbitrary lines which determine neighborhoods.