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“Christmas, the Acculturated Way”
By Benjamin Ortiz, for
Café Latino Lifestyle Magazine
November/December 2009


Growing up along the border, I spent almost every Sunday going to Matamoros, Tamaulipas. It was a pattern that became familiar – get up early, gulp down barbacoa tacos, go to church and then trek across to Mexico. The feasting, prayer and travel seemed both a spiritual and cultural renewal for the family, like a little Tex-Mex holiday to begin every week.
But these trips weren’t always comfortable, as my sister and I preferred to stay home sometimes. Coming from a sleepy Texas town whose population peaked at 3,000, we found Matamoros to be a congested, polluted and fast-moving place of extremes in poverty and violence. Moreover, my sister and I took the brunt of our cousins’ sometimes playful but usually painful references to us as pochos – americanos of Mexican descent who lost their culture, language and true homeland.
Even so, holidays along the border were not strictly American nor Mexican for anyone on either side, but a fusion of what we would throw together – a little bit of Catholicism and a whole lot of Coca-Cola. Christmas and New Year’s Eve were especially memorable, since we often stayed in Mexico overnight.
We’d arrive at our relatives’ cold, poorly heated house with gifts for family and neighborhood kids alike – little knick-knacks and dollar-store stuff. I personally looked forward to what my sister dreaded: the cheap, easily acquired fireworks available at every corner kiosk. I remember seeing those fireworks light up the smoggy night sky, as neighbors reenacted Joseph and Mary’s search for shelter with posadas, ringing out over the firecracker blasts with carols and cries of “Tamales!”
As we grew older, the visits became more rare. We ultimately lost touch with Matamoros and assimilated into the holly-jolly culture of Santa Claus and the traditional New Year’s song “Auld Lang Syne,” like many subsequent generations of Americanized Latinos who join in the holiday rush with gift lists and champagne at midnight.
Despite distance in time and space, Chicago Latinos still manage to renew cultural ties to the homelands of our ancestors through the dynamic flow of immigration. Caravans heading to Mexico typically take off for the Dec. 12 observance of La Virgen de Guadalupe day and stay through Jan. 6, the day of the Three KingsÂ’ visit to the baby Jesus. The exodus is so dramatic that a Waukegan Public Schools source estimated in a 2007 Chicago Tribune report that 10 percent of Hispanic students in the district are absent for almost a month over the holiday season.
Many, of course, can’t leave, and so the celebrations go on with Chicago flair. As Latino writer Luis Alberto Urrea put it in a 2004 New York Times op-ed, “Every American city is now a border town,” noting the corn husks and masa mixes available at supermarkets for a “traditional Christmas meal of tamales, but Chicago style – with bratwurst instead of beef.”
HOUSE MUSIC AND HOLY DAYS IN D.F.
“We’re the ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ house, but Mexican-style,” says Mayra Neria, a 35-year-old first-generation Mexican-American born and raised on Chicago’s North Side. She talks about how close-knit her family remains, with an aunt and grandparents living within a few blocks of her mom’s house.
“Basically, there are four generations in one house,” she says, mentioning her own daughter, Jessica, who is kicking off the Americanization process by moving out to go to college. “For her to leave the house to go to school, it took a lot [because] we don’t leave – you don’t leave until you’re married.”
Even with traditional Mexican mores dominating her upbringing, Neria gravitated toward the booming bass of Chicago house music and soaked up as many musical influences as she could tune into on the radio. But along with “the big hair and the bright, bright lipstick” of ’80s DJ parties, she remembers traveling to her parents’ homeland of Chilangolandia – Mexico City. There, she picked up dance steps from relatives so she could hang with guaracha as easily as disco.
From the age of 6 months on, Neria traveled back and forth between Chicago and Mexico City a few times each year. “This was all throughout my childhood, and same thing for the most part in my adolescence until I had my daughter, and then it kind of tapered off a bit.” She grew up with her cousins as an extended batch of siblings who were curious and in awe of the trendy Chicago that she was discovering.
“It wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 that I got an appreciation of the architecture and urban culture of Mexico City,” she remembers. “At 17, I took a trip to visit my cousin, and we went over to the Basílica de la Virgen de Guadalupe, and I never felt such an overwhelming emotion like I did that day walking into it. … It’s phenomenal.”
Neria feels a sense of Greater Mexico in her own home during the holidays, but she still travels to renew her memories and to share traditional experiences with her daughter: “Christmas has always been my favorite, because there’s the posadas. … It’s not like here. Even the piñatas – they have peanuts, they have sugar cane in them, they have oranges – I hate to use the word basic, because to us here it is basic, but there it’s super-cool to gather a big bag of peanuts from a piñata!”
She goes through a catalog of commonplaces – ponche (fruit punch cider), midnight Mass and the baby Jesus of nativity scenes that neighbors would dress up for Christmas Eve and treat to caresses and carols. She also talks about the real gift-giving day, Jan. 6, that makes for an extended Mexican holiday: “It wasn’t a very big thing when I was growing up, but now that I had Jessica, and my cousins were around, we started getting them more used to the idea of Los Tres Reyes. … Jan. 6 [is] when they have gifts for their kids, and over here, you know, let’s buy the rosca, and whoever gets El Niño Dios has to throw the party [on Feb. 2] – I mean there’s always a party for one reason or another.”
EPIPHANY ON EL PASEO BORICUA
Poet Eduardo Arocho remembers a particularly disturbing cultural mish-mash at a Chicago parade observing the Jan. 6 Día de los Tres Reyes Magos: “We had the Three Kings, and Ronald McDonald was on the horse wagon too. And I said, ‘Uh, uh, no, he isn’t supposed to be there!’”
At 39, Arocho has played a significant part in not only learning his own cultural roots but also sharing them with all of Chicago. As executive director of the Division Street Business Development Association, heÂ’s helping build the neighborhood around a core of Puerto Rican commerce and culture.
He describes his journey as self-discovery and re-learning of lost traditions, including his switch from the Baptist religion of his father to Catholicism: “I just felt that it was a religion that I had to know more of because I wanted to feel closer to the culture.”
Growing up with mostly mainstream Christmases, Arocho slowly absorbed Puerto Rican influences at a distance, from his brotherÂ’s stories of Jan. 6 celebrations on the island to the first time he went with a church group on a suburban parranda, the tradition of singing aguinaldos [carols] from door to door and being welcomed in for food.
In college at Northeastern Illinois University, he started to work for various cultural institutions, where he was introduced to woodcarvings of saints and the Three Kings. Arocho went to Old San Juan in January 2005 to experience Tres Reyes Magos celebrations on the island firsthand for the first time. It was a historic time to Arocho because Puerto Rican representatives in the garb of the Three Kings had been welcomed by the Pope at the Vatican, and the holiday’s special moment of international recognition was everywhere in the newspapers and in songs ringing out from the streets.
He remembers also the unveiling of the flag sculptures on Division Street on Jan. 6, 1995, and how a haphazardly organized parade, with toys and chocolate for the crowds, has grown into a big winter festival. “Now it’s the first parade of the year in Chicago – and it’s the fastest parade,” he says with a laugh, referring to the rush to get out of the typically frosty weather.
When asked about the significance of the Three Kings for Puerto Rican culture, he centers on Melchor, the African king: “It’s a [matter of] self-identification, and the Three Kings are as popular a representation of Puerto Rico as the coquí – among poor people early on in Puerto Rican history, they were worshipped.”
This year, he talks about introducing a big spin on the Three Kings celebration. “This year, I’m thinking that we should have three women kings, to do a little something different,” he says.

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