Fluidity

Much like other things in life, my neighborhood is not a static, concrete thing, but fluid. Indeed, fluidity has and will continue to be a major theme in the in-progress book on my life.

We have always known life to be such a complex thing to understand, yet we have been conditioned to put its elements and even ourselves into boxes. To aspire to fit neatly into such a box is a struggle even when one has gained consciousness of the state’s real intent behind imposing these standards upon us.

But I personally know how easy it is to be at the cusp of a box’s border and what lies beyond. For instance, I was born on October 20th, “officially” a Libra but nearly a Scorpio; born in 1987 but born so late in the year that people wonder why I’m 19 when everyone else is 20; I’m queer but I don’t personally feel the need to limit myself to any specific gender in terms of sexual orientation; I use the term “Latino” to describe myself, but it comes with its serious limitations as it is both oppressive to certain people unfairly identified as such as well as it is generally erroneously used to describe things specifically Mexican/Mexican-American(a

t least in the West Coast); my parents have very different phenotypes from one another so inevitably I’m thought of as “ethnically ambiguous”; I was never the alpha male because of my “feminine” characteristics, but I’m still grappling with the fact that I am indeed firmly grounded within the oppressive male gender; I’m officially a 1st-generation American, but because my mother and her siblings came here at such a young age, I have had a lot of 2nd-generation American privileges; and on my mom’s side of the family, the two first cousins I do have are multi-ethnic.

And the list goes on. Surely fluidity constitutes a major theme in everyone’s lives, so I’m definitely not special in that respect. And as I’ve said, my neighborhood makes no exception. My permanent residence in Los Angeles is located officially within the neighborhood boundaries of East Hollywood; however, I live less than a block away from the Silver Lake neighborhood and only a few blocks away from the Los Feliz neighborhood. In short, my immediate neighborhood is a little of each; and my “extended neighborhood” is all these and more. My more immediate neighbors are my Salvadoran grandmother, a family headed by a Nicaraguan wife and Filiipino husband, Filipino families, a gay couple next door, the White lady across the street, the Native American household on the corner, Black families, elderly Armenians, and the White hipsters/gentrifiers who just moved in. Down the street, you’ll find the ever-Mexicanizing Polish church, formerly just a Polish Catholic church, whose masses are held in English, Spanish and Polish with a lady of Guadalupe statue out in front. Down the street, you’ll find the Silver Lake/Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. Down the street, you’ll find a Korean retirement home. Down the street, you’ll find the pupuserías, the coffeehouses, the gelato place, 6 Thai Restaurants, Pioneer CHICKEN, a Vietnamese-owned donut place, quite a few gay bars, a Japanese-Peruvian owned …Peruvian restaurant, a really, really good Indian restaurant,—all within a 3-block radius.

In short, my neighborhood defies classification; its heterogeneity inevitably causes some confusion, and it also cuts short communication between neighbors because it is difficult to transcend language, socioeconomic, and cultural barriers. So of course it isn’t perfect nor is it some "multicultural haven" as I may have portrayed it to be, far from it. But I am grateful to live in an environment whose heterogeneity further inspires and even encourages me to physically and psychologically step in and out of externally-imposed boxes...but also to do the human thing: remember that people are people.