This week, Gustavo Arellano's "Ask a Mexican!" tackles the backhanded compliment Mexicans and Mexican Americans are getting used to hearing: "Why do non-Mexicans consider it a compliment when they tell Mexicans they don’t look Mexican?" So good. I've been told over and over I look Persian, Greek, Arab, Spanish, Italian -- anything but Mexican. In my immediate extended family, true to the racially mixed Mexican north, I have cousins and nephews that carry visual traces of Afro, Anglo, and Asian blood. Of course, we all look a little Andalusian, Sephardic or indigenous. You might say, as Gregory Rodriguez argues, that Mexico and the nations of Central America are just ahead of the mixture curve: the future looks ever more mestizo.
* Photo from the amazing exhibit "El Negro Mas Chulo: African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth," by Anaya Vellissia Jackson and Marco Villalobos. "Ask a Mexican!" always at OC Weekly and LA Weekly.