Latino Canadians

I was in Vancouver over the weekend attending the American Educational Research Association Conference there. I presented a paper that looks at the development of ethnic identity among Mexican-descent youth in New York City and how these youth come to equate low educational achievement with being Mexican; I argued that the data I collected shows that it is not surprising given some of the discriminatory messages they hear from teachers, and from mixed messages that their parents send, in terms of advocating hard work and a strong Mexican identity, but also with an explicit message that says, “don’t be like me.” I am sure I will have future opportunities to expand on this research that came out of my dissertation, but being in Canada offered me some time to ponder more important things: sports and Latinos.

I ran into a friend from graduate school who is now a professor at the University of Toronto. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez was actually a few years ahead of me in our doctoral program. Since arriving in Canada, he became interested in the large number of Latin-American descendants who call Canada home. When we met in passing he let me know that Latino Canadians have been around for over 50 years, yet few people have taken note, and now Rubén finds himself at the forefront of this area of inquiry.

Walking through Canadian streets a few days later, my wife and I were looking for souvenirs for our children and I immediately thought that I’d like to buy my three-year-old son a Canadian hockey jersey or maybe even a mini-hockey stick. Just as my son was entering consciousness a couple of years ago, my hometown Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. After a long drought, and fan indifference, Chicago was taken by hockey fever, especially given the dismal state of our other sports teams. One of my close friends, who is Mexican, noted that he felt some ambivalence about the fair-weather fans, especially the Latinos who had taken to the sport, swept up in the championship fervor, when the sport goes virtually unknown in our homelands whose climate is not the most hospitable to hockey. Regardless, my own Mexican family was taken by the success of the Blackhawks and my son and daughter both reveled in the contagious “Chelsea Dagger” that became the team’s anthem that year. For our son, “hockey” became one of the first two-syllable words he would utter with great enthusiasm anytime he saw my father and I watching a game on television.

One of the more popular players on the Blackhawks the year they won was Dustin Byfuglien, who was also notable as one of the few African Americans in the sport. On our search for a pint-sized jersey, I also ran into a few hockey sticks and then my mind drifted at the thought of buying our son one and it being the beginning of his journey to break ethnic and racial barriers in the great sport of our northern neighbors. This led me to wonder whether there was a Latino presence on hockey teams, given their presence in Canada.

Well, it was with a literal bang that I found out. Watching a much less captivating Blackhawks team last night, I saw the awful hit that Blackhawk player Marian Hossa took from Raffi Torres of the Coyotes. It knocked Hossa unconscious and earned him an immediate trip to the hospital. Once I learned from the evening news that Hossa was fine, I began to wonder about the Hispanic surnamed Torres. A quick search on Wikipedia taught me that Canadian-born Torres is in fact of Mexican and Peruvian descent. So, apparently ethnic barriers have already been broken in hockey, although it is probably still a matter of time before we hear about Los Blackhawks, although Coyotes is already a name with Mexican roots.

To carry a theme from the last few blog posts relating the perceived versus actual solidarity of Latinos, I was none too happy to learn of Torres’s ancestry, although it took little time for me to move beyond my ambivalence, as it is hard to stand with someone who could perpetuate such an unsportsmanlike and brutal hit, in addition to other egregious off the ice antics. So, the evidence continues to mount that we can we Latinos are a diverse and complex group that is difficult to generalize under one umbrella.

My wife put the kibosh on the hockey stick, by the way. Hockey, she said, is just too violent, Latino or otherwise.