by Daniel Martinez

Created on: January 08, 2010

I grew up in Huntington Beach in Orange County California. Do you like drunken escapades on the 4th? How about a false sense of entitlement? Than please feel free to come on down to a little piece of paradise I call home. My name is Daniel Martinez and I am American, yet I am defined the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes.  I defy most peoples concept of race because I look Asian yet by birth am 100% Hispanic. I went to high school one of a whopping 9 %, really not that bad compared to other schools but still really not that reassuring. I now what it feels like to have the gaze on me. I will not lie and pretend that everything is peachy keen and perfect. There is definitely a caste system in place. There is the local/other binary. And even though I have lived here for what will amount to 21 years of my life come March I still feel like an other. There are plenty of children and peers who are of mixed marriages and are half Hispanic but of course don’t get credit for that. Huntington Beach is a city of ritual, it is a place of birth rite. The city chooses you not the other way around. The Martinez clan has called this home for 40 odd years and we are still other.

So would I move to another city with the full knowledge that I will be the only one of my race? It’s hard to give a definitive answer. My frame of reference being home is to trust my gut instinct. I get flashes and images of me running through the street with megaphone in hand warning all to stay away and run for the hills. But logically this is really not that bad place to live. Sure there will be some, discrimination here and there. No worse than going to Little Saigon, the highest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam. Or any other ethnically dense area for that matter. People will look at me like an other because I am one.

More importantly this question is alluding to whether people of different races can get along. And it is simply not true to believe that races are radically different. I am a strong advocate of the idea that culture makes the man not race. It most certainly is a myth that perhaps many have internalized that people of different race are fundamentally opposed to one another. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. As can be seen in American second to third generation families are just a shadow of their race, and above all else are American. This new grey area creates a new culture, a new heritage, and an American heritage. The exception

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