Dr. Mexican: Introduction to Chicano Studies

Today, I received a text from my unusually good looking and ethnically-vague friend, Nicole (she lives near San Francisco, and ironically enough, went back to school to complete her bachelors at the same little hokey college where I completed my postbacc). For the record, Nicole (like me), is half Hispanic, although her variation sounds much more interesting because even saying you're Chilean just sounds so much hotter than saying you're Mexican. Le sigh.

Nicole: "I got my eyebrows waxed yesterday and I'm literally convinced they hold the key to ethnic diversity.  Unwaxed eyebrows make people wonder...is she Latina?  Mixed?  White?  Ungroomed? (kidding).  Then the second I get them waxed it's like BOOM, you're definitely Armenian or Persian."

Veronica: [replies with .jpg of hot cheetos and a diet coke with the subtitle "lunch."]

Anyways, you get the point.  While this is possibly the weirdest segue to a meaningful post, it got me thinking about a broader issue I'm actually very passionate about. 
Labels.
It doesn't matter what kind; racial, relationship-oriented, cultural, religious.  I wish I could say I dislike them, but to be honest, that's not true. There's a reason we say we "identify" with others...and I find it hard to argue that we are all kindred spirits on the basis that we all are vertebrates who walk upright.  There are certain societal roles, values, and interests that help shape our personality; I don't need to belabour the obvious.  But what Nicole says, even benignly, addresses a good point.  Whether we are conscientious of it or not, we often rush to categorize people.  I use that word selectively because I don't see it as synonymous with malignant stereotyping. Before this easily becomes a blog about a blog, I present to you the Throwback Thursday variety of Blogger: something I wrote for a competition not long ago.  Did I win? Nah, but I got a really cool pin in the mail for my submission.  #worthit.  Anyways, I present to you:

Dr. Mexican

What’s in a name?

Throughout the latter half of my life, I have embraced and opted to identify myself as firstly, a Latina, and secondly, a white female. I say this because it took many years to explore and accept my cultural heritage as something beyond my phenotype.  At first encounter, many assume my freckles and pale skin classify me as white, and in the past, I reacted almost indignantly.   “My last name is Williams because my mother wasn’t married; I don’t know my dad…but he’s Mexican. I’m half Mexican” was a standardized response.  When peers remarked that I was awarded a grant upon entering college because I “checked the Hispanic box,” I felt a flare of defensiveness, although I feigned indifference. Where had this notion of minority equals sympathy money become propagated?  More importantly, why was it perpetuated amongst intellectuals who were supposed to represent equality in a field made competitive not by affirmative action, but by meritocracy?

For years, I had entertained myself with a psychosocial “name game.”  What if I had been given my Mexican father’s last name, Reyes-Iboa? I imagined what it would be like to be paged as Doctor Reyes-Iboa, and by contrast, Doctor Williams. Even my imagination would elicit starkly different scenarios; one of a fluent Spanish dialogue, taking a patient history in an inner city clinic in Los Angeles, and another in a seemingly vanilla, big-city hospital, probably as a specialist.

But the irony was that I was neither of these things.  At the time, I was still a closet pre-med majoring in Theater and barely passing a minor in Biological Sciences.  My inability to excel in the hard sciences made me reluctant to openly admit my dream of medicine, knowing that once I vocalized it, I would be held at a standard that was seemingly unattainable from both an academic and financial outlook.  My obsession with how I would be perceived racially had me inclined to keep mum; I didn’t want my accomplishments attributed to this phenomenon of “Hispanic-box-checking” and I didn’t want my failures to be a racially charged statistic of “x percent of minorities struggling in science.”  And so, as I was trying to form a career path that suited my genuine interest in promoting the welfare of my community, I was also trying to form an identity.  Was I too white to be Hispanic, too Hispanic to be white?  Was I too middle-class to be socioeconomically disadvantaged?

It wasn’t until I was desperately mailing off applications to premed post-bacc programs in a last-ditch effort to remedy my grades that I met someone who changed my life. I was at the post office, and had dropped all of my change.  His name was Tommy Hand, an MS-II at UC Irvine School of Medicine, and he picked up all of my coins as I fumbled to introduce myself, fearing he’d see right through to my academic incompetence, my racial ambiguity, my cultural wish-washy-ness.  The white Mexican that wants to be a physician living out of her car with a 2.81 grade point average.  I was terrified.  “Post-bacc, huh?  My friend did that too!  Good, hurry up, we need you,” he said.

We need you.  For a long time, I had approached my path to medicine in a way similar to the competitive aspect of auditioning.  You memorized a monologue and delivered it better than someone else to get the principal role. But as thespians know, that ideology, at least in the scope of performance, is not conducive to a successful show.  You have to be competent enough to get there, relentless enough to keep trying; that is fact. But more importantly, you have to be willing to work with and for others to create something bigger than yourself.  People come to see a show to feel; I aim to perform in such a way that I have catalyzed that feeling.  In the same regard, I wanted to prove that I was capable of the academic rigor of medicine- not for the sake of gaining credentials or demonstrating success “in spite of” my economic or racial background, but rather, with the intent of providing excellence in patient care.

My chance meeting (and subsequent friendship) with Tommy would restore my sense in confidence and focus.  He introduced me to Physicians for Human Rights, and he helped spawn a personal interest in global medicine. What truly impressed me, however, was his involvement in the Latino community of California. Tommy was part of PRIME-LC, a program created to meet the increasing demand for culturally sensitive and linguistically competent doctors who were in tune to the needs of Latinos and those marginalized in medicine. Tommy was as characteristically white as they came; Ray-ban donning, jean-short wearing, blonde and blue eyed.  But his interest in Latino medicine stemmed from something more important than immediate racial affiliation. He pursued PRIME-LC because he saw firsthand the social injustice experienced by Hispanics in Spanish Harlem, many of whom were uninsured and had difficulty seeing providers because of a language barrier or lack of representation.  Tommy reminded me that my personal experience and interest in medicine-whatever specialty-should be just that: personal.  Although Tommy passed away last year in a motorcycle accident, I am very, very fortunate to have met someone who ignited a radical change in my perspective of myself as a potential leader, less defined by racial parameters, and more by the motivation to equalize those opportunities and resources available to my patients and even to students who, much like myself, want to make a change but are unsure if they are reaching for a goal that seems beyond their “social or cultural archetype.”

I admit, it is hard to turn a colorblind eye to subtle racism if we are inundated with it every day and do not challenge it. Where someone sees advancement in minority representation in healthcare or science, someone else may try to undermine that by calling it a group-based advantage. Certainly, diversity should not explicitly be perceived through a racial lens, but gauged through the representation of unique talent and personal experiences (cultural or otherwise) that enable future physicians to be more understanding, approachable, and sensitive to the concerns of more than one demographic.  I will always strive to uphold an academic caliber that is representative of my personal sense of worth, irrespective of my color, but I am very proud to call myself Latina, a component that inspires me to address misunderstandings that are perpetuated through stereotypes.  As a biracial student and future osteopathic physician, I am honored and compelled to find ways of promoting racial equality, dispelling senses of entitlement, and showing prospective medical students that your race is neither a limiting nor advancing factor to being a great physician.  Inevitably, I'd like to  complete an international rotation in a Latin American county so that I may interact with a patient population that I am unfamiliar with while learning from their local physicians. I truly believe this is vital to foster a sense of collaboration and comprehensive patient care, where the focus is less on what you look like or what language you speak, but rather, what services you can render to those who do not care what “box” you checked on your college application.

My personal investment in Latino healthcare has been cultivated by 24 years of figuring out who I would like to be, not just what my birth certificate says I am.  While there may not be a universal language to help me linguistically address my patients needs (my Spanish has much left to be desired), there is a universal right that I feel compelled to work towards: equal access to healthcare in times of need, regardless of legal or socioeconomic status.

So whatever my Dr. “Surname” suggests (or doesn’t), perhaps I should be called Veronica.  Because the most important testimony to my title will be my actions, and for that, I never needed a name.

http://news.uci.edu/features/international-man-of-medicine/

Keep it short, Happy Thursday,
V