By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

The immigration surge into the Kansas City area has changed the way Monica Bustamante views life and herself.

The 50-year-old Kansas City, Kan., woman instructed her sons as her parents had taught her and her seven siblings: Be proud of who you are.

It helped them endure ongoing bigotry they faced as Mexican Americans born and raised in the U.S.

But one day one of her sons came home and said, “I don’t want to be Mexican anymore,” Bustamante recalled as we talked in her home amid many framed family pictures dating back generations.

“My youngest son sat me down and said, ‘Mom, you need to really open your eyes.’” She has, and the picture isn’t pretty.

It is one of a Hispanic community that is divided between well-established Latino families living here since the turn of the last century and thousands of newcomers.

To assimilate into mainstream America, Bustamante’s parents and others like them never taught their children Spanish. She didn’t insist that her sons learn it either.
But that has created problems. Newcomers tell them they’re not “true Mexicans” because they don’t speak Spanish.

They’re even called “coconuts” — brown on the outside and white on the inside.

At the same time, they face more “traditional” discrimination from whites. Bustamante recalled the difficulty her parents had moving into their Kansas City, Kan., home in 1965 as the first Mexican Americans on the block. She faced the same thing buying her home in 1995.

In 2005 at one of her son’s soccer games white people in the stands made racist comments when the victorious opposing team began singing in Spanish.

“I told them, ‘How could you say that?’It was just mean. They walked away muttering stuff under their breath.”

Bustamante confronted a friend in the group who responded that she had the right to say such things.

“I told her I don’t understand,” Bustamante said. “You’re talking about me.”

That friendship ended.

But discrimination among Latinos is harder to stomach. It’s new but just as hurtful.

Bustamante said that two Hispanic journalists she talked to wouldn’t tell the story. One reporter said Bustamante should be ashamed she didn’t know Spanish, and it was her duty to learn it.

“I said, why should I have to learn? I got off the phone and cried. He was so indignant.

Another reporter asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I don’t think the Hispanic community wants to acknowledge that there is a division like this, that there is a frustration from the ones who were born here and they don’t want to acknowledge how the new ones treat us.”

She now says proudly she is American of Mexican descent.

English is her native tongue, and when she is told to go back where she came from she acknowledges she’s already there.

The African-American community has faced similar divisions during the Great Migration of blacks from the South to factory jobs and cities in the North.

The language differences between the north and south were obvious.

In major cities nationwide, established black families — including my own — were accused of “talking white” and not being black enough. These problems persist today.

It has taught me that black people — just like whites — are not one monolithic community, speaking and thinking the same way. Neither are Latinas and Latinos like Bustamante.

Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The Star’s Editorial Board. To reach him, call (816) 234-4723 or send e-mail to .