What's So Cool About Being Poor?
Story and Photo by Hector Gonzalez

I'm poor and I grew up poor. Being poor is more real to me than culture or nationality. Culture is always changing, and nationality is simply a border that divides people. My poor identity is the one I claim more than anything else.

When I was 6 years old I was on the bus with my dad to buy a Nintendo, after we made our purchase we rode the bus back to our house. Since I had only seen a Nintendo before, I thought that a Nintendo was for rich people, and turned to my dad and told my father in Spanish, “We're rich huh?” My father looked at me in the eyes and told me to never say that again.

The first time that I was able to have my own room was at the age of 18. It was when I moved out of my house and rented a two bedroom apartment with my friend. Before that, I spent years sharing a room with my father in a house that sheltered eleven people. I remember the feeling of hunger due to lack of funds. We would shop at the Goodwill for clothing and for years I rode the bus with my father because we didn't have a car. I've been working without a break since the age of 16, and when I graduated from high school my father advised me not to go to college and pursue a more realistic future, like a trade. Plus, he said, that there was no way that he could afford to pay for my education. The poor identity was so engraved in my family that my father didn't find it realistic for me to be anything but a member of the working class.

Now that I am five years from my high school graduation, I am fighting more than ever to not inherit the manual labor career that my father, uncles, aunts, and cousins carried with them after leaving El Salvador as refugees. We all were poor, and they were all hard workers.

Just like identities of race, ethnicity, or even tribe, the label of poor carries its own a rights' of passage. It is one that allows my friends and I to laugh at the times of our embarrassing moments in school because our outfits were bleached and stained or the times that our parents came to pick us up from school dances in beat up cars. My favorite one is when in seventh grade my dad came to pick me up in an old pick-up truck. The truck died right in front of my school and I had to help him push it. I wanted to die. It is the rights of passage that allows us to shed tears of sadness from the times that we were hungry with nothing to eat, or the times of loneliness because our parents didn't come home from work until 3 am in the morning. I remember waking up to a kiss in the cheek that my father would give me as his only offering for the day.

But it is the same rights of passage that allows us to shed tears of joy when we realize that we have the opportunity to not allow our offsprings to have this experience. My roommate Vanessa, who is a Mexicana-Filipina female whose parents and grandparents worked the fields of Stockton California, tells me that the most profound connections that she's made with people have been with people who have struggled growing up, who were poor. Not race, not music styles, not hobbies – money, or rather, the lack of. I couldn't agree with her more. I've realized that for me, when it comes to relationships, the importance of economic social status is more important than race or religion. I don't have too many friends who grew up well off. I've even walked away from relationships with girlfriends because I felt they were to well off for me.

But my poor identity embraces many more people than what it walks away from. Through my experience I am connected with many people across the world in a very intimate way, regardless if we speak the same language, or prey to the same God.   I've had deep conversations with people from almost all corners of the world when we share our testimonies of poverty. They tell me about the poverty in Cambodia, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Jamaica and I tell them about El Salvador, my place of birth were I lived during war times until the age of six. Pain unites people. We are products of war, starvation, disease.

Being that the title ‘poor' carries a rights of passage, there are many people that don't have the right to call themselves poor. I could compare it to, although in a different context, how a generation of black folks feels they have the right to call themselves “Nigga.” These generation is speaking to one, a reference to a point in history, and second, to a group of people that only they can truly understand because its their experience, just like being poor is an experience that only the people who experienced it can truly understand.        

As a community organizer, and a college student I hear people identify themselves as poor way too much. In college campuses everyone that is doing political organizing wants to front like they are the broke college student, knowing very well that their daddy's have a fat check books that they can run into when ever they need financial help. I hear many people; especially people of color feel that the oppression poor people live with is automatically bequeathed to them because they are people of color. The claim that people are oppressed in this country solely because they are brown is an exaggeration.   Perhaps this may have been the case at one point in the history of this country, but now a days it seems to be that Blacks, Latinos and some South East Asians groups could make such a claim, at least if we were talking about economics. Of course, there are always exceptions, but being that there wasn't any white people in my neighborhood, the most successful people that I knew where Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and Middle Eastern.

I even hear people from the Evergreen Hills, the luxurious side of San Jose, trying to claim the East Side culture which is the poor identity: one of working class families, taquerias, and where Spanish is sometimes more common than English.   No one wants to admit that they are privileged people.

I sometimes feel so irritated that it becomes funny when I hear some people romanticize about their poor stories, I chuckle and say to myself “homie, I've been to your house, you don't have to front”. What folks like this don't understand is that they are making a claim to an identity that carries hardships, hardships that are to be respected and honored. These hardships are what gives us our identity, the way we look at people, the way we talk, the scars on our bodies, the love for the hood'. We are the people that America has failed, and everyone else is trying to be like us!