Seeking Identity
PROLOGUE
My first language is Spanish. I grew up as an ESL student—though that term feels distant now, almost archaic. Over time, I’ve lost the confidence to speak it fully. My family teases me about it; the jabs are minor, more annoying than painful. But they carry a reminder: a reminder of a language I once knew effortlessly, a culture I once inhabited naturally, and a self I was expected to shape around others’ definitions.
I grew up in a time when cultural sacrifices were assumed. Speaking English well meant survival, opportunity, assimilation. To hold on to Spanish was seen as an indulgence, a barrier. The racial and cultural landscape today seems different, more accommodating—or at least, that’s how it appears on the surface. But the undercurrent remains: to exist fully, you must navigate the expectations of the dominant culture while negotiating your own.
Spanish doesn’t enter my daily speech. I use it with my parents, occasionally with strangers who require it. For 40 years, English has been my primary language. And yet, despite decades of practice, I’ve never felt fully understood in it. Words slip, meanings fracture, my intentions misread. There is always a gap between what I think and what I am able to convey.
Sometimes I imagine that if I spoke in Spanish, I might finally be heard. Perhaps my thoughts would arrive intact, unbroken, my ideas whole. But even then, I find myself fragmented. Language is only part of the equation; the other part is me—the experiences, the memories, the cultural negotiations that have shaped who I am. Ideas, like identity, are not always linear, not always coherent, and certainly not always contained neatly in any one language.
There’s a quiet grief in this realization, but also a strange liberation. I belong in both languages, and yet I do not belong fully in either. That tension—between heritage and assimilation, voice and understanding—has shaped the way I inhabit the world. I have learned to live with it, to speak as best I can, knowing that language is both a bridge and a barrier. My words may never be perfect, my ideas never entirely intact, but they exist. And in that existence, I find a measure of truth.
Seeking Identity
I’ve been thinking about finding a term that could frame my work—my films, comics, and writing. Chicano always felt a bit dated to me, even back in the ’90s when I was growing up. I’ve always appreciated the term for its historical weight—for what it meant to a generation that demanded recognition and dignity through art, protest, and presence. What came before me matters; it shaped the ground I stand on. But I never personally identified as Chicano. Perhaps it always felt too rooted in the activism and cultural energy of the ’60s and ’70s—vital, but of another era, bound to a moment that had already begun to fade by the time I was coming of age.
In recent days I’ve looked into other possibilities: Latinx, Xicanx, MexAm, Latinx-Local, Post-Chicano, Neo-Chicanx. Each carries its own politics, geography, and generational tone, but none quite feel like home. Even Post-Chicano, a relatively newer term, already feels outdated. The others seem to belong to a different conversation—important, but not entirely mine. I occupy a different timeline, shaped by migration, by media, by the long afterglow of the twentieth century.
I don’t know that I can invent a new label, but I keep searching—trying to find a language that might convey what I’m after, something that acknowledges history without being trapped by it. Something that recognizes that our sense of self—especially for those of us raised between cultures, between eras—is always provisional, always in motion.
Lately I’ve returned to Frantz Fanon, who wasn’t necessarily against labels, but was deeply critical of how colonialism and racism produce categories meant to fix people in place—what he called the zone of nonbeing. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon describes how colonial society imposes racial classifications (“Black,” “Negro,” “native,” etc.) that deny subjectivity. His goal wasn’t to erase difference, but to free people from definitions designed to dominate or dehumanize.
That idea resonates with me—the possibility of existing beyond inherited labels, without forgetting their histories. To live and make work from what Fanon might call the space of becoming—where memory, invention, and resistance coexist. My films, comics, and essays all emerge from that space. They’re not about rejecting identity but about reassembling it—piece by piece, story by story—until something truer begins to take shape.
What follows are a few reflections on Frantz Fanon, and on how his ideas might guide a process of reassembling identity in what I think of as the post-Chicano world—a space still shaped by history, but open to new forms of becoming.
1. Colonial Labels as Instruments of Power
Fanon saw racial and ethnic labels as tools of colonial domination. The colonizer defines the colonized — giving them names, histories, and roles that serve the colonial system. So while terms like “African” or “Caribbean” could have liberatory potential in an anti-colonial context, Fanon warned that if they were merely reactive labels, they could trap people within the same logic of classification that colonialism depended on.
“The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”
— Black Skin, White Masks
In other words, under racism, to be “Black” is not a neutral identity; it’s a position assigned within a hierarchy.
2. Humanism Beyond Race
Fanon envisioned a new humanism that would transcend racial categories — but not by pretending race doesn’t exist. He wanted to dismantle the structures that make race a determinant of value. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), he calls for a “new man” — a decolonized human subject not confined by the old binaries of Black/white, colonizer/colonized, or even nation-state identities.
So if we extend this to my question — labels like “Chicano,” “Mexican American,” “African American” — Fanon would likely say: these identities can be necessary in a historical moment of struggle (to assert dignity, solidarity, political agency), but they should not harden into permanent categories. The danger is when identity becomes an endpoint instead of a phase in a larger process of liberation.
3. Strategic vs. Essential Identity
To use Fanon’s terms, identity should be strategic, not essential. “Chicano,” for instance, emerged as a counter-identity— a way to reject assimilation and claim political subjecthood. Fanon would probably respect that. But he’d warn against allowing it to become another fixed essence (“the Chicano soul,” “the authentic Mexican American”) that limits the complexity of being.
1. Origin and Meaning
The phrase appears early in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where he describes the colonial world as structured by a violent ontological hierarchy. The white colonizer occupies the realm of “being” — full humanity, social recognition, and historical agency — while the colonized Black subject is cast into what Fanon calls “a zone of nonbeing.”
This is not merely a metaphor; it’s a description of how the colonial order annihilates the ontological status of the colonized person. In the eyes of the colonizer, the Black subject is not fully human but a shadow, an absence — someone who exists socially and materially, but whose existence is not recognized as legitimate or equal.
In Fanon’s words:
“In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. But it is a world that denies me every possibility of being…”
2. The Zone as Ontological and Spatial
The “zone of nonbeing” operates on two levels:
Ontological: It names the psychic and existential condition of being dehumanized — where one’s humanity is constantly negated, and identity is defined externally by systems of racial domination.
Spatial/Geopolitical: It prefigures what Fanon later expands in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — the colonial world as divided into compartments: the settler’s zone (of privilege, order, and recognition) and the native’s zone(of deprivation, violence, and invisibility).
In this sense, the “zone of nonbeing” is both a psychic and material geography: a site of exclusion where the colonized body is reduced to pure object, pure function.
3. Psychological Effects
Living within this zone produces profound alienation and double consciousness — similar to W.E.B. Du Bois’s formulation, but more violent. The colonized subject internalizes the white gaze and begins to view themselves as “less than,” seeking validation through mimicry of the colonizer.
Fanon describes this as an “epidermalization” of inferiority — the process by which racial hierarchy seeps beneath the skin and into the very structure of self-perception.
4. The Possibility of Emergence
Despite its bleakness, Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing” is not static. It’s also a site of potential revolt and rehumanization.
By recognizing one’s position in this zone — by confronting the violence of negation — the colonized subject can begin to reclaim being through revolutionary praxis.
This is central to Fanon’s humanism: liberation is not only political but ontological. It is about recovering the right to exist and define oneself.
Toward a Post-Chicano Consciousness: Fanon, Fluidity, and the Refusal of Fixity
Frantz Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks with a simple, devastating observation: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” With that line, Fanon captures the violence of naming—how colonialism invents the categories that come to define and contain the colonized. For Fanon, liberation begins with the refusal of those imposed identities. The goal is not to transcend race by denying it exists, but to reveal how race has been weaponized—to dismantle the machinery that makes “Black,” “native,” or “other” function as the architecture of control.
It is tempting to believe that once we reclaim a name, we are free. That to say Chicano is to overcome Mexican-American, to flip the insult, to make the margin the center. And in a sense, that’s true. The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 70s was a radical act of naming—it declared that people long erased by the binary of “American” or “foreigner” could author their own identity. But Fanon, ever the provocateur, would ask what happens next. What happens when a word forged in resistance becomes another category, another label through which we begin to police each other’s authenticity?
Identity as a Process, Not a Possession
Fanon believed identity was not a possession to be claimed but a process to be lived. “I am not a prisoner of history,” he wrote. “I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.” The revolutionary act, then, is not to fix identity but to keep it moving—to resist what he called “the epidermal schema,” that psychic sediment of colonialism that turns race into fate.
In that spirit, post-Chicano consciousness is not an erasure of the Chicano legacy but its evolution. It is a way of thinking beyond the fixity of inherited categories without forgetting their histories. It refuses the nostalgia of purity and instead embraces fluidity, hybridity, and motion—what Gloria Anzaldúa called “la conciencia de la mestiza.” But where Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness was about synthesis—bridging the split worlds of Mexican and American, masculine and feminine—the post-Chicano sensibility recognizes that even the act of bridging can ossify if it becomes a fixed narrative. The bridge must always be under construction.
From Liberation to Open Source
Fanon’s critique of racial essentialism parallels what in digital culture we might call open-source thinking: the belief that knowledge, identity, and creativity should remain mutable and accessible. Just as open-source software rejects the idea of proprietary ownership, Fanon rejects proprietary claims over identity. To be “of” a people, a place, a movement, should never mean being locked into its authorized version.
This is where the ethos of minor cinema and rasquache intersect with Fanon’s decolonial humanism. Both insist that cultural production is a living process, not a monument. The minor filmmaker—like Fanon’s decolonized subject—creates not from mastery but from necessity, improvisation, and contradiction. The rasquache aesthetic, born of scarcity and defiance, treats limitation as creative potential. It’s what Fanon meant when he called for a “new man,” a human being who invents themselves in the act of struggle, who makes art and life out of the fragments colonialism leaves behind.
The Danger of the Label
To be Chicano once meant to reject invisibility. But today, that same label can feel both too narrow and too loaded—bound to an era, a geography, a set of symbols that risk becoming museum pieces. Fanon would warn that every identity, once institutionalized, begins to mirror the structure it opposed. The name that once signified revolt can, in time, become a passport of belonging, a badge of legitimacy that divides insiders from outsiders.
That’s the paradox of all revolutionary identity work: what begins as freedom can harden into borders. Fanon’s project was to keep breaking those borders open. His humanism was not the liberal universalism of inclusion but a radical openness—a belief that once we recognize the historical construction of race, we can begin to remake ourselves beyond it.
Post-Chicano as Continuum
A post-Chicano framework doesn’t discard the word Chicano; it extends it into new temporalities. It understands identity as a continuum rather than a category. It holds memory and futurity in tension. In this sense, post-Chicano doesn’t mean “after” Chicano but through it: through its histories, contradictions, and cultural legacies toward something that cannot yet be fully named.
This approach also reclaims Fanon’s belief in invention. If colonialism was a system that named and fixed, decolonization must be a process that unfixes—that allows the subject to invent new modes of being. The post-Chicano artist, writer, or filmmaker does not seek purity but movement. They work, as in minor cinema, at the edge of visibility, remixing the archive, collapsing categories, and refusing the easy legibility demanded by both the market and the academy.
A Humanism from Below
What unites Fanon’s decolonial philosophy with the rasquache spirit is a shared commitment to a humanism from below—a belief that the human can only be rediscovered through struggle, through creative acts that emerge from the margins. For Fanon, this was the work of decolonization. For us, it might be the work of surviving within late capitalism’s gentrified, algorithmic reality. In either case, it requires what Fanon called a “new rhythm of being”—an insistence that identity remain in flux, always being rewritten, always subject to reinvention.
Epilogue: The Name as Open Source
Perhaps the label Chicano was never meant to be static. Maybe it was always open-source—a collective experiment in naming ourselves against invisibility. To think post-Chicano is to continue that experiment, to allow the code to evolve.
Fanon’s lesson still holds: liberation is not the victory of one identity over another, but the creation of conditions where naming itself no longer wounds. In that future, the task is not to abandon the name but to keep rewriting it, to make identity—like cinema, like art, like community—forever unfinished.
Zones of Nonbeing: Toward a Post-Chicano Geography
“The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks*
I. Shadows and Beginnings
When Frantz Fanon wrote of the zone of nonbeing, he was describing a space where the human ceases to exist as human—a suspended state between life and recognition. The colonized subject, in his formulation, lives as a body without ontology, a being reduced to its utility and difference. In that space, one’s existence is negated, unseen except through the gaze of those who define the world.
But Fanon’s “zone” is not only a product of colonial Africa or the French Antilles; it survives in the afterlives of empire—in migrant cities, borderlands, and working-class neighborhoods that reproduce colonial hierarchies through zoning, policing, and property lines. It is an existential condition that persists even after the flags have changed.
To inhabit the post-industrial peripheries of Los Angeles is to understand this intuitively. The freeways hum like border walls; the city’s skyline glows from a distance, but its radiance rarely reaches the neighborhoods that sustain it. The zone of nonbeing has not vanished—it has been rezoned.
II. South Gate, Pico-Union, Highland Park
The geography of the “post-Chicano” subject is one of inherited displacement. The journey from South Gate to Highland Park is not merely a commute—it is an ontological migration. In one space, you are invisible; in another, hypervisible. Somewhere between, you begin to sense that visibility itself is a form of control.
The Chicano movement once demanded presence, voice, visibility. But the post-Chicano condition begins after that visibility has been granted and commodified. The murals are now murals for tourists. The slogans are hashtags. What remains is a subtler violence: assimilation as disappearance.
Fanon might recognize this as a new iteration of the colonial dilemma. The subject seeks humanity within a system that has already defined humanity against them. The zone of nonbeing is no longer only a colonial frontier; it’s the neoliberal city itself, divided by rent, race, and representation.
You can own property in Highland Park and still feel exiled. You can teach at a university and still sense your invisibility at the faculty meeting. You can make films about your community and still be told they are too specific to travel. The colonial hierarchy has evolved—it now hides inside language, aesthetics, and access.
III. Rasquache Humanism
And yet, as Fanon reminds us, the zone of nonbeing is not pure void. It is also a site of potential—of new forms of being that emerge precisely because they have been excluded.
Here enters rasquache: the art of making do, of creating from what is discarded. To live rasquache is to refuse nonbeing through invention. It is Fanon’s humanism, rendered through the streets and backyards of Los Angeles. The broken camera becomes cinema; the borrowed venue becomes a gallery; the glitch becomes aesthetic.
This is what minor cinema enacts—a cinema of survival and assertion. It is not about representation in the conventional sense, but about re-inscribing existence into the frame. Each DIY film, each community screening, each digitized home video is a quiet act of ontological defiance.
The post-Chicano artist no longer asks for inclusion; they build parallel systems of meaning. Their work occupies the nonbeing zone not to escape it but to recode it—to transform it into a living archive of struggle and imagination.
IV. The Open Source Horizon
Open-source culture, in this context, becomes more than a technological metaphor; it becomes a philosophy of liberation. It rejects privatized authorship and gatekeeping in favor of shared making. Like Fanon’s call for a “new humanism,” it imagines a future built from the commons of the oppressed.
The temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) is its spatial expression: a gathering, a screening, a zine fair, a mural in progress—fleeting yet real. Each TAZ ruptures the logic of nonbeing by asserting presence on its own terms. In these moments, art ceases to be commodity and returns to being praxis: a way of existing in the world, together, if only briefly.
V. Mapping the Unseen City
To write, film, or remember from within Los Angeles’s forgotten geographies is to practice counter-cartography. You are mapping Fanon’s “zone” from the inside—redefining the coordinates of being.
A post-Chicano geography does not erase history; it expands it. It acknowledges the violence that built the city—the redlining, the industrial zoning, the erasure of working-class lives—and still insists on joy, presence, and creation. It turns survival into style, memory into theory.
In the end, Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing” becomes less a prison than a starting point. It reminds us that new humanisms are always born in the dark, at the edges of visibility. The artist’s task is not to flee that darkness but to illuminate it from within—to make the unseen shimmer, even if for a moment.
VI. Epilogue: Toward Being
To live and create in Los Angeles today is to live between worlds—the old barrio and the new café, the erased and the hyperbranded, the remembered and the forgotten. Fanon teaches us that the path to liberation is not through mimicry or approval but through becoming: through acts that reclaim our right to define what being means.
The post-Chicano subject, the minor filmmaker, the rasquache archivist—each is a builder of new ontologies. Out of the city’s margins, they craft small openings where life asserts itself, where the invisible becomes undeniable.
And in those fleeting moments—on a screen flickering in a borrowed community hall, or a blog post uploaded from a modest apartment—we glimpse what Fanon called the ultimate task:
“to make the world human.”