For Mexican Americans, Castro is the real thing -- even without Spanish

Welcome to my lifelong therapy session. Mexican Americans are cursed by idiosyncrasies -- over nationality, culture, language.

It wasn't until my early 30s, while living in Dallas, that I got my head on straight. I met a beautiful girl from Guadalajara who went to college in Mexico and graduate school in the United States. While she could speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, she saw me as just another monolingual American. Then, one day, I had an interview on Spanish-language television. I opened my mouth and all these Spanish words came out. The girl was stunned, as if I had committed cultural fraud. Luckily, she married me anyway.

Why the charade? I was fed up with ethnic litmus tests. Attending college in New England, my fellow Mexican Americans and I majored in "Identity Crisis 101." We were mostly assimilated, light-skinned, monolingual English speakers who masked our own insecurities by poking at everyone else's.

That game gets old. Eventually, I rebelled by setting out to prove that one didn't have to speak Spanish to be a full-blooded Mexican American.

Here's what you need to know: This is a touchy subject for my tribe. So you all need to back off. If you want to insult us, make it over something else.

You can bet Castro, who I've known for nearly 20 years, is thinking the same thing right about now.

Despite a few scripted lines of Spanish now and then, my friend knows he doesn't speak it well. But, he also gets the irony.

Society told us to master English, and now criticizes us for not speaking Spanish. Our parents were punished for speaking Spanish, and now we get bashed if we only speak English. And, even as people like me -- and Castro -- get attacked for not speaking Spanish, there are videos circulating on social media of Latinos being attacked in public for speaking Spanish.

Still hung up over language, America needs counseling. I'll see if my therapist has any openings.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.