|
To Daniel's mostly Latino and black students, the faces of Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez on the wall are as familiar as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln -- absent in this classroom -- are to other American kids.
While students gulp down high-energy snacks in the cafeteria, Daniel works silently in the classroom; when they run to the playground for recess, he prays without missing a beat in the rhythm of his recitations.
By the end of the school day, Daniel's cheek presses against his ungraded papers as he takes an involuntary nap. It's three hours till dinner.
Family and Faith
With a veil on her hair and a brown baby with curly black hair on her hip, Daniel's Jamaican wife, Roxanne, is busy preparing the meal. After shocking his relatives with his conversion, he shocked them again less than four years later by marrying a black woman. Interracial marriages in the United States still account for fewer than 5 percent of all couples and, because of historically strained relations among blacks and Latinos, weddings between them are unusual.
Then again, so are Mexican Muslims -- or, for that matter, Jamaican Muslims.
Roxanne's mother was also just digesting her daughter's conversion to Islam;
now she, too, had to swallow the idea of her marrying a man she barely knew. "She didn't want to tell anyone," says Roxanne. "She was worried what everybody else was going to think."
Given the raised familial eyebrows, the couple held their wedding ceremony, not in a mosque or church but in a university hall and had both a pastor and an imam, each reading from their holy book.
The result was a little confusing for some guests. "I didn't know what was going on," comments Daniel's teaching colleague Lilian Guerra.
Like her, Stockton's mostly white and Latino residents have had few dealings with Islam. Even though veiled women have strolled down supermarket aisles for years, Stocktonians still stare. On a trip to Safeway, Daniel and Roxanne seem immune to the glares as they buy supplies for Iftar, a gathering to break the Ramadan fast. Roxanne and some Muslim friends take turns hosting such dinner parties; this week it's at her house. As soon as they get home, she sets big pots and pans over the stove to prepare a dish that would never be served in Mecca -- chicken curry with coconut milk, a recipe from her mother, with fried plantains, a Jamaican staple.
As the sun goes down, she has the crispy plantain fritters frying in oil, scenting a house that fills with hungry women, who arrive bringing different pieces of the culinary geography of Muslim Stockton. Nagat, the daughter of a Mexican American and a Yemenite, brings a platter of chile con carne; a woman of Indian descent who was born in South Africa carries in packets of puffed bread. The dishes sit alongside Somali spaghetti and defrosted fish sticks, baklavas and chocolate cake.
The veiled women talk loudly, joking and laughing about fashion, politics and marriage. "People have all these preconceived notions," says Roxanne. "They think, 'Her husband is making her wear the scarf and stay at home,' (that) you're uneducated, oppressed..."
Self-confident and assertive, her personality sparkles in her hand gestures and her black round eyes, which open wide every time she wants to make a point.
Yet for all her self-assurance, she kept herself locked inside her house in the days after Sept. 11, when, as she was driving in full Muslim garb, someone in a speeding car yelled, "Go home!"
So she did.
"I thought it was cowardly that they didn't say it to my face. They were going so fast I couldn't even see the car."
Even before the attacks, Roxanne did not venture much into the outside world. She sells a line of cleaning products by phone and computer and takes care of her little girls. Islam teaches that if you raise three daughters as good Muslims, heaven is guaranteed. Daniel only has two but he has already taught Sahala, his eldest, to say Bismilah, in the name of God, every time they travel somewhere by car. But Sahala, who is only 2 years old, does not know that the Arabic proverbs hanging in her living room and the Christmas tree she sees at a conference her parents attended with her recently belong to different worlds. She only knows that she likes the lights and shiny spheres on the tree.
Putting the pieces together
In many ways, the Dentons live the two-car suburban dream. Their daughters keep a normal toddler quota of colorful toys, from play kitchens to dolls, in their room, and the television set anchors the living room.
But Daniel faces the additional challenge of incorporating his identity, a credo made of pieces of political philosophies, religions, national sentiments and consumer patterns, into the American dream, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that came with no picture on the box and a collection of mismatched pieces.
After years of study, he has found in the Aztec calendar connections between Mexico's indigenous past and Islam. The Aztecs used the calendar, a 25- ton basaltic stone believed to have been sculpted in 1479, to keep track of their agricultural and religious cycles. Into the elaborate carvings of jaguars, crocodiles and sacrificial knives, Daniel has read the coming of Islam to Aztec lands, focusing on Quetzalcoatl, a plumed serpent God who promised to return from the land of the sun wearing a beard and a robe -- the very image of Muslims.
In a manila folder, he collects evidence proving Islam is the natural course of spiritual life in Mexico: historical facts, mathematical equations and a stack of colored acetates of Mesoamerican figurines, including one depicting a kneeling woman, resting her hands on her thighs. "To a Muslim, it's a woman in prayer," he says.
Such archaeological artifacts portray the people who, Daniel believes, were awaiting Quetzalcoatl, but received the conquistadors instead.
"Were the Spanish the Quetzalcoatl?" he asks. "No, not by a long shot."
"Were they the beautiful brother that came from the land of the sun?" he adds passionately. "Again, I'm going to tell you no."
"Islam is our tradition as Latinos, Chicanos, Mexicanos, people from Latin America -- we are part of this, this is part of us," he says. "Peace and justice -- that is what we want as Latinos. Islam presents this as an option."
Last summer Daniel and his family packed their sarapes and Koranic scriptures, and moved to San Diego, where his mother lives. This way his two daughters can spend time with their grandmother and learn Spanish from her. The climate is also better, says Daniel. Although he refers to Southern California's sun, he means the religious environment, too. Here the Dentons have found a Muslim community where they fit in better.
"Everyone we know is a convert. They all have families of a different religion, we're all going through the same things," he says. Daniel has also found a job where his search for a new grounding force is likely to reemerge: He teaches newly arrived Mexican children.
|