Both sides of my family are 10th generation Americans.

My dad’s a white guy from the Midwest whose ancestry traces to the mayflower and similar English colonies of puritans in the early 1600s, the majority of his side is German including Mennonites who came in the 1700 and 1800s with 10 (that I’ve counted) who fought in the revolutionary war for the patriots.

Numerous others fought for the Union during the Civil war, and for the United States in virtually every single conflict since, including a Medal of Honor recipient in WW1 and a Distinguished Service Cross receipent in WW2.

My Mexican american mother’s side is a mixture. Most were here prior to the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Her fathers side is of Central and Northern Mexican ancestry from the Baijo, they came to LA in the 1900s and 1910s, the last of them before 1930. They’re mostly criollos with some mestizo, native, and African ancestry.

My grandmothers side is Yaqui Indian on one end and Hispano and Tejano on the others. The Yaquis are natives who’ve been in Arizona and Sonora for thousands of years, many of them in my family left Sonora in the 1860s along with much of the tribe to wage guerrilla warfare in the Sierra and secretly work in the US as migrants in order to buy guns and ammo for rebellious tribe members waging war with Mexico up until the 1930s. I lost ancestors of my family to death squads, genocide, and slavery with the youngest victims of Porfiro Diaz’s ethnic cleansing campaigns being 10-14 year old children, siblings of my great grandmother.

The Tejanos go back to the mid 1600s, with the most recent sides on their line coming in the 1800s from Chihuahua and Nuevo León.

My Hispano side from northern New Mexico is mostly Spanish and Portuguese criollos with many sephardic jewish conversios and basques, along with some native Pueblo and genizaros, or detribalized native slaves. They came to New Mexico in 1598 and never left save for the rebellion of Popay in 1680.