There are stereotypes and then there are stereotypes

I was joking with Cindy awhile ago that there should be a Latino Graduate Students organization and we would wear T Shirts that said "Now I think I'm all bad". This is based off the joke by George Lopez that Latinos are never happy for anyone and instead of congratulation cards there should be "And now you think you're all bad" cards. I found this joke to be hilarious b/c if anyone in my family got too big of a head (My cousin Jr) there were always jokes to bring them down to earth.
It doesn't mean we're not proud when one of our cousins achieves, but when they achieve and think they did it on their own we can get a little snarky. My family is very community oriented. We all work hard and do everything we can for each other. No one in my family has ever done anything on their own. I like this. I think it keeps me real. One of the things I see a lot of wealthy people do is think they owe their success solely to their own efforts. They forget about their mom who helped them with homework or whatever. So when a cousin says "look at this award I won all by myself" I think a "So you think you're all bad now" is appropriate. When I graduate from law school I know it's b/c of a family network supporting me. I'm part of a group of people who are phenomenally successful and pushed and supported me. One person couldn't say all the novenas it took for me to pass Prop Trans.
There is one slight down side to this. I'm embarrassed to ever admit that I have done something right or deserve anything. I'm always just lucky to be around smart people and it rubbed off or I got a sprinkle of their talent.
This weekend I got invited to an event with a fairly important person in the legal community. It honestly wasn't b/c I deserved it, but b/c a friend intervened on my behalf. There's an argument to be made that the friend wouldn't have intervened if I didn't deserve it, but I'm not going to go and think I'm all bad or anything.
A friend invited me to a BBQ at the same time as this event and I emailed that I couldn't go b/c I was supposed to do this other thing with the VIP. He emails me back "Good Job! Someday you'll be wearing the black dress and we'll call you 'Your Honor'". I immediately shot back "I think I was just mistaken for catering staff, they need a Mexicano to wash dishes."
Generally my friend would have emailed me a joke back, maybe he would have offered to lend me his leaf blower. Instead he emails me that he was at a client's house the other day and the client thought that he and his supervising attorney, who is Lebanese and not Latino, were there to clean the house.
The self deprecating humor didn't seem that funny anymore and keeping my place seemed a lot harder. When Latinos move out into a culture that generally doesn't recognize the holistic contributions of the community there seems to be a greater chance that humility, or even false humility as in my case, can be mistake as incompetence. This has an impact on the way that affirmative action programs are viewed. What happens when a white person hears a couple of Latinos saying that they aren't so great or that they just got lucky in getting a job or a slot at a school? Won't the white person assume that the reason the Latinos got their slots was b/c of affirmative action and not b/c they were qualified. I'm almost certain that what won't occur to the white person is that the family of the Latino student would perceive him as ungrateful or arrogant if he acted like he deserved the slot and had no help from anyone else.