Let’s be real here: sometimes I have no idea who I am. How many college freshmen do? Half the time I think I’m a delicate, emotional flower; but when I lift a box of my boyfriend’s tools and he admiringly compliments my strength, pride floods my heart, and I remember that independence and toughness is also important to me. My passion for children and love for working with elementary school students is juxtaposed with a deep-rooted instinct to lock myself in an isolated library and never interact with people again. I yearn to finish a novel, yet I can’t bring myself to write anything longer than five chapters.
Likewise, I can’t figure out if I’m Hispanic or Caucasian.
Last week, a girl commented on the “whiteness” of my roommates and me. We looked at each other, somewhat amused, and explained that only two of the six of us were actually Caucasian. She stared at me with unmasked surprise and asked, “Then, what are you?”
“I’m half-Mexican,” I told her.
“Well, what else are you?” she pressed, her tone suggesting that I must be withholding some very important information.
“German and Italian,” I replied.
She allowed a soft laugh to escape. “You’re white,” she declared.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes; I tried to swallow the hurt, the indignant defense that rose up in my mind. I didn’t know her well enough to start an argument; I neglected to point out that if I was half Hispanic, the rest of me was a quarter Italian, a quarter German, and how did twenty-five percent German turn the remaining seventy-five percent “white?”
This wasn’t a new occurrence, and truthfully, I used to enjoy the shock value. At Georgia Brown Elementary School, the dual-immersion school I attended through fifth grade, students were typically Hispanic or Caucasian, and it wasn’t hard to tell which was which. In my naïveté, I enjoyed surprising people. It was one of my favorite fun facts for “Two Truths and a Lie” (“My daddy was born in Mexico”), and my peers would look at me in confusion, and I’d explain. Towards the beginning of high school, I distinctly remember a girl saying something funny in Spanish; I overheard and laughed. She turned to me with the same look of astonishment and asked if I spoke Spanish.
I do speak Spanish; my parents tried to speak only that to me until I was two years old. I knew sandía and luna before I learned them as “watermelon” and “moon.” My father’s family, which now consists of a surgery-ridden grandmother, nine aunts and uncles, and hordes of cousins whose ages range from two to 26, hosts chaotic Thanksgivings and Christmas Eve celebrations, the food an eclectic mix of Mexican and American (the mashed potatoes and stuffing can be found to the left of the platter of tamales and bowl of salsa). My grandparents, when both were alive, only spoke Spanish; the only way to really understand them was to know the language.
Now, though, I’m at a point where I feel like I don’t have a right to own the Hispanic portion of myself. First, I grew up, got over myself and realized that I wasn’t unique—just because there were few people in my early years that looked “white” but identified as Mexican, it did not mean there weren’t others. Then, when people assumed I was white, correcting them became a chore. It was embarrassing, and, in some cases, like the one I shared above, frustrating. I began to overanalyze: they’ll see me as a poser; because of my fair coloring, I won’t be taken seriously if I choose to join Latina-based clubs or organizations; I am a National Hispanic Merit Scholar, but does it count when my eyes are blue and my skin is white?
If there’s anything my Ethnic Studies class has taught me this quarter, it’s that categorization is a part of life. When we see someone, our first instinct is to place them into some sort of classification, be it gender, ethnicity or class standing. We can’t call the classifications the problem, because they seem inevitable. The problem manifests in the ignorance that occurs when people are unwilling to shove these first impressions aside and open their minds.
I don’t know how to solve this, and I don’t know how to change it. However, I do know this: when it comes to heritage, we shouldn’t need to explain ourselves. We shouldn’t fear judgment when we identify with a culture that doesn’t fit with our social identifiers.