The 1619 Project & Me

Soy yo

My name is Beth Leyba. I am the mixed-race American daughter of a Chicano father of Spanish and indigenous descent, and a white mother of European descent. Soy mestiza.

I have often said that I have always felt the conflict of colonization in my bones, as the descendant of both colonizers and colonized. I am light-skinned and therefore white passing, in many spaces and contexts, though not all. I have fielded the dreaded…