The Clash Of Identities: Am I A Traitor Of My Golden Skin?

It started with an off-hand comment from one of my best friends. She didn’t mean any harm by it and I laughed hysterically when it happened but it planted a seed in my brain. We were walking into a movie theater when she said,

“We’re gonna be the only white people in the theater!”

I stopped for a second to process what she had just said and had two immediate clashing thoughts. The first was, “Girl, are you blind? I’m brown.” and the other was, “Do you really see me as white? How should I feel about this? And what does that say about my personality?”

I give her a hard time about that moment from time to time (love you ❤) and I knew I wanted to write about it one day but I never really had a direction. That is, until Gina Rodriguez won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her new role in Jane The Virgin last night. I had heard rumblings of that show but I didn’t know what it was about. I immediately binged watched 5 episodes after the awards show and stayed up until 3:30am on a Sunday night watching them. The first thing I said after watching just the first episode was:

“Oh my gosh, that girl is me; that story is mine.”

I’m a first-generation American, born to immigrant parents from Mexico. My mother moved here when she was 14 and never looked back. She is driven, she is smart and she knew back then that she was destined for greater things than what Mexico could give her. So she scraped by working for McDonalds, graduating from high school and later earning her Associates Degree from community college. She started at the bottom of a healthcare company slowing climbing the rungs and ending up as a Director of said company. She was there for 17 years before choosing to resign when the company was bought out. It was time to move on; she didn’t know where to begin but if she was worried about her next step, she never let that feeling known to me.

In her pursuit of greatness, I saw very little of her. She would leave work before I went to school (but always gave me a kiss to start the day) and get home around 8pm when I had already buried myself in homework. And though I hardly saw her, she drilled her work ethic and instilled it in me.

But before I dive into that, I should note that I grew up speaking Spanish. My grandmother didn’t speak any English and because she was at home with us, that was naturally what I spoke. Around the time I was 4, my family realized that I needed to learn English before Kindergarten (I didn’t attend pre-school) and I needed to learn it fast. Hooked-On-Phonics became my best friend and I would spend hours and hours with my father trying to learn and understand this new language. Before I knew it, it was time to attend school but I was shy to speak for fear of saying the wrong thing in English — I didn’t really interact with any other children before this time and I constantly observed them teasing each other which further pushed me into the introvert closet. My social skills were close to none so I did the thing that came naturally to me: I didn’t speak and concentrated solely on the books and papers in front of me. It was also at this point that my mother realized that I needed to fully integrate myself into American society — or what I later came to realize geographically as ‘white suburban’ culture. She wanted me to assimilate and I dove headfirst into doing just that.

You see, my mother grew up telling me that my job was school. That was all I had and because of that, I’d better give 1000% of myself into doing the best that I could. That she came to this country for a better life for me and that she didn’t want me to waste my opportunities. From elementary school to freshman year of high school, anything below an A (yes, even an A-) was unacceptable. So I pushed myself academically (though because of the shyness, I was TERRIBLE at public speaking), physically and musically. I was to be the best at what I did and remain as competitive if not more so than the 90% Caucasian population in which I was raised with. I played competitive travel softball through high school before switching my extra-curricular priorities to music — by the end of my senior year, I was in 4 music groups and 5 AP classes. Wait, was I supposed to play into a stereotype? Because fuck that.

When it came time for applying to college, I had no idea what I was doing. Remember, I’m first-generation American which means that I was the first of my mother’s side of the family to go to college in America. I applied to the University of Notre Dame on a whim (that’s a long and entertaining story) and was invited to attend an all-expenses paid Diversity Weekend to explore what the campus had to offer. I saw many of the other diversity students struggling with culture shock in seeing so many Caucasian people on campus as they were coming from more minority-dominated neighborhoods. I stayed quiet — how was I going to come off if I said, ‘Wow, this is the most minorities I’ve seen in a long time…”

When I stepped onto campus my freshman year, I migrated to hanging out with “The Latinos” because naively I thought, ‘Okay, maybe they’ll be nice to me because I’m brown too and because we share a lot of the same cultural upbringings.’ It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I started to feel like a phony. I felt like I wasn’t ‘Latina’ enough for this group of people and I felt a lot of pressure to know about certain cultural norms. I found myself lying about what I knew or didn’t know, anything from popular songs to Latin American history. So instead of coming clean, I alienated myself from them and made friends through other clubs I was a part of. It’s something I’m sad I did but a lesson I’ve taken with me.

Here in New York City, when I go to a bodega and the owner speaks to me in Spanish, am I obligated to speak back in Spanish? What if I say the wrong thing? I’ve tried a social experiment here in various bodegas and pretended not to know Spanish in predominantly Latin areas — the reactions are ones of disbelief. I could hear them saying that my parents should be ashamed of themselves for not teaching me the language (I walk out chuckling and usually give myself away). In this case, I’m getting judged for being ‘too white’ of a Latina.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve experienced racism of being ‘too Latin.’ The summer before I started college at Notre Dame, I worked as a cashier for Macy’s. It was an easy way to make some extra money before heading to school so I thought nothing of it. I’m pleasant as fuck in retail situations and one day, I fell into a conversation with a Caucasian couple. The wife asked me where I went to school and when I mentioned I was working temporarily before heading to Notre Dame in the fall, she couldn’t believe me. ‘Are you sure you’re not talking about the high school?’ she asked. ‘Yes m’am, I’m sure. I just mentioned that I graduated from Tesoro,’ I replied. She quickly retorted, ‘No, but you can’t mean the university. That’s just not plausible.’ Her husband at this point was mortified that his wife was speaking this way to me but I plastered a grin on my face, closed out her transaction and told her to have a great day (her husband came back a minute later, profusely apologized and let out a ‘Go Irish!’ before they left). I let myself get upset for 5 minutes before I started to laugh. This woman didn’t have to believe me and only I knew how hard I had worked to get to that point. I was on my way to proving the haters wrong.

So where do I fall? Will I be perpetually straddling the Latina and American line?

What I love about Jane The Virgin is that both she and the actress that portrays her in real life, speak broken Spanish. She’ll be speaking and stop mid-sentence to say ‘Wait, how do you say that in Spanish again?’ then continue with her thoughts. She and her grandmother also do what my mother and I do — which is that she’ll speak to me solely in Spanish and I’ll speak to her solely in English, carrying on full conversations in grocery stores this way (we get a lot of amusing looks). Jane has her moments with her crazy familia but I love that the show is a fusion of the two cultures — of what Latin Americans are growing up with these days and how I grew up back in Southern California.

But dammit — I am Latina. I have beautiful golden skin (thanks natural tan!), I have awesome hips (and dat ass thooo), and I speak Spanish (I’m not fluent, a side-effect of my need to assimilate, but I can understand 99% of what is said to me). I’ve come to OWN the way I carry myself regardless of the way I look. But do I get self-conscious sometimes and feel like a traitor to my heritage in my own skin? Yes.

But you know what, I’m forging my own path and choosing to take pieces from both cultures to carry with me every day.