You’re Mexican and You Don’t Speak Spanish?

“White-boy.”

“Fake-ass Mexican.”

“Güero.”

Yeah, you’re right. My bad my parents didn’t speak Spanish in my house growing up. My bad I didn’t realize at the age of five that it was my responsibility to teach myself a new language. That’s my fault.

Same goes for the rest of us who didn’t:

“There’s a growing number of Hispanics who are U.S.-born and growing up in households where only English is spoken,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at Pew. Among those born in the U.S., 40 percent don’t speak Spanish at home.”

As if learning Spanish during adolescence required out of you any type of skill or hard work growing up. Stop it. It is a language, not a badge of honor.

Growing up I did not carry this badge. To this day I could never understand why this definition of “whiteness” had been placed on me, until I read Sarah Ahmed’s definition of whiteness as a “category of experience. ” She explains how it lives in the shadows of society, giving us a model of how we should judge ourselves and those around us. I realized it had lived with me my entire life.

I am not white. But I have been privileged. My parents provided for my family. I’ve always had a roof over my head. That’s not to say we haven’t struggled, for damn sure we have. But for me to sit here and not embrace and be proud of how blessed I’ve been would be disrespectful to those in my ancestry who have worked their bodies into the ground just to make an honest living in this country.

The problem is there are people who have twisted the definition of “real” Mexican. “Real” Mexicans know hardship they claim. “Real” Mexicans get their hands dirty. The way my dad did. And his dad before him; an immigrant from Jalisco who provided for a family of 13 before he passed away. My roots are from the very same soil of those who consider me a white-boy.

As, Zenia Avelar, a receptionist at Microsoft in Bellevue, WA, said when she visits family back in Mexico: “They think I’ve forgotten about my Mexican roots.”

So what are you doing by defining me as white for not being fluent in Spanish? You are limiting the potential of your own race. You are intentionally separating yourself from whiteness; intentionally separating yourself from “privilege.” I am all for taking pride in the blue collar origins of the Mexican culture; that is what my family came from, but by taking that stand you are limiting the potential of brown skin. Implying that it has no business living in the same comforts as white people.

As if having a nice house and speaking intellectually is “not for Mexicans.”

By criticizing someone for being “white-washed” you are bringing them down for getting ahead. How does that make sense? How does that push forward the culture of colored people in America? If a black man is born in the ghetto, but by blood, sweat and tears he makes it out and comes back in a suit, tie, and glasses he is considered fake. He is not “real” anymore.

The underlying reasoning here? Ahmed’s “whiteness,” lying in the background. Forever causing ethnic people to dissociate from white privilege.

It should be embraced. It should be strived for. People shouldn’t be put down for achieving success. Judge them on their character, their drive, not their clothes. Not the way they speak.

Because that drive is what gets a person to cross a border and build a home from the ground up on minimum wage. It’s what gets a person to leave the projects as a broke teenager but come back for their mama in a new car. It’s what gets parents through a boat ride across oceans to provide for children miles away back home. It’s how America became America. And I don’t know a better way to be show my Mexican pride than to keep being American. I owe that to my dad. I owe that to grandpa. It’s what they worked so hard for.