Ethnicity and Race; Why can’t I embrace both?
By Savanah Silva
Being Puerto Rican is the only thing I understood growing up. My mom is from San Juan so I was only exposed to that culture which was completely different to the one I was growing up in in San Antonio.
The infamous act of bubbling in your race has been instilled into school children for decades. There are usually four or five different races for a child to pick, however most already know what they identify as. It’s the simple idea of am I white, brown, black or other? My dilemma was, and has continued to be, that I don’t recognize as what I bubbled. I categorize myself as my ethnicity more than what my appearance gives. People shouldn’t have to choose between one or the other but rather learn to embrace both.
I was surrounded by Mexican Americans in San Antonio. I went to a high school where blacks and Mexicans were almost the majority over my white classmates. I grew up with the disrespectful comments that “all the brown kids had illegal parents.” The negative connotation that went with being brown was even prominent in my family. My mother never allowed us to say we were Mexican nor did she like us saying we were Hispanic. The answer was always that we were Puerto Rican. Unfortunately, state exams didn’t care much what my home life was teaching me to embrace, rather it cared about what society saw me as and that was a brown person in the southern part of Texas which simply translated into a Mexican.
9.2 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population is of Puerto Rican descent according to a study done by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, making it the “second largest Hispanic population,”(Jouralistsresource, Puerto Rican in the United States). 52 percent of Puerto Ricans who come to the mainland settle in the Northeast, with 23 percent of the population concentrated in the New York. With such different biases in different regions of the country, it isn’t a surprise that if I lived in New York no one would bat an eye to me claiming my Puerto Rican heritage considering they have the highest percentage of them. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, “people of Mexican origin make up 91.3 percent of San Antonio’s Hispanic population. Making up the rest are Puerto Ricans, with 1.5 percent of the local Hispanic population…” (San Antonio Express News, 2011). Looking back on it, it makes sense why my teachers, classmates and society in San Antonio wanted me to be Mexican. It’s really all they understood. Which is why I couldn’t grasp why they didn’t understand what I saw myself as.
The court case of Gonzalez v. Hispanics United illustrates biases between Hispanics extremely well. In the case, the plaintiff of Monica Licea-Castro sues Hispanic United after she claimed the company denied her request of a promotion and gave it to a Puerto Rican colleague with lack of experience over her simply because she was Cuban. The courts now have to deal with a case that is claiming racial discrimination but both parties are technically of the same race. The issue is they are different ethnicities and this matters and is noticed, but only by the two parties involved. “The fact that both parties are of Hispanic origin is irrelevant,” said Heather A. Giambra, head of the Erie County Bar Association’s Labor Law Committee. Who gets to decide relevancy?
With so many different ideas of what it means to be Hispanic, who gets to tell me that I must claim Mexican or Hispanic and not what I really am? Why can’t I claim Puerto Rican? The true definition of race according to Dictionary.com is “a group of persons related by common descent or heredity,”. Ethnicity is described as “a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like,” (Dictionary.com).
Throughout college I’ve considered the idea that maybe I’m the one putting myself in a box. That I’m the one not embracing both. That could be the case and I’m slowly acknowledging that. I was taught to be proud of where I’m from and to correct others when they called me something else. Ask any Mexican American if there is a difference between them and a Puerto Rican and a majority will say yes immediately. Though the same language is spoken, different values and traditions are practiced. Throughout my years in grade school I can remember feeling as though society didn’t want to accept that there were other races outside of the typical Mexican race.
The New York Times wrote a story over 10 years ago about the issue going on in East Harlem between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. Both ethnicities had stereotypes of each other, causing tension in the neighborhood. Shockingly, a decade later I still find myself struggling with the same Mexican stereotypes. I catch myself thinking Mexicans must be illegals and have low education values, when in reality those are statistics I learned growing up with no actual value to them.
Embracing both the fact that I am both Puerto Rican and of Hispanic decent is something that I have to work on myself. Not society. I have to want to embrace both instead of putting myself in a box that fits how I want society to perceive me. Social norms are slowly progressing. People will perceive me how I want them to. I can walk in a room and say I’m Puerto Rican all I want but what’s going to truly matter is how I embrace what I’m saying. Take down the wall of race and ethnicity and start seeing them as equal terms and society will learn to embrace both for what they are, which in simple terms, is an in-depth of a person.
Source List
http://www.mysanantonio.com/sacultura/conexion/article/Hispanics-in-San-Antonio-2192950.php
