Neither Here Nor There

What happens when we live between two identities

“Why is your dad so dark?”, “Are you adopted?”, “Why don’t you and your siblings look the same?”, “You don’t look like your mom!”, “You don’t look like your dad!” These questions, among others as annoying and intrusive, were what I heard most of my childhood and what continue to be asked of me today. I am a child of mixed blood. My mother is a 5’10” blonde woman with green eyes and a stalky build. My other half of my genetic make-up comes from my father, who is a short Mexican man with a dark skin tone and dark brown, almost black, hair and eyes. I am some swirled vision of them both. Being this mix of two people from distinctly different ethnicities, I never belonged to any group. My racial identity and my perceived identity were always ambiguous and constantly fluid. I was always between two worlds, neither here nor there.

My ambiguous identity proved to be even more difficult when I began politically organizing in college. At first, I was very apprehensive to go into space for people of color because I was afraid of being looked at as only a white person who was taking up space in these closed spaces. However, I finally went when one of my other mixed friends ensured me it was my space too. I eventually mustered up enough courage to start attending groups for queer people of color. In these groups, queerness, race, class, and ableism were intertwined with one another. I wanted so badly to fall in love with a group of people, to find community with them. This turned out to not be the case. In these groups, there was a clear division of who was oppressed and who was an oppressor.

This dichotomy created a problem for me as I belonged to both the oppressed and the oppressor. I was both colonized and colonizer; my two identities in constant conflict with each another. I felt like I could never truly belong to spaces for people of color, but I could not just live life as a white person either. My two worlds were at odds, and I was stuck in the middle. I did not belong anywhere or to any struggle. I, instead, started looking for other mixed people; people who lived in the gray area, the in-between. It is with this group where I found my people. I came home to a place that did not even exist. This was a group of people who had to create a new language that described how

mixed people moved through the world and used these perspectives to create stronger organizing, art, zines, and so much more. People who had to create a new way to think about race because every narrative accessible did not fit.

While I struggled, I gained valuable insight about how my identities were not separate so that I could go back and forth between them, but instead two identities that exist at the same time. These two identities or multiple conflicting identities can create a new perceptive in which to view the world. This perspective was neither white nor that from a person of color, but instead something that was in-between.

Gloria Anzadula describes this way of thinking and knowledge as the mestiza consciousness. This is the idea of claiming the gray area between two worlds like I do. While undoubtedly the gray area is hard to navigate, at times it is an unclaimed canvas where new knowledge has an opportunity to be created.

While in my example I used my racial/ethnic identity, mestiza consciousness can be used by many people. Mestiza consciousness can be used for anyone who lies in the area that is neither here nor there. This can include people who are first generation or immigrants who are torn between their culture and assimilating into American culture. It can also refer to gender non-conforming individuals who flow from masculine to feminine or stay somewhere ambiguously in middle. Mestiza consciousness acknowledges the in-between.

I believe those of us torn between two worlds will be the way of the future because revolution and change have always been brought by those on the outside. There are so many dichotomies in organizing now. Protest movements are always stuck in the binary of oppressed versus oppressor or us versus them. It victimizes the oppressed without being critical of allowing the people organizing, who while being perceived as the oppressed, are perpetuating the role of oppressor. By looking at the gray area, where many of us live, it will give organizers an opportunity to break out of the ways they currently think about protest movements. The largest form of protest may be by claiming our own identities, those that give us the privilege and those that oppress us, and taking responsibility for them.