I’m really white.
I mean, obviously I’m latina but I am a PNW girl. I am a straight product of White Culture™, and that because incredibly obvious to me these past couple weeks.
Most children of immigrants, even 2nd, 3rd generation children have felt a disconnect with their parents’ culture(s), as well as the culture of the place they’re being raised; we’re living indefinite borderlands.
I come from a shit-ass armpit of a town called Port Orchard (ask me about why I hate it!), where the majority of the friends I made were white. My brown family didn’t really befriend many other brown families, and it was always weird. I was the only one of my friends that 100% could not have boys over let alone sleep //inside// my house. I was the only one of my friends that christmases didn’t include copious amounts of electronics (I’ve never had a DS, for example) and that christmases lasted until January 6. My close family includes 30+ people, and eating at friends’ houses was always a bland struggle.
So I felt different, even from the people I trusted most like my friends and peers. I was different; my family had different traditions and values. Going to college and meeting other latinos coming from immigrant parents or 2nd generation families was the closest I ever felt to community, we were all brown kids who grew up in predominantly white communities going to a *really fucking white, like in all definitions of the word white* university, but we’re not like, perfectly brown you know.
At a club meeting for Latinx students I remember doing an exercise when we all shared some aspect about ourselves that made us “bad” Latinos. I said I don’t speak spanish. Someone else said they hate spicy food. Someone couldn’t roll their r’s. All minor offences really, but these things are things that really do separate us from our parent-cultures, something that has become ever so apparent while on this grant.
Being in Mexico, Im finally not a minority. I’m not the only person in class with my type of nose, my color skin, my big ass lips or shit-colored eyes. But, I don’t speak spanish. But, I have piercings. But, I dress too masculinely to blend into a culture that still has heavy-handed gender stereotypes. And then I went to Michoacan.
I met a lot of family, many Spanish being their only language, many never seeing a girl with any facial piercings or tattoos let alone as many as I have, many being uneducated. And it so very suddenly hit me, how I will never be able to say “I’m Mexican” without lying. My dad’s cousin had been deported, and hasn’t been able to go back to his family in the USA for 9 years. My aunt told me about how when her and my uncle were children, they walked when crossing the border with a Coyote, they almost died of dehydration and starvation. At the town’s festival my dad told me how most of the women here, between 15 and 25, so desperately want to have kids, so they can have a life.
And here I am.
A fat 20 year old who wrote 8 pages double spaced and convinced a panel of successful professors to give me 20k so i could live more than comfortably in a place where I can only somewhat appear to belong, while knowing, I really truly cannot belong here. And it’s simply because of two reasons: I’m too privileged and I’m disconnected enough from my parent-culture that some has been lost, I cannot get certain thing back no matter how much I may want it.
My dad loves Michoacan. He loves his motherland, in a way I really don’t understand. And it was so humbling, my father was so at peace while speaking his language, eating his food, coughing up the dust filled air.
And, to be frank, I felt ashamed. My father, and family in general, has sacrificed so much for their children, for me. And here I am, going back as leisurely as a human possibly can, to a place my family left. Here I am, with my 500 usd camera taking photos of a world I’ll never understand or fit into but can briefly pretend to, all while knowing I can leave this and take my sorry ass right the fuck back to starbucks with no worries. Take my sorry ass back to a university where I can get a stupid ass degree in fucking art and act like I know shit, like my family didn’t face unthinkable hardships i will literally never have to face or begin to comprehend just so I can have the choice to say “ya know I think I’d like to draw colorful women and write mediocre poetry for the rest of my life”.
So i think this eye-opener of my own child-safety-proofed bubble of bulshit I’ve been existing in is what made these past weeks so important to me. And you know what? I still don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Something inside of me has been ignited, what or why is not very clear yet. I just know I need to do something, not just for me.
--Claudia