When you meet me for the first time, you read me as if I were a book. Every idea you have about me and every word I say is part of that book.
When you look at me, you will think I am white. I already know this. When you shake my hand and meet me for the first time, you always already read me as white. You will hear me speak English without an accent and think I am white. You will hear or read my last name and think I am white. You read me wrong.
We all have crowded bookshelves in our heads crammed with texts for every person we know. They knock about in our skulls, falling off the shelves. We refer to them again and again, wearing the pages thin. When you read me wrong, everything that follows is askew.
I have strategies I use to tell you who I am. They have different rates of success, but I will employ them all whenever the situation allows. I mention my quinceañera. I tell the story of the first time my parents heard me speak English. I say words deliberately correctly in Spanish like guerrilla. I talk about Mexican music I like. I note that I am a bilingual Spanish speaker on my resume. I talk about Mexican movies I like. When I am with people, I answer phone calls from my mom and tell her I can’t talk, but I do it in Spanish. I keep her on the phone a little longer than I have to. Whenever the topic of family comes up, I say that most of mine lives in Mexico. I am prepared with these tactics when I have to tell you who I am, ready to fit them in between the pauses so that you might reread me. I’m better at it now than I used to be—I’ve been practicing a long time, figuring out the right words to say.
The author and her mother
My mother was born in Mexico City. She doesn’t know what her first word was. I was born in Culver City, California. My first language was Spanish, and I learned English at preschool. My first word was “agua,” but my parents don’t agree if that came before or after the first time I said my name. My skin is lighter than my mother’s and I don’t speak English with an accent like she does and my last name is not Mexican and I have an American dad. I have learned that if I want someone to read who I am, I have to tell them.
I know that the way I am read is privilege. When people look at me they read me as a white woman and when they look at my mother they read her as a Mexican woman. Even though she has a PhD, I have heard white people speak more loudly when they speak to her, like she can’t understand. I know I walk through doors every single day because I have white-passing privilege. I will notice some of them. I will fail to notice others. There will be so many doors in my life that they cannot be counted.
My mom says that my voice sounds different when I speak in Spanish. She says I sound nicer.
At a party, I am talking to a group of people about books. Junot Díaz is brought up. “I don’t like his work,” a white boy says, “It’s so annoying when writers get all caught up in their identity, you know?” “It’s so annoying when writers who aren’t white write about not being white, you know?” I think.
When I learn what sounds animals make, I learn them en Español. Baby chicks in Spanish say, “Pío pío pío,” cuando tienen hambre y cuando tienen frio. Breakfast at my house is huevos rancheros and a quesadilla. My mom wraps the quesadilla in a paper towel so I won’t burn my fingers on the hot cheese. I have tapes of Disney songs in Spanish and I carry around my red and white tape player to listen to them wherever I go. I watch Zoot Suit and Mi Vida Loca and Selena and Mi Familia and El Norte and La Bamba and Stand and Deliver after dinner. This is my childhood. This is the person I want you to read.
I also want you to see that in elementary school I am embarrassed that the apartment I live in doesn’t look like the houses of my white friends. I am embarrassed by sopa de fideo for dinner if my white friends come over or spend the night. I am embarrassed by serapes on the kitchen table and Frida Kahlo hung above the television. I am embarrassed by my mom’s accent. I don’t want to be different, and it is so easy for white people to think I am the same. They can’t even tell by looking at me or hearing me say my own name. But they can tell if they come over or meet my mom; I am reread alongside her.
I have never told anyone that the way English speakers pronounce my name is different than the way my name sounds when it comes out of my mother’s mouth. I’ve never corrected anyone. I suppose the first time I could have was my first day of school. How many days did it take before that was how I heard my own name, too? My name comes out of my mouth in English.
I want you to see that mi mamá taught me how to dance cumbia in our living room, that she took belly dancing classes when I was in elementary school and I was embarrassed about it because it wasn’t something any of my white friends’ mothers would do, that she played Alejandra Guzman and Maná and the Gipsy Kings in the nineties, that I still know all the dialogue in Zoot Suit by heart and Amores Perros still makes me cry, that I loved telenovelas, that I watched Como Agua Para Chocolate with her and she made me cover my eyes during the sex parts, that we always had sugar skulls and pan dulce and an altar for el Día de los Muertos and I poured out shots of tequila for my dead abuelos, that my comfort food is caldo do pollo con arroz and lots of cilantro and lime, that she was the first woman in her family to go to college, and when I was in college I took a year of Spanish literature and I called her and we talked about my papers and what I was reading, that she taught me how to ride a bike even though she didn’t know how to ride a bike, and taught me to drive ten years later, that my first words in English were “Don’t push me,” that I am so rarely read as Mexican or as a person of color that I forget that it feels so, so good when I am, like I could cry, like you really see me, like hearing my name in Spanish.
Sometimes, I am read without having to say anything at all. Sometimes I don’t have to try my strategies and tactics, figure out the right words to say. The times that I have been read right, from the very first moment, I have been with my mother. Seeing the two of us together, it’s so clear we are mother and daughter, the same eyes and laugh. The same. And when she is read, I am read alongside her.
Tags: dahlia grossman-heinze, family, identity, personal history, the butter
This made me cry because I have been there, I AM there. Trying to explain the complex emotions and weird guilt of being Latina but passing as white is virtually impossible for me, but you’ve done it so beautifully and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Oh, yes. I try to bring the Cuban thing up as often as I can, but people still assume. One of the reasons changing my name when I got married would have felt like an erasure of identity is that my Spanish last name is the only visible link with that part of my heritage. (If spouse’s surname had been, like, García or something, I might have considered it. Might have. At least people sort of know how to pronounce that…)
I cook my abuela’s food, I try conscientiously to remember some Spanish in a place where Swedish would be more mainstream, and I don’t want to lose that.
There are days where I really really wish I had a Spanish last name, just to ease things a little bit. My last name is Polish, so I get a lot of people saying “Oh, so you aren’t REALLY Latina then, you’re Eastern European.” It makes me FURIOUS.
I’m furious on your behalf that anyone says that to you. WTF? Like random people know your family history better than you do?
It gets so much more complicated when people find out you’re Jewish AND Latina. Like they’re mutually exclusive somehow. It’s a strange space to exist in. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to put it down in words, but it’s never come out the way I want it to.
Two ethnicities in one head?? No one can LIVE at that speed!!!!!
I am catching up on this thread now and had to share that this made me chuckle!
IT’S MADNESSSSSS
Have you read Susana Silverman Chavez?
I haven’t, but I’ll go look her up right now!
Check out Aurora Levins Morales, as well!
Right? Because no one understands patronymic naming? Like the time I got called into the counselor’s office after making National Latino Scholar and quizzed on my family tree while Felipe Castaneda just stood there embarrassed for me. He and I both spoke English at home; had light skin; made A- in Spanish 3; had one Mexican and one Gringo/a parent.
My last name, which is from my non-Jewish father, isn’t Polish in this case but is also a popular Polish last name, and because of that, people are like, “well, you’re not dark, and your surname is Eastern European, so you’re an Eastern European Jew, why bother with that Sephardic thing?” When I’m Eastern European AND a Jew, but not an Eastern European Jew.* And am most definitely Sephardic. It makes me RAAAGE. And also wish I had an obviously Sephardic surname so nobody would question it.
*I do have some Ashkenazic ancestry, but my relatives on the Jewish side are primarily self-hating, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, assimilated Israeli Sephardim, with let’s-just-do-it-and-not-talk-about-it Sephardic religious and cultural and culinary traditions.
I really enjoyed this piece, and found so many aspects of it spot on – if not the specifics, then definitely the sentiment. I am white, in an almost wholly Northern European mix that seems to have created some kind of pan-Germanic look, so anywhere I go north of about France most people think I’m a local. What I found really amazing was the way that the author captured that feeling, that moment where someone looks at you and assumes and reads you, and it’s just all wrong. I’m Jewish – Ashkenazi, unsurprisingly – but my dad’s Scottish, so I have a very Scottish surname and it seems immediately obvious to everyone that that’s what is going on. There are a number of subtle ways people have of talking to me that read my religion and my culture all wrong, because I don’t have a Jewish name or Jewish hair or nose or colouring, or whatever it is that people look for, and so I’ve developed a number of strategies to tell these people that’s who I am – just like the author. I suspect mine aren’t as well-developed, and it’s an interesting thought for me to take away – anything that stops me from having to explain, yet again, that no, actually, I’m not ‘just half-Jewish’, and I really would prefer not to be part of Secret Santa.
And, it may be a little late now, but I just want the author to know – you definitely aren’t the only girl whose mother took belly-dancing lessons while you were at school. I find it oddly comforting now that I’m older – I keep a CD of the music in my car, just in case I feel like listening 🙂
Oh man I know these feels. My mom’s of primarily English and Pennsylvania Dutch descent, and I look exactly like her except for blue eyes instead of green, so I get read as goyshe until I open my mouth. However, after years of studying Judaism and now living in Israel, my identity is impossible to mistake when I start talking (loud, interupt-y, and my speech is full of of Yiddish and Hebrew words). I like it better this way.
I have an Irish surname – actually my whole name is pretty damned Irish – which reflects my father’s paternal ancestry. I’m also Jewish. Mostly people roll with it, but they’re definitely often confused. I think my brother had a harder time of it – we moved just before he started high school and I started college, so we left our previous Jewish community behind, and my parents didn’t get involved in one after we moved. However, he went to a (secular) private high school that had a lot of Jewish kids, and he was often treated like an outsider until he reminded them that actually, yeah, he was Jewish, too (he cracked some joke one day and someone got upset, because it was the kind of joke you can only make if you’re a member of the group – but he is. BTW, everyone, our pale, redheaded coloring? Equally from the Ashkenazi Jewish side as the Irish/Italian side. We look just as “Jewish” as you do.)
I have taken to using my middle name (my mother’s maiden name) more and more, to try and make my name less white, but I guess I am SO UNBELIEVABLY WHITE that when I tell them my e-mail address some of them are like, “Taurus? Like the sign? Ha ha, I guess your parents like astrology!”
Me, too. I’m sending this to my sobrinas, who don’t have a Spanish last name, but are mexicanas in their hearts.
This is just amazing. Thank you for sharing this.
This is beautiful.
Your mom is so beautiful. What a lovely photo.
This was lovely. Thank you.
I am reading A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández right now and I think folks who like this piece will also like that book. It’s *quite* a toasty book, actually.
Just lovely and somewhat elegiac, too. I speak Spanish (a little) and not only do I sound nicer in Spanish, I AM nicer. Just my opinion, but American English is quite brutish comparatively.
“My mom says that my voice sounds different when I speak in Spanish. She says I sound nicer.”
That broke my heart but, man, do I get it. Thank you for this!
I have a tattoo in my mother’s native language, and I think that part of the reason I have it is because I want people to challenge me on it, to call me out for being another white girl with a Chinese tattoo, so I can tell them that I’m not. (And because, most of the time, *I* don’t feel like I have a “right” to it, and it’s easier to fight that doubt when it’s someone else expressing it.)
Gracias for this post! I read all of it with emotion watering my eyes, but with a smile plastered on my face. All of this, ALL of this, resonates with me. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your reflection on your racial identity as it relates to you, your parents and how society reads you.
“I have never told anyone that the way English speakers pronounce my name is different than the way my name sounds when it comes out of my mother’s mouth. I’ve never corrected anyone. I suppose the first time I could have was my first day of school.”
The first time I started introducing myself with my name pronounced in Spanish in an English-dominated setting was on my first day of graduate school. That’s how long it took me to own my name and ask for others to adapt to my name, and not my name to adapt to others.
Beautiful post!
this is awesome and spot-on. My family run every shade of the rainbow, and when you see us all together, it’s visible, but when I leave the Creole homeplace to, say, go to work, I’m white again. It’s so bizarre and tough to explain outside of the safe family nest, and you did so perfectly.
Thank you so, so much for this. The parts about feeling really seen, like hearing your name, and about being read alongside your mother got me good in the gut 🙂
I’m White Latina, with whatever indigenous ancestry I have being visible enough to mark me as also not White, and it’s special to know other people have the same questions and feelings that I have. Like, things that mark me as Latina feel so good, even though it means being read as inferior in the U.S.
Because race is constructed differently up and down the americas it took me a long, long while to parse out one-drop stuff from the you-simply-are-what-most-people-read-you-are. And that nationality and race are completely separate things. To acknowledge that “mestizo” or White indicate *cultures* too. I’ve felt anger, feelings it’s disingenuous for white Latinos to claim they’re people of color if they’re mostly white and are read as such. I’ve felt shame for not knowing where I fit.
Beyond race and the fact that there are of course hordes of white Latinos, it’s been strengthening to remember that Latina is a culture-ethnicity that’s immutable in me as a mixed race woman, regardless of how other latinos react when I fail at rolling my rr, or when I’m cornered and prodded as an exotic curiosity by white men.
Again, thank you for this candid piece.
very well-said!
That Cri-Cri reference made me laugh. The whole thing was great. I’m a white Mexican living in Mexico and the privilege is different but also very much present.
awesome article! i’m white, one of my roommates in college was mexican-american and bilingual. she would talk about her friends and pronounce their names one way and when i would meet her friends they would introduce themselves with an anglicized version of the name and i always thought it must feel strange to translate your own name for others like that. at that age i didn’t realize how much deeper it goes than just a name…
Wow, this is amazing. I am writing my MSW thesis on mixed people perceived as white, and interviewing a lot of them. You speak our words/truth! As the daughter of a Peruvian mother (who is and looks like a woman of color, and has an accent) and a white father, and as someone ALWAYS perceived as white, this article so so resonates with me. Thank you thank you thank you for writing it!
Your thesis sounds awesome!
What a great topic for a thesis.
I am a mixed race individual who is perceived as white and has been denied my mixed race identity. I would love to hear more about your thesis.
Thank you from someone else with one Latino parent, one white, who “passes” and sometimes benefits from it and never wants to do either.
Oh, goodness. My mom’s Argentinian and so much of my life has been different from yours but so much has been the same, too. I can’t think about the emotional baggage around how we pronounce our names too much or I’ll probably cry. All I can say is thank you so much for putting that into words in such a beautiful way.
Thank you for this. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that so completely captures the weird mix of guilt and anger and protectiveness and pride that comes with being mixed and white-passing. (And the occasional pleasant surprise, like the time my Korean expat co-worker noticed my middle name in our work’s email system and asked, tentatively and hopefully about it.)
This article made me cry. I’m Latina, but I can also pass for white (Mexican mother, white American father), but my mother died when I was very young, so I don’t even her around anymore, and so often, I feel like I have to defend my heritage–“No, I’m not kidding. I’m really Hispanic. Mexican, actually.” So many people think I’m joking, or that “Surely, you can’t be Mexican! You’re so light! Puerto Rican, maybe. Or maybe Cuban.”
I am White. I am a mom. 2 of my 3 children are Black. I imagine they are experiencing many of the things you described since assumptions are made about who they before its known they are in a White home and different assumptions are made once it is known. Same for me – alone or with them. I want to somehow “show” that I’m not part of an only White family, that on some level I “get it” but I know I never will fully “get it”. The main challenges for me in the 12 years since becoming a mom to a Black child hasn’t been people of color. It’s all been other White people telling me the things I’ve seen and learned and felt and experienced are not real or “that bad” or I’m “too sensitive”. I understand feeling somewhat crazy, schizophrenic and paranoid trying to live in or across cultures and races.
I can’t put into words how much this post meant to me. This has been my life. Thank you for writing such a beautiful piece, it truly means so much to me to know that others have lived this. We’re not alone in this weird identity crisis of having to explain to the world who we are, because they can’t see it.
*many hugs*
I’m Sephardic, which may or may not be the same thing, depending on whom you ask, but I’ve noticed that even some other Jews seem to have a problem wrapping their heads around the existence of a non-Yiddish-related, nonwhite Jewish identity. My name doesn’t reflect that part of my identity, and my appearance mostly doesn’t, so that makes it even less believable, apparently. ETA: This was a response to ppyajunebug.
Beautifully-written, powerful piece.
Thank you so much for writing this. I struggle with this every day, needing to figure out how to announce myself as Latina, to make my heritage known because it gets erased in the visual world, especially now that I live so far from my home community where my ethnic background is obvious to people. It’s very painful to feel so implicated in the political struggles of people of color but to feel like the term excludes you because of its emphasis on the visual condition of skin color, like you don’t have a right to participate. Passing undoubtedly comes with privileges, but it also comes at the expense of feeling like your heritage is being erased with each bit of distance that grows between you and the people or places that would otherwise allow you to be seen. Thank you again for speaking about this important and complicated experience! Very inspiring.
This. I know that passing comes with so many privileges, but it is also hard to feel like you have no right to claim important parts of your identity.
My dad is Argentinean, my mom is very white, so as a result, I’m pretty white. i never know what to call myself, usually white hispanic. but yeah, there are parts of this article that i definitely relate to. thank you for writing this.
I often wonder about how the death of a parent affects bi/multiracial children in atypical ways.
I’m South Asian and puerto rican (and the only inheritor of recessive white-passing genes in my family). I grew up very close to my father’s side and South Asian culture was all I knew, but since he’s passed and those connections have weakened in his absence, I’ve felt the need to “prove” it to people, even within the community I would ordinarily call my own. He was the anchor to my roots and always reinforced my identity, but now that he’s gone I almost feel like that part of me is becoming increasingly invalid.
So when I read this line, the truth of it made my heart swell:
“I am so rarely read as Mexican or as a person of color that I forget that it feels so, so good when I am, like I could cry, like you really see me, like hearing my name in Spanish.”
Thank you so much for this! I have so many of the same feelings. My tactics are not even this subtle, I will just say, “Well, I’m Mexican, so” in the middle of conversations, and then maybe, to try and explain myself, “Of course, my dad is super white.” My mother’s family has been in the States for a generation and a half, though, and her parents were so gung-ho about assimilating, so I feel even more disconnected. It’s like, no, I don’t speak great Spanish and I can’t roll my r’s, because I had to learn it in college; my grandfather wanted his kids to be American. We don’t eat that much Mexican food at home, because we’re all vegetarian and my grandma didn’t cook, she was getting her PhD. I grew up with fideo and tamales at Christmas and Senora Santana at bedtime, but then I moved to Boston as a kid and I love it so much here, but it made me feel even farther from that side of myself.
We’re the resident “whitinos” in the family, even though my cousins all speak less Spanish than I do and most of them married white dudes. But they still live in California and have slightly darker skin and are closer with our/their extended families. What I really hate is the class-based hierarchy of who is seen as the “most” Mexican in my family, not only by outsiders (though obviously that is fucked) but by the family itself — that my cousin who didn’t leave L.A., who did drugs and married a gang member, who had the most complicated family life and became born again has the most “cred,” and then we are seen as less and less Mexican as we move farther from L.A. (Orange County, Colorado, Boston) or as we pursue higher levels of education, PhD-having grandmother aside.
Ugh, this. I’m half Puerto Rican, half Irish American, and reaaal white. Freckles, pink cheeks, and all. I have a Puerto Rican last name, but people often read it as Italian. I even lived there for six years and had so many silent rages when children chanted “gringa!” at me. I felt guilty for so many years for getting mad about being mistaken for white, since it provides me with privilege, but it’s really maddening to have others define your identity for you. Like a former coworker filling out some form about our staff’s racial composition and said “You don’t identify as Hispanic, do you?” Uhh, ACTUALLY.
My Spanish is real rusty and I wish I were better at keeping up with it–my father, maddeningly, never spoke it to me as a child so I had to learn it in an academic context. I studied abroad in Chile, where a lot of people look like me–pale with dark eyes and dark hair. By the end of my time there, I was pretty close to fluent, and it brought me such joy to have cab drivers read me as a native. And now I’m married to a white man, and it makes me a little sad that our future children will be even further removed from the Puerto Rican identity. I’ll have to do my best to keep it alive. Platanos for all!
This article fails to address the fact that there are white Latinx, who though are from Latin America and whose family may have been there for generations are descended entirely (or close to it) from white people. Latinx isn’t a race and the author never tells us what her true race is. I don’t want to police identities, but we have to be very careful of claiming marginalized identities when we don’t actually live those experiences. Judging by the picture provided the author’s mother shows to me someone who pretty much looks like a white woman, which isn’t to say that she isn’t Latina or that she didn’t face discrimination, just that maybe it was based on xenophobia and not racism. There is a difference between being a white passing Latina whose parent(s) are visibly Brown or Black and being a white Latinx who because of the way latinidad is conceptualized in this country isn’t recognized as such.
I also take issue with the author expressing joy at being read as a person of color when for visible poc that means facing emotional and physical violence from a white supremacist society.
Celeste, I struggle with this because I know — as the author of this piece also expressed — that I have a lot of privilege as a light-skinned Latina who almost always passes for white (if people don’t know my name and where I’m from). But those of us who can’t quite claim person of color status because of this privilege still face that emotional violence. When people tell me, “don’t worry, you don’t look Mexican, you don’t sound Mexican, you’re smarter than Mexicans…” or when they share their racist sentiments because they assume I am all white, it wounds me in a way that is more deeply personal than when I encounter discrimination towards groups with which I do not identify. It’s emotional violence towards my family and towards almost everyone I grew up with. I feel joy when people recognize my Latina ethnicity because it IS part of who I am.
The issue here is if you are perceived as white then you are white. I’m Spanish Jew – neither are considered white – Spanish for a long time was considered a different race but it’s not now. I only realized and began to identify as white after adopting a Black child. That is when I realized that I am perceived as white and that mere fact is something that my son will never experience. I understand what it is like to be in a crowd and no one know your identity – I have heard antiSemitic jokes, cruel Spanish accents, and the like, but I don’t have an accent like my father did, I don’t have his olive complexion so I was white until I said otherwise.
It’s definitely true that the issue is what you are perceived to be, but if you are a Spanish Jew then you are not white passing you’re just white full stop. Spanish is white, whether your complexion is olive or not. If we are speaking about Jews from Europe than again that’s white. Historically both groups have at times excluded from whiteness, because of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, but they have both been absorbed into whiteness and are white.
Most immigrants regardless of where they’re from will face some type of xenophobia in this country, which is of course terrible, but if you’re white (as Spaniards are) that’s not racism and you should never call it such. They just like all white people have white privilege. Same goes for Jews, they experience tons of oppression to this day, but European descended Jews (of which I am half) need to own their whiteness and stop pretending as though anti-semitism cancels out their white privilege.
Yes, I’ve heard of a few thoroughly white Jews, generally of Polish/Russian/German sort of ancestry, who claim that Jews aren’t white *as an entire group*. Nonsense. Being Jewish does not predict your race, country of origin or skin colour. I’m ethnically Jewish and also white, as are most but not all Jews whom I’ve met. I knew a guy who was Jewish and a POC, with a public school English accent, and despite having a Jewish name, he was usually not read as Jewish and people were surprised to find out that he’s Israeli. People seem to expect Jews to be white, at least in the UK. About two thirds of the diaspora are Ashkenazi (of Eastern European origin, i.e. white), last I checked. Sephardi Jews are more likely to be POC, and also more likely to be discriminated against.
As for experiencing tons of oppression due to being Jewish, obviously some people still do, and there are still some attacks on synagogues and so forth, but in my experience it’s not all that huge. I am also female, LGBT, disabled, and that is far more of a deal in terms of oppression, especially being disabled. Yes, we always had security on the synagogue in a way churches don’t have to bother about, but I was never afraid to walk down the street wearing a kippa (skullcap), and I was never attacked or insulted for it. Now I am always using either a walking stick or a wheelchair, and I have had plenty of verbal abuse, some borderline physical situations, plus someone who tried to run us over and yelled “I’ll put you in a wheelchair!” to my partner. Not to mention not being able to get into buildings, someones not even being able to get down a street, and having restaurants hang up as soon as we ask about wheelchair access. So yes, it really pisses me off when people claim that being Jewish means you face constant oppression, because the people who say that are usually so privileged that they have no idea what real oppression is, and it’s outrageous to appropriate being a victim of racism.
Lovely article, and some aspects of it resonated with me in terms of growing up with Jewish culture. That too is complicated: I stopped attending synagogue when I realised that I was an atheist, and got a “does not compute” from the community. The cultural aspect of Judaism is considered so important that it’s meant to outweigh religious belief. This article really captures what it’s like to grow up with a very strong culture that’s different from that of the country you live in.
I am mixed race. I wouldn’t say I struggled with my racial identity. I am privileged in that I grew up in an environment when a significant minority of the kids around me were also mixed race. (Military bases are a bizarre translation of US culture.)
I married a white guy, despite my general misgivings, because I love him. Our daughter is phenotypically white. White from her dirty blonde hair down to her paler-than-pale skin. I don’t know what this means for her. What it meant for me to have a white mother is different than what it will mean for her to have a black one. I hold my breath, waiting for the questions, hoping that we have reached a point, we have chosen a community, where the questions will never come. And not knowing what I will say when they inevitably do.
I am mixed race. I wouldn't say I struggled with my racial identity. I am privileged in that I grew up in an environment when a significant minority of the kids around me were also mixed race. (Military bases are a bizarre translation of US culture.)
I married a white guy, despite my general misgivings, because I love him. Our daughter is phenotypically white. White from her dirty blonde hair down to her paler-than-pale skin. I don't know what this means for her. What it meant for me to have a white mother is different than what it will mean for her to have a black one. I hold my breath, waiting for the questions, hoping that we have reached a point, we have chosen a community, where the questions will never come. And not knowing what I will say when they inevitably do.
Thank you for this beautiful piece, Dahlia. I’m half Latina, almost always pass as white . This part moved me especially:
“…I am so rarely read as Mexican or as a person of color that I forget that it feels so, so good when I am, like I could cry, like you really see me, like hearing my name in Spanish.”
I am self-conscious about speaking Spanish because I do it so poorly. I pronounce my name like an American English speaker because of that and because — I don’t know — I feel like a poseur or something, this white girl trying to be Latina. But I feel exactly the way you described when people pronounce my name in Spanish.
I am more careful to pronounce my last name, with an “rr,” in Spanish. When I left New Mexico I briefly dropped the Spanish pronunciation because so many non-Latino people would change dramatically from cold and unfriendly to extra-nice when I did so. Then I realized the implications: that it isn’t just my name, but my family’s name — and I have no desire to detach from my family to please bigots.
Thank you for writing something that resonates with this particular identity struggle. It’s often hard to talk about because, yes, as someone mentioned above, it comes with privilege. Bringing it up puts us at risk of angering both sides — white people for claiming we’re different from them, people of color for claiming we’re similar to them — and that puts us right at the heart of the struggle, feeling like you don’t belong anywhere.
Thank you, you don’t read a whole lot about this because, I suspect, no one has much time for the poor white Latinos’s plight 😉 I recognize a lot of this in my own life (except the part about childhood embarrassment, because I wasn’t raised in the US). I’m from Puerto Rico, but my paternal grandfather was American so I have an English last name to go along with my English first name. I’ve also developed lots little “tells”, to show that my white skin and English name is deceiving when it comes to who I am. Mostly it’s because I don’t want my identity to get lost in the shuffle, but sometimes it’s a defense mechanism when I sense that the people I’m talking to might be about to go down an ill-advised path in the conversation. I even think that after all these years my accent in English is getting stronger, and it’s an unconscious result of trying to develop tells. I very much remember when I realized that passing as white absolutely granted me white privilege, and that it set me apart from most of my community. I have a 3 yr old son now and my husband is a white American; I can only wonder right now if he will also feel embarrassed about the Puerto Rican side of his life. I mean, I assume that will happen at some point, I just hope I handle it well.
I see your point, but perhaps her not mentioning her “true race” is a way of avoiding the identity policing you speak of. It may lead readers to oversimplify her experience and reduce it to a matter of black and white when it’s obviously more complex than society typically gives credit for, as the author expressed.
Also, given that it’s a very personal and reflective account of how her identity has developed as the white-passing daughter of a Mexican mother and American father, I’m not sure how the topic of white people in Latin America would fit in without detracting from the intimacy of the piece. At least that’s how I read it!
I love this post, it is everything I have always felt as an East Asian who passes for white, but has two brothers who do not. I do not care how I got the “good skin” because I am left out of so many situations and mocked for being white.
I love this post, it is everything I have always felt as an East Asian who passes for white, but has two brothers who do not. I do not care how I got the "good skin" because I am left out of so many situations and mocked for being white.
I love the article and agree with all the comments. I’m a Latina married to an Irish-American. I would prefer, however, to eliminate the term “white” vs “mexican”. Technically, white is not a race, it’s Caucasian and that includes a great variety of ethnic groups throughout the Americas. I see it more like cultural differences, my husband is Irish American, I’m a salvadorean.
I can relate. I am Arab American and “white” American but look mostly white. Some of my relatives look more white than I do, and then some others look less white. I am often am complimented on my “tan” which leads to uncomfortable conversations. Shortly after 9/11 I was in a college course girl when the girl sitting next to me said that she would not feel comfortable sitting on a plane next to someone who is Arab or Muslim. I wish you all could have seen the look on her face when it was my turn to speak. It honestly probably really scared her to realize that you really could not tell someone’s background just by looking at a them. Thanks for sharing this!
Fellow Arab American read as white here, and this absolutely resonated with me. And I’m now married to a white man which makes it even harder to read me.
To Dahlia (in my head I’m saying this the Arabic way), my husband thinks it’s hilarious that I’m teaching our son animal sounds in “Arabic”, where dogs “hawhaw” and cats “nawnaw” and birds “sawsaw”.
I am amazed by how many of the same strategies (in response to similar identity issues) I use…the deliberate pronunciation of words in Spanish, the sprinkling of heritage objects in my home. And yet, I also do not pronounce my own name in English when talking to English speakers. I feel like I betray myself every time. This is powerful, thank you!
I am amazed by how many of the same strategies (in response to similar identity issues) I use…the deliberate pronunciation of words in Spanish, the sprinkling of heritage objects in my home. And yet, I also do not pronounce my own name in English when talking to English speakers. I feel like I betray myself every time. This is powerful, thank you!
I’m a latina who does not pass as white, but my voice, accentless sure does. The thing you said about how to pronounce your name, definitely stuck a chord for me. My name was mispronounced since kindergartner and I allowed people to mispronounce my name up until my senior year in HS. Freshman year in college, I introduced myself with the correct pronunciation. When my name is pronounced correctly, I feel safe and understood.
Thank you for this. My daughter struggles with this every day. She hates constantly having to defend her identity.
I am an Iraqi-American and as a child growing up in white suburbia, I always felt my otherness. I hated my name and didn’t want other kids to meet my parents let alone know their names. I was ashamed that my parents had accents, that we spoke Arabic and that we ate foods that looked “gross”. All I wanted was to fit it, to go unnoticed as “other” or different.
Now as an adult – by appearance standards I fit in. I can pass as white and it is now that I realize the indoctrination of my youth growing up in this country. Never were my school leaders interested in my family’s culture, traditions or heritage. Never did a teacher stop to ask where my family was from after they repeatedly butchered the pronunciation of my name. Instead I was made to adopt the Anglo-friendly version of my name since it was easier for them to pronounce. Ashamedly it has taken a long time for me to value my heritage and to relearn the mother-tongue that I refused to speak for years. I now find myself eager to share the delicate aspects of my identity that I once buried so deep.
This post is everything. Thank you.
This post is everything. Thank you.