Güero is not just the title of this journal, it is also the nickname I have lived by my entire life when I am in Mexico. In my case it is a term of endearment, but I would not recommend you go around calling people this on your next trip to Cancun or Tulum, because coming from a stranger it is a bit strange to hear.

 

My grandfather, Papa Armando, has called me this since the day I was born. He always says that when he first saw me as a baby he was shocked by my green eyes and my fair skin, and that he told my mom it looked like I was from Monterrey (a part of Mexico that is substantially whiter than the rest of the country). My skin color and my identity were never at odds with each other growing up. Mexico is full of people that look like me, and sure in more touristy areas people try to speak to me in English at first, but the moment they hear my Spanish they realize I am just one of them in a lighter shade of paint.  The only time this separation of skin color from ethnicity comes into play is in the good ole USA, where race is somehow everything when we like to pretend that it is nothing.

 

Americans on the whole are seemingly totally ignorant of the fact that Mexico is in fact a country, and not a race. To be fair, why would they know that? All the Mexicans they ever knowingly interact with are brown and when they see Mexicans portrayed on TV they are also brown. Mexicans – much like Americans - come in all different types of colors and cannot be boiled down to one stereotypical appearance.

 

This project is an endeavor to reconcile my appearance with my identity as a Mexican American with a whole heap of other complexities thrown in. Each entry is just a tidbit about what I am thinking about or reflecting on at the time of its writing, and I don’t have this all figured out so there will almost certainly be some internal dissonance between the entries, but I guess that fits with what is going on in my head.

 

If I had grown up and lived exclusively in Mexico, I would wager this project never gets made. I would have no reason to ever think about my identity beyond the fact that I was Mexican with fair skin. However, that oversimplified fake world is simply that: fake. In reality, I grew up in the US and have to constantly explain to people that I am in fact Mexican while simultaneously being white and American. Even with this constant need for explanation and proving to people that I am Mexican by being tested on my Spanish abilities, I am not sure I would trade this life for the fantasy version where I was born in Mexico. I love being Mexican American and I love all the parts of my identity. America, for all its flaws, is home. Mexico may be a cultural home, and I can definitely see myself living there at some point in my life, but America will always be home. What I don’t love, is when other people call the different parts of my identity into question and say that they don’t fit together, because then I inevitably also call them into question and start to think they don’t fit together, when in reality I am living proof that they do.