I wrote an article for my school newspaper publication’s magazine section about my experience being a native Spanish speaker but not being believed due to my skin tone. I don’t regret writing this piece, as I think it was done well and told a good story, but it was incomplete. Maybe incomplete isn’t even the right word. It was TOO complete. It wrapped up the story in a neat little bow about self love and all that good stuff you want to read about. But it’s too good to be true. I’m not settled in my understanding of the Spanish speaking world and my place within it. 

 

I wish I was happy with my current understanding. I wish I believed that I deserved to speak Spanish, a white colonial language by the way but that’s a whole different can of worms, and call myself Mexican without a care in the world. I don’t feel that way (at least not as I write this entry. It comes in waves). Spanish feels like yet another privilege I have rather than a connection to my ethnic past. My life is full of privilege, and yea I know typing that out is the douchiest thing a human can do but it’s true. I’m a white, straight man from the United States. I don’t have to worry if someone is following me around a store to keep tabs on me, or if people are made uncomfortable by my presence in a restaurant, or if the next movie I go to see will have someone in it  that looks like me. All those bases, and infinitely more, are always covered. I also have this little extra one: my ethnicity and language. The things that for other Latinos are the basis of strife and separation from the society around them for me are a little cherry on top of my “regular” life. I hate that. I want to just be Mexican. I want to not think about it. I don’t want to have to answer for it. I don’t want to have to create a whole project about how I feel and how it’s hard and whine to you through this screen about it. 

 

It’s a weird dichotomy. The privilege of belonging to a minority community but getting to hide away as if you didn’t. All this, while I actively try not to hide. Possibly in the corniest thought process ever, I have come to the conclusion that I have to reconcile these seemingly two different worlds and ways of living. That last sentence you just read, albeit true and a fair representation of what I feel, is disappointingly also the intro sentence to every bi-racial or bi-ethnic kid’s college entrance essay.