Up until the ninth grade, my ethnicity had been sort of a joke to me. I
had gone to a small private middle school that was primarily white and
because I looked the part I fit in. I made fun of the Mexican culture because
I could not identify with it. I didn't wear Ben Davis pants or wear a lot of
gel in my hair as most Hispanic kids I knew did. I grew up in a the nice part
of town, and my olive skin and green eyes never suggested that I should
observe a culture which played no role in my life. I could barely even speak
Spanish. It wasn't until I went to an urban public school that I began to
feel the pressures that came along with ethnicity and identity.
I was well into the second semester of my ninth grade, virtually
unchanged from my middle school days, when my race began to feel more
important to me. I was completing a homework assignment in my Strategies for
Success class while in the midst of two peers talking over my head. Their
names were Marcos and Paulo and over the course of the semester we had grown
to be rather close. They teased me sometimes about being "whitey" in an all
Latino classroom, but I had never taken them seriously. This one day Marcos
asked me something that still stings in my ears when I think about
itââ'¬Â¦
"Hey, Elena. Why do you hang out with so many white people?"
The question lingered in the air as I sat up in my chair. I could
feel my eyebrows crinkle up as I looked for answers somewhere on the face of
my desk.
" I don't know," I responded without confidence.
" Why don't you hang out with any white kids?"
It was really a rhetorical question, and Marcos didn't say anything
for a moment. The conversation didn't pick up again, so I went back to my
homework and Marcos returned to his conversation with Paulo.
At that moment I felt as if I had just been interrogated. Was Marcos
looking to attack me? What's wrong with the fact that I hang out with white
kids? I am more white than Mexican, yet if I want to be considered Mexican at
all I have to stop hanging out with white kids? Point blank I hang out with
people that I share things in common with. If they happen to be white, am I
disgracing a culture that I don't even subscribe to? Have I sold myself out?
Am I only Mexican on paper? In a school that is racially segregated these
questions really mattered. Suddenly I felt as if I didn't belong anywhere and
that no matter what I did I would be defying some aspect of my past.
I still don't know how to answer all of these questions. It has been
a long time since the ninth grade. In my school, race defines what one wears,
where one hangs out and with whom. I haven't changed the people that I hang
out with because I don't think that race and culture are one in the same nor
do I think that those things should ever set limits as to who it is
acceptable to spend time with. One thing I have learned since the ninth grade
is that my culture is unique to myself, regardless of my race. What I believe
and what I experience in my life create who I am and that makes me different
from everyone else. Although I do believe that race influences what one will
experience and therefor what she believes it should never set standards for
someone's behavior. I live in San Francisco, which is one of the most
beautifully diverse places in the world. If I accede to only one of these
cultures, I am only limiting myself. Since the ninth grade I have grown to
understand that being biracial, I will never truly relate to one culture over
another, and that I will have to create my identity from scratch without set
cultural understandings or knowing exactly where I fit in.
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