By Marley Cruise
It’s a question I’ve been asked in various different forms for most of my life. However, it wasn’t until high school that I asked myself that question.
Before then it was an easy: “a quarter Mexican.” People would say cool or neat and the conversation would move on. One day it changed for me. The group I hung out with for most of middle school had claimed a picnic table outside of the cafeteria and the conversation somehow moved on to ancestry; my friends gave various answers such as “my family is Irish/ German/my great great great grandmother was Native American” Then someone asked me The Question: “Hey, aren’t you Mexican?” I nodded “Yep, a quarter.”
That should have been the extent of the conversation, but the girl sitting across from me rolled her eyes and said, “girl, shut up your white.” Everyone laughed and the conversation moved on. I stopped eating lunch with them three weeks later when one of the boys in that group informed me that I didn’t really have to worry about a certain dress code policy because I “didn’t have an ass anyway.” Body image is an issue for another day though.
To this day, I don’t know if it was said as a joke, in disbelief or because she thought I was lying; what I do know is that it has intrinsically changed the way I view my race, and myself.
This is because to put it plainly I look white. In the winter, when I’m covered head to toe in sweaters and scarves, I don’t look quite as ghostly as some of my friends, and though I tan incredibly easy at most I’ve been told I look Italian in the summer. I don’t speak Spanish or have an accent. In fact, I struggled to get a B in my high school Spanish classes. Because I live in constant fear of ever offending anyone, I question how much I deserve the label “Mexican.”
I can walk through life unscathed by the disenfranchisement and racial profiling many are not so lucky to escape. Still, did I not have to fight a language barrier when my great-grandmother, who spoke little to no English, came to live with my grandparents for the last years of her life?
Do I still not live for the one day every other year when my family gathers around my grandmother’s kitchen table to make tamales in an all-day affair?
Have I not listened to my mom and grandmother talk in Spanish to our extended family in El Paso, Texas my whole life?
How do I tell if I’m just a white girl claiming something that doesn’t belong to her?
Honestly, my relationship with my race is still on uncertain ground; I spent my senior year of high school uncertain of whether I should mark the little boxes on college and scholarship applications that marked me as Hispanic. When faced with the question “what are you” I prefaced my answer with “well, I’m mostly white”. That being said, I make no other statement with this article than to reach out to the other girls, who like me, are hyper-aware of their own ambiguousness and tell them that it is okay. You’re not alone. Take your time figuring out what you are. God knows I still am.