“You’re Hispanic?” My friend looked me up and down, a dubious look on her face. “Seriously?” Even after answering yes to her question, she still didn’t believe me—until I showed her a picture of my family.
The fact that my aunts and Grandpa were smiling at the camera did not matter to my friend. The fact that our arms were wrapped around each other in a gesture of love didn’t matter to her either. No. What mattered and stood out to her was how our skin colors looked different.
My grandpa’s skin color was the darkest of us all. My aunts’ skin colors were slightly lighter. My skin color was the lightest of them all. “Ohhh,” she said, “yeah, see now it makes sense.” She nodded her head, satisfied. But I wasn’t.
Why is it that every time I tell someone I am Hispanic they don’t believe me? I mean, sure, I look white. However, I look like my dad, who is white (my mom’s side of the family has the Hispanic ancestry). Does my white skin color make me less Hispanic? Does that mean I should not have put Hispanic/Latino on my college applications?
Until my friend had doubted my Hispanic family ancestry, I hadn’t given my racial background much thought. I knew we were Hispanic, however my family doesn’t really celebrate our culture. The most we celebrate our culture is with tamales at Christmas.
Confused as to why my family didn’t celebrate our Hispanic culture more, I decided to ask my mom about it. She told me that way back in the early 1960s, prejudice against Hispanics and other minorities were rampant. At the time of the early 1960s, the United States still had laws against interracial marriage. My grandpa was a recipient of the prejudicial views of the time and he did not want his kids subjected to it. The Hispanic dishes that were made with such flair and spice were replaced with hamburgers and meatloaf. The melodic sound of the Spanish language, which once flowed so freely and effortlessly from the lips of my grandpa, was replaced with the concise sounds of the English language.
Despite all these changes, there was one thing that my grandpa could not erase: his skin color. It was a part of him, yet it did not represent his entire identity. While his skin color identified him as Hispanic, my grandpa was also a father, a devoted Elvis fan and an entrepreneur. My grandma, a white German-American, was a mother, a cancer survivor and an occasional comedian.
For my grandparents, skin color was not an accurate representation of their identities. For them, it merely represented a small piece of who they were.
My mother, who is biracial, never felt less of a Hispanic for having slightly lighter skin than her father. She, like my grandparents, felt that skin color represented only a small piece of her identity. The rest of her identity, she felt, was determined by her actions.
Perhaps I should take these lessons from the past and apply them to my future. Through my grandparents, I learned that skin tone does not define an entire identity. Through my mother, I learned that race is based on what one identifies as, not necessarily what one looks like. And it is only through experience, that the rest of an identity can be formed.