Growing up, you feel like the whole world is just like your family. Coming from a town where the majority of the population was Hispanic, I thought the rest of the world was like this, that the world was like me. That September 16 was probably the biggest party to celebrate and the biggest parade to see in town. Mother’s Day was always on May 10, no matter what day of the week it falls on. And that on December 19, everyone went to church to sing to the La Virgin De Guadalupe. I thought that the world and all the other families did what my family did, ate what my family ate, wore what my family wore and even looked the way my family looked.
Once you start school, you notice that some kids do not look like you. Some are really tall while others are really short; some have straight hair while others have really curly hair, and some have really pale skin while others are really dark. All of a sudden, I started becoming the person that didn't look like everyone else. The notion of being different didn't really hit me until I started college, and I walked into my first class to see that I was the only minority in there. This continued to get worse when a professor would specifically ask me a question because he thought that my views would be different because I was different.
Another professor told me that I was white enough because my ethnicity was the closest to it. When receiving a paper back, a professor looked me in the eye and told me how surprised he was that my paper was good while a different professor told me that they expected more ideas from me than the rest of the class because my background was different. It was normal for my peers to ask me to say something in Spanish, just to hear how I sounded. To be asked to eat a jalapeno to see if I could handle the heat. To hear jokes about my Hispanic food by saying that Taco Bell is the best Mexican restaurant in town. But the number one thing I heard was that I was really pale to be Mexican and that I could pass for being part Caucasian.
It became a regular thing to assume that I was different, that my views were different and my ideas should be different just because of the way I look. I came to the conclusion that this is my life, this is the life for a lot of minorities and that it wouldn't change anytime soon. That we will always be looked at differently than the rest of the world, but personally, I’m OK with that. I’m OK with having to work harder, to talk smarter and to act stronger in order to show that I’m just as good as anyone else. I’m tired of seeing others doubt my people by saying that we aren’t allowed to live the American Dream.
If we work just as hard as the person sitting next to us in class, then we also deserve the chance to be better. To show that we can be better for ourselves, for our families and for any other minority that thinks that they can’t make it. Every problem, every smart comment, every person that makes us feels like we aren’t as good as them, will see that we will and can be better than them. For now, we might just be a needle, but a stack of hay was also once just one single piece of hay.
