The other day, I was told that I spoke English well. I smiled and didn't respond that it felt more comfortable in my mouth than my mother tongue. I didn't tell them that I speak it better, write it neater and read it better than Spanish. I'm often applauded for being so socially aware of America because of my obvious brown skin tone and Hispanic features. Usually when this happens, I laugh and I don't say that I understand America's politics better than Mexico's. I have often been told that it must have been difficult to be the child of immigrants, and I lie and don't explain that I am still fighting a fight that started the day my mother stepped her diligent foot in this country.

The truth is, when I was younger, I had to essentially rip out my own tongue and transplant a new one, one shaped for the round vowels and smoothness of English. I had to twist my tongue into something that struggled to wrap around the language that gave it birth, gave it voice. When in school, I wanted to claw out of my skin, as I was stuck learning a history that didn't really feel like mine in classrooms that were never really built for me. As I grew older, I wished for a history lesson that didn't transplant me here like a new organ, not quite similar enough to be accepted into the body of this country. I was clawing my way out of my skin long before I realized that it was myself I was fighting.

I was 15 when I was finally given a word for it: assimilation. I found it thrown around in history classes as if something so insidious could not possibly still be present, as if I didn't bear witness to the silent and invisible violence I perpetuated against myself in an effort to blend in. At that point, I had been clawing out of my skin for years and I just didn't know how to stop anymore. To this day, I sometimes still do.

I want to crawl back in time and find the tattered pieces of my ancestry, find my younger self that did not yet know to apologize for my culture or be ashamed of it. Every day, I try my absolute hardest to sew those pieces together again and proudly display my culture and roots. It is hard to take off this skin that I put on myself, the skin I patched together from the pretty pieces of America, never knowing how garish it would feel and how tight it would trap me as I grew.

I try to claw out of the familiarity of this language that cages me, this self-imposed path of assimilation and avoidance that has built a barbed wire isolation fence that I didn't know how to climb out of. I am not the only one with this sentiment. I am not the only brown kid that has to cringe and accept faulty pronunciation on their names. The issue is that often they don't even know what they'd do if they did escape the constricts of this society. I'll admit that I too was torn between the decision to run back to the place that should be home or to continue picking myself apart with a silent prayer that my bones were white enough to grant me acceptance.

It's a process, but everyday I strive to see more and more of my people garner self-love. I hope they love how safe Spanish feels in their mouth like I do. I hope they never try to assimilate again, for self-colonization is the worst kind.