““Why does everyone ask me if I’m Latina, isn’t it obvious?” - Alexa Demi”

There is nothing that bothers me more than when people ask about my ethnicity. When I try to vent to people about this, people don’t seem to understand my frustration. For most, it’s a simple question.

On the surface level it’s an annoyance with men and dating. It’s ridiculous the amount of times I’ve told a man I’m latina and he then utters ~spicy~. It’s a very dangerous stereotype and just simply annoying. I don’t like it when people make assumptions about me, so this especially irritates me. When I moved to the east coast I started getting a lot of people thinking that I am pretty much anything but Mexican. In response to that, I started having people guess before I told them. It was fun and interesting at first, but it’s started to have a different effect on me.

It now has me questioning myself, maybe I’m not really Mexican. If nobody else can see it in me, why should I? Eventually I started a list to keep track and it has become a wide ranging list of ethnicities and nationalities from all over the world. The racially ambiguous “trend” does play into it, but I won’t go into that beast of a discourse.

A few years after I had moved to New York, a Mexican friend of mine invited me to a party that was composed of family and friends. My friends family and the community they surround themselves with come from a part of Mexico that is prominently indigenous. A man asked me to dance and hesitantly agreed since I still fear men at times, while dancing he asked me what I was, I said Mexican. He was shocked and then asked me where my parents are from and I told him their home state. He then proceeds to say that no wonder I was so pretty unlike the other girls at the party. I didn’t know what to say so I just nervously laughed. After that interaction, I started to realize that people on the east coast don’t tend to place me with Mexican because they equate Mexican with darker complexion and indigenous features, which I don’t have.

It might come as a surprise to some people but Mexico is a very diverse country. It might even surprise people to know that there are African and Asian descendants in Mexico. They are still Mexican, regardless of their ethnicity.

On a deeper level it does make me question myself and my identity. Growing up I never felt that connected to my Mexican roots, my parents didn’t expose me to much outside of our home. I also didn’t feel that American because I was Mexican and as pale as my skin was, there is still racism everywhere. So here it comes, I wasn’t Mexican enough for the Mexican and I wasn’t American enough for the Americans. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that it did have some type of affect on me and being able to fit in. It got me thinking, who am I and why does it matter?

Recently I went to go watch the Pedro Almodovar film Parallel Mothers and the subplot of it was the main character trying to excavate a mass grave from her hometown where her great-grandfather and other men from the town were buried during the Spanish Civil War and give them a proper burial. I wish I could remember the exact quotes but at the end of the film someone makes a comment about why does she care to dig up the past and the main character, visibly upset at the comment says something along the lines of you have to know your past and where you came from to be able to look to the future. Which is something that really resonated with me. After the movie, I decided to purchase a genealogy kit, something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while but always talked myself out of. I know what the results are going to be, Spanish. Both of my parents last names are Spanish. But what if there’s something else there? Will that hold the answers to what I’ve been looking for all this time? Now I’m just waiting for the results, but what am I going to do once I get them? I’ll know my genealogy and part of my family history, so what else is there to search for?

My genealogy is part of who I am, it’s what I look like and how people see me. But who am I? This is just one part of discovering who I am.