Since about 1998/99 I have been actively working on trying to figure out this thing called identity. For the most part I am set with the whole being a girl part of my identity. Over the last few years I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking about what it means to be a person who has parents from two different cultures, two different races (my dad is not black, does that make him a white-Latino?). I have moved from wondering how I can connect with my Guatemalan cultural history to thinking about what it means to be Latina in the states, what does it mean to be mixed within the pan-Latino* population in the states, and more specifically what it means to be a woman within this context. What does it take to be considered Latina?

*Pan-Latino – a term I am using to talk about those people who are from the many Spanish speaking heritages, including those monoracial/monocultural (at least at home) people born in the states.
Little by little I have been taking in information and finding new resources like Mavin, and other groups, where I see and hear other people who are talking about being mixed. Along with learning for myself I have been bringing other people along with me partly as a way to show the non-mixed people that other people are actually experiencing some of the same things that i do, and partly to show them this community that I am becoming more and more at home in.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to speak to a graduate multicultural counseling course about mixed race/ethnicity issues and for this I brought my parents along. This talk came out of a final project I did for my masters degree, so part of the reason I brought them along was because I wanted them to see what I had put together and show them how I was growing into all of this. I also thought it would be really cool to have my parents on hand to add any insight that they might have. (They were my show and tell ~ oooooh a real life mixed couple .
What I wanted to accomplish with this presentation is what i had seemed to have accomplished with my independent study professor. I had opened his eyes to some of the unique experiences of the mixed population. The summer before when I had taken his class, I was generally very pleased with the way in which he ran the class, but I always felt that I had to keep raising my hand to say, well lets not forget that this is not always the case especially if you have a person who is mixed somehow. None of the literature that we were assigned to read even mentioned mixed issues. When I did this independent study the most gratifying part of it was that he had this light bulb over his head that said, yes this is also an important population that needed to be addressed in the class.

So (again) I brought my parents. I wanted them to see not only that I had in fact finished my degree, that I was (hopefully) an academic in the making, but that without them I would not be the person I was, but also that they did a pretty good job of raising my sister and I. As I went through the presentation, I did ask my parents to chime in on a couple of things, and I think someone asked them a question during the question and answer session. Afterwards, when we were walking out, my dad said to me part jokingly in his accent (which my mom always insists isn’t the way he talks by my sister and I know better) “sorry we mixed you up Luisa”. I have talked to him before about this, and he knows that I am proud of who I am, if not sometimes confused about what space in society i feel most comfortable. BUT what I found more interesting is that he also said, oh you know what I guess I am mixed too. One of my Grandpas was from Spain, and there is some Indian in the family as well. In defining myself I had opened his way of thinking about what it means to be mixed as well.

Something similar happened with my boyfriend. He is Peruvian. He came here with his family when he was sort of young, and has a stable, comfortable understanding of himself as Peruvian. His mother and father both are, his sister is, and so they are all Peruvian. As we have dated, and as I have come to be able to talk more about being mixed in words and real sentances, and as I did this independent study and did research on identity theory, I think he has come to see that it is an important part of how I see myself. But not having that sort of experience himself it didn’t make a lot of sense as to how it could be so different.

A little while ago i took him and my mom to see Chasing Daybreak, the movie produced by the Mavin Foundation about the 5 mixed young people who travel across the country in an RV and talk to different schools and organizations about being mixed race/mixed ethnicity. My mom has been coming to see that my experience is different from hers for a few years now, but the boyfriend is relatively new to “the scene” and after the movie I think he kind of started to get it. A few days later he was telling me how he was thinking about the movie and how he was mixed too. He had always considered himself Peruvian, but that now he was starting to think about what it meant to be Peruvian. Like all of Latin America, South American countries have long histories of intermixing of races and ethnicities and this is also true for his family. One grandfather is from Spain, and there are other parts of the family that are Inca.
And then after he said that a little part of me said to myself, hes not mixed, he is Peruvian, thus exposing to myself how much I subscribe to American notions of ethnicity and culture.

Needless to say I have to go back and do some more retraining to the brain and working on expanding my own understandings on race and culture. But at least I may have started some others thinking a little more about it.