race paper

Class: Looking Backwards

My Interview

I realize that this may not be what you are looking for, or intended for this essay, but this is what I choose for your eyes to lay waste to.

I had never called myself “Brown” before, until Monday night, it had always been a reluctant “Mexican.”  I realized 3 years ago that I had a major problem with internalized racism; I just hated myself for being born. As I write this, I’m crying because I know that it’s true, unfortunately whole-heartily.  A series of unfortunate events...

    I thought perhaps that if I were born White, still believing what Nickelodeon had taught me, that perhaps I wouldn’t have to get beat every night. My parents would be rich and not alcoholics and I wouldn’t have bruises that I would have to hide. I’d sleep in a four poster bed with Pop bands lining my walls and parents that cared for my well being, helped with my homework after dinner. Perhaps if I had been born someone else I wouldn’t want to die every day of my life (How intense a thought  to be thinking at the age of four?!).

It wasn’t until after my father left when I was 7 (something my family still blames me for, bringing in “outsiders” (the cops), the cultural guidelines that I broke unknowingly), that I found out that it wasn’t just a Mexican family that would do this to their own. I remember the day someone told me that the extremely poor White girl would hike up her skirt to show the bruises her father left. My first thought was “How disgusting! Why couldn’t she just shoulder the pain by herself, I did, why did she have to parade her wounds like that?” Having grown up and had years to think this moment over and over in my head, I’ve come to realize that she was just hoping someone would see her S.O.S. and save her; or maybe on some level, she didn’t want to go through what she was going through, alone. That last thought is probably just a product of my own sadomasochistic habits, which are a product of my family’s sadistic tendencies. I would like to state that I then came to realize that maybe I was just born into a fucked up situation to fucked up individuals, but alas, I harbored that incident and categorized it under Class. Poor people (which I didn’t realize, I mean the idea really didn’t settle, that I was Lower Class - Working Poor until I was 20.) did these kinds of things. I accepted that a White family could do this as well, but with a stipulation attached. The fact that I lived in a house and she, a mobile home, that made the evidence concrete to me, that solidified the even keel that I (or the media) had made up. We were in the same boat because our families were poor and uneducated, but I felt sorry for her because she didn’t deserve that because she was born with an advantage, non utilization was the problem. 

My younger brother always called me White. I never understood what he was talking about or trying to get at, did he not sit there and watch the same things on television as I?  Learn as I had, the same morals that prime time offered him after school? Our one and only babysitter.  He always had such animosity towards me after I started saying “dude,” or “totally,” even if I said something remotely complex like “affirmative.”  I was so confused by the shift, we were close while growing up, the only thing separating us was eleven months or so i thought. We grew up and we grew apart, we were obviously living in different worlds. He lived in the reality posed by our environment and I lived in the one made up in my head. While he had Mexican friends in the neighborhood and an older brother who he admired and aspired to be like (one who ultimately landed in prison twice), I on the other hand had no friends and no one in close proximity that I looked up to.  I didn’t find the same sense of community in my community that everyone else seemed to be content with.

I did have one friend growing up. But, that relationship too ended on a sour note before I turned 11. Her mother never liked me; we couldn’t communicate with each other because I didn’t know Spanish. I seemed to be too White for the Mexican families living in the Arizona desert.

My parents knew how to speak the language but never saw the need to teach their children. They learned out of necessity; both their parents only spoke Spanish. I have yet to have a “real” conversation with my last existing grandparent because of a language barrier. I lived with her for 3 months which consisted of a lot of pointing, smiling, avoiding, laughing at nothing, and pretending I understood. As I grew older my contempt for the Spanish speakers I encountered moved me to learn French in high school, even though I knew I could only benefit from speaking the language of Mexico. 

I now understand how I came to find myself among the alienated. I always believed that I started getting piercings at 14 and tattoos at 15, because I didn’t want to be considered a sexual object. Walk down any street in any type of clothing as a woman in Phoenix and you will be bombarded with catcalls and dirty talk in Spanish. And, while that is half true, if I were to be completely honest with myself... I would have to say that what I hated most, was whom I was being bombarded by. I couldn’t stand be associated with “them” in any capacity.

High visibility becomes invisibility, I know this to be very true. Before it was commonplace for teenagers to have piercings, again (after the 90s), I as a sophomore was one of the 1st in my high school of 2000+ students to get them. By the time I graduated in 2005 I had 11 piercings just in my face. I was no longer just another Mexican, I was devoid of race as a “pierced freak.”

I guess the point I’m trying to make with this essay, is that I know/believe/have experienced racism on so many levels. I just realized today how far back my hate goes... for myself... for being Mexican. I always thought it was my choice, and to an extent for letting it go on so long it is, but I have to remind myself that it didn’t start with me - I learned it somewhere. 

And I’m finally willing to unlearn it...