Hi. I’m the “Whitest Puerto Rican Girl You’ve Ever Met.”
Nice to meet you.
You may have noticed in our short time together that my skin is a lot closer to the color of paper than cafe con leche, my Spanish is shit, and I can’t dance to save my life.
On the inside I can’t deny my heritage though, what with my irrefutable Latin temper, the way the sound of a rolled “R” makes me feel at home and my inability to tire of arroz con pollo, guineitos or sopa de leche.
Sometimes, I wish I could be just like my pale-faced, red headed mother, who loves with a ferocity too great to deny that she is Latin. And she won’t.
Where I come from, being Hispanic doesn’t make you anything more than one of the masses.
Maybe that’s why I associate being Puerto Rican with bright paint slicked Honda Civic’s bumping Reggaeton too late into the night, boys with over-plucked eyebrows and smiles too cocky and too earnest for my liking, and the feeling of alienation instead of the smell of cilantro, loving fervent kisses from my non-English speaking great grandmother and the way that two “L’s” always seem to ask why.
How I relate to my ethnicity will always be too circles of a Venn Diagram that don’t quite overlap.
There is no room for me on that red, white and blue carpet.
For a while, I relished in not being associated with where my family comes from.
I liked being a question mark. That is, until I began to feel the tight squeeze of question marks at the end of phrases like “What are you?”
When responding, I always like to start with “human” and work my way down the list.
Yeah, I understand the question, but the intricacies of the human condition aren’t lost on me and sarcasm is finely ingrained in who I am. So, maybe after I’m glared at with pursed lips, I’ll cop to being Puerto Rican.
Growing up with caramel-skinned cousins who told me I was ugly in two languages, didn’t make it easy for me to love myself.
Truth be told, I don’t think I’ll ever fit into the mold of who I’m supposed to be. Denying who you are is a lot of work and it’s been done for me all my life.
From the day I was born, my parents were accused of picking up the wrong kid at the hospital.
According to my own family, my eyes were entirely too almond-shaped for me to belong in this family. I must have been the long-lost daughter of some Japanese couple.
So I hated them.
The parts of me that allow me to see the world. The proverbial windows to my soul were merely keyholes in the doors hiding all that I hated about myself and resented about my family.
These are my eyes. I know they don’t look the way they should, but they’re mine. It’s because of them that I notice colors shifting when the sun sets and the corners of mouths ascending at the sound of a professor’s bad joke. It’s because of them I’m now able to look at myself without hatred pouring out like black inky mascara after a bad break-up.
Without them, I’d never be able to see myself as I am now. Someone with an ambitious heart and an open mind. An introverted demeanor and a snarky sense of humor. Someone who just wants to hugged and told that she did a good job. A feminist. A writer. A lover of processed food and bad reality television.
And someone who just happens to be Puerto Rican.
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