This is my Land Too
As a young Mexican- American woman I struggle to find my place. When I enter the marketa I am known as la guera because I am lighter than most Latinas. Around campus I am labeled as Mexican because I do not have the blonde hair that falls over my pale white skin. For my family, I have been white washed since I did not grown up in the traditional Mexican patriarchy where men control my life. Even for my Latina friends I am too white since my hair is dyed and the color of my skin is not the usual shade of brown. Others will always see me as less because they believe I do not deserve to be in the United States. They yell go back to your homeland but little do they know I too am American. I face the struggle of being from two different places yet feeling, as I do not belong to any of them.
When I was growing up I never understood why people had so much hate toward our culture. I had never been insulted or neglected at school. In fact, all of the children looked like me so I fit in perfectly. It was not until one day I experienced the discrimination many Latino people face. As I accompanied my grandmother to her usual errand of buying groceries, a male made an offensive comment in a language that was very foreign to my grandmother but very familiar to me. He rudely commented that we did not belong here. My grandmother ignored it never knowing he was insulting her yet this comment stuck with me because I felt like I had no power to even respond. I did not understand why he felt greater than us. Why was he in liberty to judge where we came from? When was this power established? It was not until then that I realized I was a minority and I had to fight harder than the people around me due to society’ mentality that states if you do not come from an American family you will not succeed.
Labels followed me wherever I went. After that day I saw them too. Every time I looked in the mirror I saw how my brown hair and my brown eyes dominated my appearance and I wondered if that was all that people saw. I was labeled as a minority and there was no way I could hide it because everyone saw it as soon as I walked into the room. As a female Latina woman, I faced much discrimination especially as I grew up because people thought that I would be a high school drop out and would not pursue a higher education. They looked down on me and thought that I had no future. These stigmas about joining gangs and getting pregnant followed me as I walked down the street. Although I do consider myself a Latina, I never let these stigmas control my life because I knew that my family consisted of strong workers who worked multiple jobs to offer a good life for their children and smart women who raised their children with morals. I knew my parents had great hope that one day I would be successful. I absorbed the comment from the stranger in the marketa and decided to use it as my motivation to prove to others that I could be successful.
I realized that I was the only hope of my parents and my grandmother. The one they relied on to pay the bills and talk to business people on the phone. I was their voice. This was my motivation to pursue a college career and offer my family a brighter future. Never again were they going to be discriminated because I would have a voice that would be as loud as the American voice since I too was American. The thought of my grandmother and parents leaving their home land in order to come to the States just so I could have better opportunities made me realize that they too were strong and courageous people. They were not the mojados that everyone saw nor minorities.