Tuesday, January 19, 2016

"Being Biracial, Black, and Boricua"

"I was pretty sure of who I was, but only truly certain about my Blackness. My Blackness was obvious to much of the outside world and it was always being reaffirmed or confronted in various ways. Still, I was more concerned with other people not accepting that I was Puerto Rican, because so many people didn’t. They flat out denied it, because supposedly, you’re not Puerto Rican unless you look like Jennifer Lopez.

When our religion teacher asked each student to share their ethnic background with the class one year, after my turn, a Latina classmate across from me said, “I know she’s telling the truth ‘cause she has that mole on her upper lip, and I’ve only seen it on Latinos.”

It was annoying and weird how other Latinos tried to justify my existence — my Boricuaness — while inevitably explaining away and erasing everything else because that somehow made me legitimate...

That girl and I had both been ripped from our roots somehow, somewhere. Her mother never taught her Spanish because she wanted her to assimilate. My mother rarely taught me about my Latina heritage because our Blackness was the priority. Still, we were both supposed to be proud somehow, but were waiting for affirmation in the strangest of places."

http://labprolib.com/being-biracial-black-and-boricua#

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