Besides imprecise language, there’s the fact that Latinos are not a monolith. What does a Peruvian who speaks only Quechua have in common with a Cuban who speaks only Spanish and a second-generation Puerto Rican New Yorker who only speaks English? If you had to pick one thing, it’s probably the fact that white Americans think we’re all the same.
Even though so many diverse peoples are encompassed into that one definition, I have tried all my life to be Latina while never quite feeling like I “count.” My Dominican mom raised me on merengue music, platanos and rice and beans. She told me we were Hispanic, because that’s what people called her then. But I didn’t get her curly dark hair or hazel eyes, and she spoke to me in English until I reached college. Still, there are blue-eyed, light-skinned people across Latin America.
If I tell people I’m Latina, they laugh. If I tell them I’m Dominican, they laugh louder. It’s the fact that she raised me in predominantly white neighborhoods of predominantly white suburbs that rendered the other details of my upbringing more alienating than unifying. When I came to college in New York City, I went to the first few meetings of all the Latino and Dominican affinity group meetings. Then I shrank away, too shy to figure out how to fit in with the kids who’d grown up in cities, grown up speaking Spanish,. And with the special bias of a shy person, I didn’t bother to consider that the other members weren’t all the same as each other any more than they were the same as me, and that I wasn’t the only shy person there.
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