On legitimacy and “brown-ness”: Hispanic Heritage Month and identity

Part 1. While I appreciate your concern…

I’m in a meeting talking about representation, equity, and the ability to elect representatives that come from the communities that they serve.

I notice a raised eyebrow from someone sitting next to me. “Do we even have a Hispanic elected official? Who even is that?”

I explain that we do and I tell him who. He repeats the question. “I didn’t know that,” he says, over and over again. I ignore this. Someone else assures him that this is true. He shrugs his shoulders, continuing to question, and I know this doesn’t matter to him. I don’t know why I don’t say more. Maybe I‘m not brave enough. Maybe I’m exhausted.

Later, sitting in my car, I let out a scream. I furiously text a friend curse words in all caps. When my rage cools, I think of every time I’ve been in a room where my own identity was diminished or disregarded or questioned. Where non-Latino “experts” were making decisions about brown communities, and using words like equity and inclusion, while shrinking the strength of our voices in favor of their own. In these rooms, they can’t imagine that we are accomplished enough to be our own heroes. In these rooms, cultural appropriation flows like tequila on Cinco de Mayo.

“My wife is half-Puerto Rican so I have a lot of experience in this field.”

“I was in the Peace Corps in Latin America.”

“Mexican food is my faaaavorite!”

“I HAVE SOCKS WITH FRIDA KAHLO ON THEM!”

In these rooms, some of us are just not brown enough to count or to be included in that equity conversation. Allies come in with their own concept of what is brown enough and apply those ideas haphazardly.

“When I was in Latin America, my host family…”

“I celebrate Día de los Muertos!”

“Burritos! Salsa! Pupusas!”

We show up to meetings in business casual, speaking unaccented English. We are code switching because that’s how we learned to survive. We have to remember to be acceptable and non-threatening and good to be allowed space. When the rage builds, or when we are not seen and we demand visibility, we are Too Angry, Temperamental and Spicy. Code switching is a delicate balance.

“If I dress like Frida, maybe they’ll love me,” I say to a Latino colleague one day. I create a mental picture of myself walking into a meeting, hair pulled into braids crowned with roses, wearing a the dress.

Outside of these meeting rooms, we can be just brown enough to make existence dangerous. In 2016, I was talking to voters, urging them to vote in the presidential election. I was out with my paper list of voters, walking down a cul-de-sac, when I walked by someone out in his yard. He abruptly stood up, walked in his house, and came back out with a shotgun. He half shouted to me that I’d better not step on his lawn. I half shouted back “Don’t worry, you’re not on my list!” and finished out my list before walking to the next street and calmly calling my husband to pick me up.

A few weeks later, I was in a different neighborhood when a lovely woman walked up to me and sweetly said “Honey, my neighbors don’t like when people we don’t know walk through our neighborhood and they’ll call the police. I would never do this but my neighbors will.” I remember walking back to my car, walking my list back to the precinct captain, and telling her what happened. She offered a different list but I was exhausted. She looked shocked when I told her that someone less “vaguely ethnic” should finish my list. Later I’d hear that I was the only person who was threatened with police that day, in that beautiful neighborhood in Fairfax County.

I tell those two stories together because they are classified in the same folder in my brain. Sometimes the gossip and the whispers and the “I would nevers” are more harmful. The white allies who gatekeep Latinidad for us can diminish us more than the visible, angry men with guns diminish us. Because we expect it from the men with guns, screaming about the border and whether or not we belong. The others, the gatekeepers, bury our voices under the sheer volume of their allyship and notions of what we are or should be, rendering us silent in disbelief, exhaustion and rage.

“Part 2: I was never a cowgirl” is coming soon.