It’s not uncommon for me to meet a teacher or bureaucrat who, after reading the name Monica Salazar and looking up to see me standing in front of them, puts on a stymied look as they try to reconcile a name that shouted “Latin American” with the girl who only seemed like an echo.
Some try to be subtle about it, quickly looking down again at the paper to re-read the name as if customary. The doubt in their eyes, however, wasn’t lost on me, even as a kid.
“Monica?” They’d ask with a polite incredulousness.
Others, who were not so polite, would pose the famous, “what are you?” question. I knew the question was about race/ethnic identity, but each time I heard the question an image of a scientist working in a lab stumbling upon some new virus in their microscope would pop into my mind.
“What are you?”
“Monica?”
My dad was born in a pueblo in Chihuahua, Mexico. From the aerial view of Google Maps, the town he grew up in looks like nothing more than a brown patch with a few roads. He was the youngest sibling of 10 and as a young teenager would travel with his older brothers to the U.S and work the fields with other migrant farmers. By age 17 he crossed the border for good— without knowing English, without a job and without papers.
My dad, through a mixture of education, hard work, luck and community support became a successful electrician. He went from being a janitor at a medical manufacturing plant to eventual running facility operations of a similar kind of manufacturing plant.
In that time, he gained everything he had set out for when he came to America. Education, work, a good paying job, money to spend on pleasure. He’d one day meet my mom, a Bay Area, California native who he’d one day marry.
In the process of becoming an American, however, he gave up parts of himself and his past. Among other things, he lost his name, Jesus. Today, people just call him Manny.
When raising my siblings and me he didn’t go out of his way to teach us Spanish or share his cultural traditions. He seemed ambivalent to his past.
My Granny, from my mom’s side, shares the same story as me in this regard. Just as my father didn’t care for me to speak Spanish, Granny’s mother never wanted her to speak Portuguese. They wanted to fit in and become “American.”
The only Spanish I learned from my dad were the words you’d use in street fight against some vato, words that’d slip from his lips when my siblings and I would get on his nerves.
The first time I met my dad’s side of the family, most of which only spoke Spanish, I wanted to tell them how grateful I was to meet them, I wanted to ask all of them questions. Then I realized that the only things I could communicate to them was a handful of cuss words and whatever basic Spanish I picked up from school.
“What are you?”
Growing up, I mostly passed as being just white. A few times, I heard bigoted comments about Mexicans while in groups of white Americans who were unaware that the hateful things they were saying could be applied to me or my family members.
Quite frequently, I shared my ethnic identity and received, “no, you’re not!” or some other dismissive as a response.
And so, I became accustomed to having an identity that was subject to dispute. An identity constantly put on trial.
All of which resulted in feelings of shame and isolation — a double rejection from both communities. An omnipresent discomfort at feeling like I always had to explain myself just for who my parents are and for what I appear to be — just for being.
“What are you, Monica?” became a kind of refrain.
When in college, I couldn’t seem to escape the question. I had often been rewarded for identifying with being White more so than Latinx. I thought back to Granny and her mother and the language that died, or rather, was killed, in the name of protection and progress. I didn’t want that to happen to me. Maybe my dad was taught to be ashamed of this part of himself, but I learned its value and didn’t want his traditions to end with me.
From that point forward, I decided I had enough. I needed to engage with this part of myself and my heritage in a meaningful way or else it’d slip through my fingers.
The following semester, I signed up for Spanish classes and dedicated myself to watching shows, reading and listening to music only in Spanish.
After a year, I got put into a Spanish class for native speakers, and while initially anxiety inducing (imagining others in the class thinking, “what’s this gringa doing here?”), the experience exposed me to Latinx students with a spectrum of experiences and identities that made me realize that belonging to this identity didn’t have any clear criteria. It made me realize that I might just actually belong here, that there are people grappling with the same strange hand of cards that I’d been dealt.
Eventually, I became confident enough in my Spanish to try and talk to my dad in his native tongue. But when I tried, he’d always respond in English, as if correcting me on the proper way to speak. It hurts each time he does, but I keep on studying and engaging Mexican culture as much as I can.
Today, when I hear the question “What are you?” I think back to a conversation I had with an author about Latinx identity, he said, “you are the template. You are the definition. I think it’s different for each of us, but also the same. If you find a way to own it, you become the exemplar.”