In this week’s reading, we read a creative prose piece, ” Too Latina To Be Black, Too Black To Be Latina,” by Aleichia Williams. She speaks about moving to a “quiet North Carolina,” where she experienced what she calls a race crisis. In middle school, her peers identified her as just solely a black girl who didn’t speak Spanish, and to their surprise, she did Spanish. Growing up in New York City, Aleichia didn’t have to deal so much with identifying herself as Spanish because she was surrounded by diversity, automatically thinking she was somehow Spanish. That was not the case in another state because her skin color identified her. I see it repeatedly when people choose to identify you with how you look rather than sparking up a conversation that will ultimately leave you with some background story. It upsets me when people also place anyone who speaks Spanish as “Mexican,” not only Mexicans who speak Spanish. As a Mexican American, I feel robbed of my native language before being conquered by the Spaniards was Nahuatl, an Aztec language. Spaniards like to look down on Mexican for not speaking the “Spanish” language correctly.
Moving along, Aleichia never lost who she was and embraced everything that came her way. In my experience, even when you go back to your home country, I experience a race crisis because I’m identified as not being Mexican enough to do things that anyone there can. I’m expected to sit there and look pretty, which is not who I am. I can do a lot more, and I prove it.