The Other Box
Describing my ethnicity has always been a challenge, at least when having to explain it to a non-Latinx. I’m Mexican, a Mexican of European ancestry — the perfect example of white privilege, the result of centuries of colonisation and Spanish settlement. I’m a “güera” (a white girl), a Mexico City stereotype, a concept and identity forever engraved in my mind, at least until I moved to the UK.
Race, you see, is a muddy, forever complicated subject in my country. As in all Latin America, the concept of race is perpetually linked to a now obsolete but ever-looming caste system. The notion of racial ethnicity, more specifically, the Mexican race, haunts our national identity. The unrelenting idea that all Mexicans are the result of Indigenous and European mestizaje haunts our classrooms, homes, and textbooks. ”We are all mestizos” my fourth-grade teacher told me once, doing what our country does best when talking about race.
Even though colourism dictates all aspects of Mexican life, we, as a nation of millions, have avoided, until pretty recently, racial commentary like the plague. A few years ago, census forms related to race weren’t common, and talking about racial privilege was taboo. Mexicans just accepted the fact that we are and are not a race. We allowed the way the global North, especially the US, perceived us, to define our identity. No, being Mexican is not a race, but when you are the result of mestizaje, racial cleansing, and racial assimilation, most of us are so confused that we simply reject talking about it.
So, naturally, when moving to the UK and having to describe my ethnicity while filling out a racial census form for my uni, I almost had a breakdown. There was no “Latin American” box to click on! What was I supposed to do? According to the Western world, I’m not white, but back home, I’m a güerita. I remembered glaring at my laptop screen. Other? Should I click the “other” option? Apparently so. But I have white privilege, at least I have it back home. So, what am I? Is saying I’m Mexican enough? Or am I letting someone else’s idea of what it means to be Mexican define me?
Talking to other Latinos, there are these concepts that keep popping up: White Latinos are not as white as White Europeans. As if our culture weighed more than our features. But if I had random Spaniards immediately realise I speak Spanish just by the way I look (two days ago, at work, a woman turned to me and said, without even hearing my accent, “tienes una cara de española, que no puedes con ella,” — “you look so Spanish you can’t hide it”) that means I look white, that I am white, but am I? Or does the term white-passing apply to me and everyone in my country that looks like me?
Regardless of my skin tone, I had to deal with a co-worker singing Rita Moreno songs to me and doing a rather poor imitation of Speedy Gonzales. No matter my complexion, people still call me a person of colour, even though such a description is not only inaccurate but me accepting such a term would be insulting and degrading to actual people of colour in my country. It is as if the second I got on that plane, my entire identity changed.
Of course, I know a lot of it comes from centuries of racism against mixed race, Afro-Mexicans, and indigenous Mexicans. All this xenophobia is the result of our own colourism and racism and the US understanding of what they think they know about Mexican people. But still, regardless, the question is still hovering over my subconscious. Do other people define what I am supposed to be in their descriptions of me? Is whiteness truly about culture rather than complexion? Or is the term completely different to us Latinxs?
