What are you?
This is a difficult question for me.
I know I get asked it more frequently than others do because looks are ambiguous. My first response is usually: human.
Followed by one or more of the following depending upon the situation:
Woman, mother, lover/partner, artist, lay minister, writer, dancer, Mexican, Irish, Unitarian Universalist, Oregonian, American, White, Brown, Middle Class, Educated, Teacher, PhD, Worker among workers......
I am all of these things and I am none of them. They all seem to miss the mark and that is why I hate the question.
As part of an art collaboration, I have been exploring the concept of passing. I was taught to pass as white by default. People often assume I am white but then I don't really look quite right and that begs the question of "what are you." My siblings are white by coloring. We were raised in an interracial home by a mother that people assumed was the nanny because she was a brown women with white children in tow. This was the perpetual tension: being half brown by blood and white by culture.
We were raised in a white neighborhood in a white suburb. My Grandmother, Maria Fiero, would be very proud that her progeny have passed into the white culture. She didn’t want us to live with the oppression and hunger she experienced. To become white she married Fred Brown, my mother's step father, and died Mary Brown . Becoming white was an honorable goal that lifted her child, Dora Esquivel, out of poverty and into the middle class.
When I reflect upon what it means to be Mexican I am left stuttering. We learned a few words of Spanish, but not many. Spanish was beaten out of my mother by the school system . It meant we ate beans and tortillas at least once a week for dinner. Our home was decorated in bright colors and we vacationed in Baja California each summer.
The suburb I grew up in had a Barrio, a Mexican ghetto. The kids there were Cholos and gang members. The San Gabriel gang was 'La Raza.' The girls wore heavy make up and black clothing. They had a particular calligraphy that was used for graffiti and a real or affected Barrio accent. When we went to a city-wide middle school, I tried to befriend some of these girls. I compared myself with them, I was Mexican too but I wasn’t a Cholo. I felt like an imposter in their midst. I was comfortable and safe with the white kids of my own neighborhood. I questioned my identity. In the end I chose to stay white and safe rather than take the risk to turn brown.
There were always a few non white kids in our immediate neighborhood: Children, like myself, either of mixed race or whose parents had made it economically and assimilated into the white mix. I never felt an outcast because of my brown-ness. There were token Asians and Jews in our community, but no blacks. At least among my friends we were all welcome in each other’s home, but none of us would have brought home a Cholo to play. They lived across the railroad tracks and we were taught that it wasn’t safe over there, to watch out for ourselves, and not to trust those kids.
I also hate having to check the little box that says race. Nothing describes me or my children. I am not white and I am not brown. These days I write in ‘biracial’ and make another box. In those few instances where I see the data later, that term has often be changed to ‘white’ by an office worker somewhere.
I have been hired for academic jobs in part because of my gender and my race. They got a smart woman of color without really having to confront their racism. I was an easy person of color to assimilate because I was already assimilated. I have always felt guilty giving this information when applying for jobs. It feels a little like cheating. I wasn’t taking a job away from a ‘real person of color’ (whatever the hell that means) but rather somehow using a new privilege to get ahead of the normally privileged class. I was suddenly given privilege because of my ancestry and that was disorienting.
