by Daniel Cubias
I watched my mother hammer a nail into the wall. She missed, hitting her thumb. A stream of Spanish obscenities leaked out of her. I was alarmed, and not just because she was shaking her hand and hopping around. I had never heard so many undecipherable words at once. Then again, I was six years old.
When my mother calmed down, I asked, “What did you say?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“But what does ‘puta’ mean?” I asked.
“It’s just something they say back in my country,” she said.
And for some reason, this was the first time I consciously realized that my mother came from another nation. I had known this my entire life, of course, but it didn’t sink in until I heard her curse in Spanish. Almost simultaneously, I figured out that her heritage meant I was kind of exotic too.
And I suddenly became aware — I mean, truly noticed — how I differed from my friends, who were almost all white and blonde (it was Wisconsin decades ago; there wasn’t a lot of diversity except for my cousins and me).
Now, perhaps there are many Latinos who have always been so tuned in to their heritage that they can’t remember an epiphany about their ethnicity. Maybe they just always knew. But for many of us, there is an instant, a moment often identified only in retrospect, when we possess the first inklings of our identity.
Certainly, our racial and ethnic backgrounds are among the strongest components of our lives, whether we want them to be or not. It’s not like realizing that you like pasta or are right-handed or something like that. As such, for many Latinos, there comes a time when we notice that most of America doesn’t share our background. We are different. This can be jarring, or invigorating, or even disturbing.
A friend of mine didn’t realize it — not really — until he was a pre-adolescent. He told me how he was hanging out with his friends, all of them white, when one of them joked about calling the border patrol on him.
“I didn’t get it,” my friend told me. “But I knew it applied only to me. It was a difference between us.”
Of course, we hope that most moments of self-realization aren’t so traumatic. We also hope that those punks who slurred my friend eventually got their asses kicked when one of their little “jokes” backfired.
But regardless of how monumental or trivial or weird these events seemed at the time, we should savor them now. They come around only once.
To learn more about Daniel, visit Hispanic Fanatic.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of
the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.
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