#is pedro even mexican or am i just being racist

[aimeesuzara]

How We Learn to Hate Our Skin or, a Late Blossom into Self-Love, When Growing up Brown in a World that Makes You Want to Be White (For A History of My Body Blog Series)

 In the summer of 2016, I arrived in Santiago de Cuba with a dance group, and the first thing we attended was a performance by Danza Del Caribe. There, in a dark theater, with very few people in attendance, emerged the lithe, dynamic dancers -- the music, driving and sensual, the bodies, athletic and slim —the dance, modern, though there was something distinct about the movement that was very Cuban, its expression, the undulations of their torsos and hips.  Soon, there was another dance featuring traditional drummers and singers and all in costumes, reenacting a fiesta in the streets, and now, I could see the Afro-Cuban roots, the movement beneath the movement.  The music and the dance immediately seized us, a welcome that was neither superficial nor subtle.  Outside in the night, we piled into cars where Jacob Forever's song "Hasta Que Se Seque el Malecon" blared, and I realized I was listening to this song for the first time in Cuba.  I realized: I am IN Cuba!  That I had taken Cuban dance, from folkloric to Cuban salsa, and had become nearly addicted to dancing casino to Salsa-Timba, needing to dance at least once, if not three times, a week, faithfully attending class at my gym taught by one of the leaders of this very trip -- had always seemed strange if I were never to come here. Of course, it was a privilege to travel, a privilege that is very “American.”

As a person whose culture has not quite suffered the amount of co-opting that other cultures have (what comes to mind is yoga-fied Indian, anime-ed Japanese, kitschy or cutesy Chinese, boy-band Korean, luau'd Hawaii, cigar-and-salsa Cuba – to name just a few)-- I always wonder, "when and if this happens to us, how will I feel?" for example, how would I feel if I went to a Filipino tribal dance class from, say, Mindanao, and all of the attendees were white?  Sure, they could learn the language and the gestures, but could this be right?  And what if the consumers of such traditions had never been interested in my country nor never attempted to know and understand and have true relationship with not only the symbols of, but the actual inhabitants or descendants of my islands? I always imagined entering a class like that and basically losing my mind, giving everyone a piece of my mind.  And yet I, too, have done my fair share of being fascinated by and borrowing and romanticizing cultures other than my own -- I am guilty of it, certainly -- I do not deny that living in India in college, studying Buddhism and Hinduism and an extended stay of 9 months,  then returning here to attending yoga classes where few if any people were actually Indian -- that I was participating in the consumption of culture.  I also do not claim that my fascination with Cuban culture, spirituality, history, are entirely devoid of romanticism, idealizing.  And yet, there is something here to consider.  I do not consider myself a part of the (at least racial) dominant class.  That I have grown up with economic comfort, an excellent education, and two parents who lived together and were committed, raising me with everything I needed -- that I grew up with at least some semblance of identity connected to a homeland -- I do not deny the privileges I have inherited.

But as I've gotten older, I realize that my suspicion that we were always second-class citizens in many peoples' eyes, in the system's eyes; that we are dispensable, as labor, as intelligence, as optional colors to throw into a melting pot that somehow was and should be neutral, in other words, white; that I have never nor ever will experience whatever it is to feel I was neutral or normal or the regular, that things were made and meant for me; though I strove for, and lived at times under the illusion that I could be, a part of it.  As a child, I wanted my mom to have m & m's and pizza and popcorn around like the other kids; not soy sauce, fish sauce, hot peppers and rice.  I wanted us to sit down to an “American” Thanksgiving Dinner, since that's what everyone else did.  This became instated, at my insistence at the age of eight or nine: we had turkey, canned cranberry sauce, powdered whipped potatoes.  I was content to be like the other kids, not realizing that what was being replaced was whatever Filipino we had left. For a mother who was not that into cooking, those small symbols were what we couuld and should hold onto.  My Dad's Adobo; my mom's pancit; the ginataan that I half-loved and half-was disgusted by; the odd sweets and bottles and jars filled with sugary beans and coconut jelly for making Halo-Halo.  Instead, I opted for the can-shaped gelatinous cranberry sauce, not knowing how easy it was to make fresh sauce from scratch; the microwaved dinners like Hungry Man's potatoes and gravy and meatloaf, also not realizing that these were the easiest foods to make from scratch; popcorn and eggs, likewise, easy to to make and inferior when made in our enormous microwave oven.  I fought hard to lose our culture in order to be  part of the crowd, only realizing later that I would never the part of the crowd.  I would always be different, exotic, cute.  I would always stand out, could not really hide behind my hair like I thought I could; wearing black as a teen probably made me stand out more; I could never be "goth" -- my melanin prevented this. 

The illusion of belonging to a dominant class was broken at moments of my parents being talked down to; or my mom being called "cute" --my lunchbox food called weird, and people fascinated by my hair and eyes.  At a point in fifth grade the adoration turned to a silent segregation, and I distinctly remember sitting, as though on a faraway island, looking at my increasingly distant best friend, freckles and blue eyes, and her other newer best friends, blond and red-haired, all pale like Strawberry Shortcake and Barbie and Madonna; all perfect American little girls, as they became a click and left me with Jasmine and Keisha, whom I liked and got along with but also resented because they reminded me of my darkness; somehow being with the two black girls made me feel that all together we were just this big blotch of ink; a shadow on the playground; invisible and disappearing while the rest of the world marched on. A child of ten does not invent such a feeling, and especially not in a small town like Pasco, given that race or racism was never directly talked about by my parents nor in school, that my friends were all oblivious to the subtle ways in which racism was being perpetuated and carried on by their parents.  I remember Luis and Juan and some sense about them being just weird or less-than; I remember Pedro who broke his arm doing antics on the slide; they were Mexican and were seen as the comic relief; they were the jokesters, the pranksters, and so they were loved.  But in a sort of adorable, little-brother way, not to be taken seriously, and certainly not to be the object of a crush.  There was my Indonesian friend, also adorable and smart but never to be the object of a crush; crushes would be reserved for the classically white-cute Jeff or John. (*all names have been changed)

I probably had picked up on or heard snippets of my fathers' frustration, when he was deflated or downright angry about the dynamics at the hospital.  It seemed that the Filipinos were helping the Filipinos but not enough (and what was it they need to help each other for, I wondered?) and the Indian doctors had to leave; and the white doctors all supported one other were not supporting him. We left the Tri-cities nearly losing everything, in debt and abandoning the beautiful house on the hill; I disappeared for years from the scene and moved like a nomad across the country five times before I was a sophomore in high school.

But that is another story.  Let's begin with the body here and see where it all changed.

In Houston, Texas, I learned, as abruptly as you could at the age of 11 in sixth grade, that yes, we were second class citizens, people who should go back "home" (and what home was that?) and who smelled (this being the Indian slur applied generically).  Or it was "ching chong" which really got me because immediately the sound summoned the most slanty-eyed cartoon I could imagine, someone who couldn't even see through the slits of their eyes; and I was proud to have large, almond eyes, eyes my father and others said were due to my Spanish ancestry.  Deer eyes, round eyes, eyes that were expressive.  And I loved to sing, and talk and dance, so how could anything be Ching Chong from my lips --what a bunch of gibberish; I knew nothing about Chinese culture, but I knew no one spoke like that.

I remember, too, that in Texas, my two best friends and I clung to one other, protecting one another from the harsh slurs and taunting and just plain stupidity of the typical hormonal 6th-grader.  We created a fortress by linking arms and always walked together in the narrow halls.  I remember being conscious of Shalini, our Indian third, being made fun of for her hairiness and/or her odor.  Grace was nearly perfect, I thought, but her being Vietnamese and me Filipina, still, we were Asian and this was something, apparently, bad.  Our biggest steretotype was perhaps to be too smart (how terrible). But this also had to go hand-in-hand with, or mean, not-attractive. God forbid you could be brown, smart and pretty at the same time; that idea was only a fantasy.

There is something that extends beyond the number of incidences that I may be able to name that were "racist" -- micro-aggressions, and simply systematic and historical realities that, once you are aware of them, you could not become unaware.  It was only much later, after college, that I became aware that we live in a society built upon slavery, and exploitation, and the murder of brown-skinned people who lived here before. Then I learned that in my islands there were indigenous people before came the Spaniards, and the Dutch, and the British, and the United States, before capitalism and westernized culture infected the minds and hearts and bodies; I learned that people in my islands wished to lighten their skin and go to great lengths to be light, to appear or be white, to speak white, to be Western, and to look down upon their own even before coming to the USA-- the exact process described by Fanon and Cesaire as internalized colonialism, internalized inferiority. I inherited the internalized inferiority complex: I wanted blond hair and blue eyes; I wanted a tall nose; I wanted to lose my melanin and tried to hide my shadow in the brightness of light-skinned people for much of my childhood and teenager-hood. I bought into believing my parents were less-than with their strong accents and "foreign” ways. If I did not -- how else would I ever belong?

It had to be systemic: how could a 10-year old invent the kind of complex that I recall dawning upon me like a heavy mist, a poisonous web, that I breathed into my lungs, that permeated my body.  To be ashamed of my parents' tongue, our skin color, our bone structure, our food, our culture, to be ashamed.

To be ashamed as a woman may be something very universal, and especially under Catholicism, the gift of the conquistador to the natives of our islands and the other islands they descended upon.  But to be ashamed to also be brown, to also hail from what I learned later were islands resembling, no, are actually, Paradise?  Why and how could we feel ashamed of this?  Why and how could we feel ashamed to come from Paradise, where people are warm, loving, communally-minded, resilient, culturally rich, creative, how can you possibly hate the place you came from that was Paradise?

The shame of our own bodies as brown and Filipina is a sad and shared experience.  And now there is the irony that while in most of the world, it's more superior to be light, but there is also the fascination, the desire to be darker, to nearly consume, our golden skin.  The irony that while lightness gains privilege, those same privileged envy – no, desire -- our melanin, our eyes and hair.  To be envied yet to be looked down upon at the same time.  To feel invisible in one moment, unimportant, seen as part of the help or someone who cannot speak for herself; and then in the next, seen as extremely intelligent, eloquent, and exotic.  I never really knew how to accept the "compliment" of being exotic; was I a fruit?  Was I something to eat?  Why not be beautiful, like a fully-conscious and complete and (in my mind, neutral or standard) person could be?  Couldn't I be complex and whole, too? Could we focus on normal things like ice cream flavors and what we liked to do, rather than dwell on the uncomfortable differentness of our bodies? I would have preferred to be smart, interesting and cool than to be exotic, any day.  The journey of loving this body and this skin has been many years in the making.  People are often surprised, because they see me as very Pinay proud, embracing my heritage and loving my body and brown skin.  It’s been an evolution.  For those of us who have lived outside of the liberal or progressive Bay Area, we’ve been exposed to different messages.  Even IN the liberal Bay Area, we have to fight to drown out the noise; to make our own voices of self-love even louder.