#smth smth reconnecting with my heritage etc

[moonchild-in-blue]

Why are box braids so damn hard to do it yourself. I have a renewed and greater respect for my DIY people 💙

[doberbutts]

sorry if this is like out of line or smth but ive been seeing a lot of your mixed w/ white posts today and i had a question.

my entire dads side of the family is cuban, theres a lot of hispanic heritage on that side of the family. my entire moms side of the family is white. ive always considered myself mixed/hispanic w/ white but im incredibly white passing. ive always felt like an outsider in hispanic communities because i was mainly raised by my mom.

how do i get past the shame and sense of non-belonging to start connecting with my cuban and hispanic heritage?

I don't think it's out of line, but I do want to warn that I really can only give theoreticals. As I have stated a few different times, I was raised in a multicultural, multi-ethnic family that went to great lengths to expose me to my cultures and also the cultures of others. It was very important to my parents to make sure their children did not feel divorced from being black. Unfortunately, they didn't have much of a choice about being divorced from being Native, as that decision was also made for them when they were children themselves. However, it was still important for them to show us what they could.

So I never really had to "reconnect" with my blackness because it was something my dad felt was really important for me to be raised in long before I was born. Whether or not I'm "allowed" to say I belong to my Nation depends entirely on paperwork that I don't have due to family members dying etc (and also, you know, race politics bc for a very long time you were not legally able to be both black and native) and so while there are means to get that paperwork nowadays... personally I don't have much of a drive to give someone a whole bunch of money to dig around in my family history and see what documents they might be able to fish out. It is enough for me that I can point to dearly departed family and state that I know they were part of the Nation. It is enough for me that no matter where I go, when I bump into someone else who is Native they recognize me without me needing to say anything. It is enough for me to have memories of this happening while we were near a reservation, and a family took us in because we were lost and confused and heading directly into a wildfire out west.

I would like to learn more about my Nation. About the traditions and cultures and lifestyles there. I'd like to learn the language. But I don't need papers to do that. I have some oral tradition received by aforementioned family members, but otherwise it's mostly just what I pick up here and there learning on my own. For right now, I am okay with that.