This past week, I was fortunate enough to
spend my days talking about diversity and inclusion with other volunteers and
nearly every member of the Peace Corps staff, including our amazing gardeners,
custodians, and shuttle drivers. The Intercultural Diversity and Inclusion
workshop provided by Peace Corps Global was an incredible opportunity for me to
witness how Guatemalans perceive and digest complex issues like privilege,
race, and sexuality, but it also gave me a chance to introspect on my own
experiences with these themes back in the U.S.
A common topic of discussion throughout the
week related to Guatemalans’ grasp of the American identity. Many POC
volunteers have found that Guatemalans are slower to accept their American
citizenship when they’re not blonde and blue-eyed. The “typical gringo” is a
highly valued volunteer, one that Guatemalan families can easily tote around
town and say, “this is my American.” Meanwhile black, Hispanic, and Asian
American volunteers are met with more confusion than excitement – that’s to say
we’re not the typical American girls and boys they had pictured before our
arrival. This idea of the white American as “the American” wasn’t invented by
Guatemalans, but rather ingrained into their perception of the U.S. by American
TV shows, movies, and media campaigns that still favor white-washing their
characters over a truthful representation of the plentitude of shapes, sizes,
and colors Americans come in.
As humans, we like to categorize and we
tend to stick to this delineation of personas with a particular stubbornness.
It’s the reason the media shows mug shots of black criminals, and even victims
of crimes, and the school or family photos of white criminals. We have a very
consistent idea of what it means to be white and black in America and we’re not
ready to deviate from it, not ready to disassociate certain traits from our
perceptions of an entire race or ethnicity. Because of this blackness and
innocence, Islam and peace, Hispanic and legal, gay and manly, lesbian and
effeminate, handicapped and athletic have become antithetical concepts in our
minds. If you think I’m exaggerating, you probably don’t ascribe yourself to
one of these communities. As a small testament, I offer you the stories Peace
Corps staff members have shared with me of travelling in the U.S. to visit
family, where they were called illegals and threatened with deportation. In the
eyes of too many Americans, you’re either a fully integrated Latinx American
who speaks English without an accent like me or an illegal immigrant. The idea
of Latinx tourists in the U.S. may have never even occurred to you.
I can’t help but wonder what it is about us
as human beings that leads us to favor this dichotomization of the individual
experience so much. Why is it so hard to grasp that we are not just black or
white, straight or gay, religious or atheist, good or bad? The idea of identity
as an ever-moving point on a spectrum of spectrums is still incredibly obscure
to most people I know, especially here in Guatemala. We struggle when we can’t
clearly define another individual using a vocabulary based solely on our own
experiences and perceptions.
Here the most prevalent polarization of
identity separates the ladinos, those of Spanish descent, from the indigenous
Mayan populations. I had always heard of this division and see it regularly,
but I wasn’t fully aware of it’s depth until I heard my ladino host family
refer to my indigenous host family as “indios” – a highly derogative term in
Guatemala. To address this division of identity, many Guatemalans have begun to
refer to themselves as “mestizo” in place of “ladino” to indicate that no one is
just one thing: we are all have a place on some sort of ethnic or racial
spectrum.
I’ve come to realize that when you’re
surrounded by like-minded individuals, you forget to challenge your
perspective. I’m guessing that the reason my ladino host family feels comfortable
using the word “indio” is because they’ve never truly spent time with someone
who would be affected by it. They’ve lived their entire lives in their
exclusively ladino community. Coming to Guatemala has forced me slice my
perspective from the navel up and root around the guts of it. It’s caused me to
reflect on the language I use, the beliefs I hold true, and how that impacts
those around me. It’s also given me the opportunity to reflect on how others’
language and perceptions of me have affected my own personal growth and
development.
When I was younger, my Cuban ethnicity was
a huge source of both external and internal confusion. Many of my classmates
asked me if I was white or black, never once considering that there were
countless other options. Personally, I knew that I was Latina, but I didn’t
have a strong grasp on what that meant. Somewhere along the line, I was led to
believe that in order to identify as Latina American, I needed to have a harrowing
tale of my family’s journey to the U.S. I used to regale my middle school
classmates with the entirely fictional story of how my parent’s risked their
lives to arrive in the U.S. after days on a broken down dinghy packed with
Cubans ready to start their realization of the American dream. Their eyes met
from across the 10-foot boat as the waves salted their hair and they instantly
fell in love. In case you’re wondering, there’s not an ounce of truth to this
story. Both of my parents were born on U.S. soil and my grandparents immigrated
to the U.S. legally. The privilege of growing up white in America is that
you’ve probably never struggled enough with your own identity to make up such an
outlandish story. You probably haven’t been on the receiving end of pointed
questions like, “what are you?” or “but like, where are you from from?”
There are days when these questions are
easy enough to shrug off and laugh at, and there are days when these questions
are as harmful as calling me a “spic” or any other derogatory term. Fielding these questions is a constant
reminder that, to you, I am different. You are forcing me to define myself by
something that is more convenient for you than is true for me because if I
answered, “I am an ambitious young woman with dreams of changing the world” I
doubt you would leave it there. You
would push me to tell you my ethnicity so that you can comfortably place me in
a box and move on.
One of the Peace Corps’ most unique and
demanding challenges is navigating your way through an entirely new society’s
race relations and gender dynamics after spending your whole life conforming to
America’s ideas of race and gender. This has been particularly true for me as a
Latina still learning Spanish – many don’t understand why my Spanish isn’t
perfect if I identify as Cuban. The incredible trick is to know, without a
doubt, who it is you are and how you wish to be defined. From there you can
start the type of necessary conversations about race, religion, gender, and
sexuality. Guatemalans, and most Americans, aren’t accustomed to the idea that
there can be so many choices when it comes to self-definition, and so they
react with a confusion and misperception that can be easily taken as
discrimination. The challenge of the Peace Corps volunteer is to find
productive and culturally sensitive avenues of tackling these complex issues
with host country nationals while forgiving their hurtful missteps. It isn’t
easy and you will fail at times, but if personally demonstrating the sense of
self to define yourself outside the convenient lines our societies have
constructed inspires just one person to seek their own truth, then it’s worth
the fight.
