Black, White, And Everything In Between

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.