I Can Only Be American
I never really know what to mark when it comes to filling out ethnicity reports. I look brown on the outside, sure, but that’s about the closest tie I have to any Latin heritage.
My family is very traditional, especially those close to the nearest branches. My grandmother came to America in the 50s and off the sweat of her back made a life for my mother and uncles. She struggled with it so much that she ended up having to put my mother in a nunnery for the nuns to take care of her. They were American and I think this part, this event of putting my mother in a nunnery, is what changed her into who she is today.
My mother left the nunnery in time to start high school at 14. She wasn’t able to attend for very long because soon she had to be married. Keeping with tradition, she had to marry the man that dishonored her in order for our family not to be shamed.
I don’t know if this started her root of hatred. If this man made my mother ashamed of who she was, my family, my entire background, but by the time she had left, and met my father, she had decided to ban everything about Mexico from our lives.
My father is Cuban and had to flee Cuba in 1994-1995 or face being killed. The organization that sponsored him ended up bringing him to Minnesota where my mother was working as a Spanish translator. Funny, because she can’t write in Spanish at all. My father ended up falling in love with her and within two years they were married and my sister and I were born.
My mother picked up a few things in Minnesota before she left to go to Spokane with my father. First, she decided to become a Lutheran. Fine enough. And then she picked up the Norwegian heritage and culture and brought the pieces she liked with us.
By the time we settled in Spokane, my mother had taught my father English and then gagged him from telling me and my sister anything about Cuba and to keep from speaking Spanish around us. She took her newfound culture and found another church that also had Norwegian families within it. Now, we were Norwegians.
Time to add in our exchange students. By the age of three, I went from hearing English, misspoken Spanish, and Japanese within my house. Added in by hearing some Norwegian every other week at church and mixing all of the words together in some kind of understandable language of my home.
My mother was furious the day that I came home in 2nd grade with a book in Spanish. My teachers had decided to enroll me in an ESL program without my parents’ consent. My mother yelled at the school district for days, but in the end, they ended up putting me in a tiny room with another girl, trying to get us to say elephant correctly for an hour.
Things got so much harder when it came to holidays. At my church, we would be making lefse and ranting on about how bad lutefisk smells when it’s being cooked. No one else had that. What was an American Christmas? What was mine?
It really sucks to stop and wonder some days what it really means to be of a culture. Majority of the Norwegian stuff I was taught involved just food and different saints to worship. The Japanese side had all of my manners, how I should treat people, how to clean, and food as always. And then there’s the Mexican and Cuban side. A side so detached that I have no form of any accent at all, know a limited amount of Spanish that I picked up from hearing my father and others around me swear and demand things from me. The most Latin thing I have about me is just my skin. A face that I can’t change and too many cultures that I can balance with.
I’ve tried learning Spanish, I’ve tried to make Latin food, and none of it seems to fit. It’s like I have all of the wrong pieces or that I’m just the wrong frame to fit those pieces anymore.
I can’t call myself Japanese. My knowledge is only limited to what I can learn now and whatever popular media I can find now. I can’t call myself Norwegian because if anything, my experience with this culture has just been stolen and altered to fit my parents’ parties. Latin? Can I really be when the only thing I have tied to this culture is just blood, skin, and the bones in my face? I have no contact with my family in Mexico and the ones in Cuba are dead. It’s like my connection has just been floating this whole time and I haven’t figured out where to land yet.
I guess, for now, the only thing that I can be, is American.
