Latina-American

Not until I began high school did I think of calling myself Latina. We spoke English at home. I had few Latina friends and didn’t know many members of my mother’s Peruvian family except for aunts and uncles. Only recently did I realize that my mother seems to have a cousin in every corner of the world. “You’re just as much Hispanic as anyone,” my mom would tell me. I am biracial, half Peruvian and half Anglo. Yet saying “I am Latina” felt strange, almost mysterious. As a way to find this new Latina persona, I resolved to become as authentic as possible. My three step plan:

Step 1: Learn Spanish
A friend once told me, “You’re not really Hispanic if you can’t speak Spanish.” I studied Spanish from elementary school through college, but I was still a long way from fluency. My Spanish skills grow with time spent in class and time spent traveling in Latin America, and wither with neglect and disuse. Language can define, identify and unite a culture. Latinos can find other Latinos in a crowd simply by uttering a few words in Spanish that other Americans, outsiders, cannot understand.

This summer I took part in “Latinas Learning to Lead,” a personal development program for undergraduate Latinas sponsored by the National Latina Leadership Institute (NHLI). To my naive surprise, not everyone spoke immaculate Spanish. Speaking English, Spanish and often “Spanglish” with the other NHLI fellows, I found that language is a tool, a thread tying people together, not a qualifier or a divider. Spanish and English bind our people, our nations—yet our identity as Latinas reaches beyond knowing how to conjugate the irregular verbs.

Step 2: Know Other Latinos
Even though I was vice-president of my high school’s Spanish club, I found few Latina friends. Most Latinas kept tight, exclusive social circles, only including other Latinas. I longed to be a part of these circles, but knew I spoke Spanish too poorly and with too strong an accent, and my last name gave no hint of a Hispanic heritage.

In my college years, I traveled to Latin America during the summer, tagging along to my father’s business conferences. My family, the young Latinos I met at the conferences and other NHLI fellows now form my own circle of Latinos. Swapping stories with these acquaintances, I realized the similarities within my own heritage, like how my mother believes in her own brand of medicine. I feel better knowing other Latinas like me struggle to incorporate and balance the two cultures in their lives.

Step 3: Cook Hispanic Food
I don’t prefer Latin American food to any other food. Often it is too creamy or cheesy for my palate—though when asked my favorite food, sometimes I am tempted to say something like “papas a la huancaina” to assert my identity.

This summer, after visiting a Latin restaurant with my mother, I resolved that I wanted to learn how to make the perfect ceviche. I have also added two of my favorite foods to the list—alfajores and fried bananas. I thought that preparing a delicious Peruvian dish would be the perfect way to prove myself Latina and woo over any doubters. In all honesty, the closest I’ve come to regularly eating Peruvian food are store-bought bags of banana chips.

These three steps I laid out for myself, I realized, couldn’t determine my identity. Despite taking them, I didn’t morph into what I perceived as the “real” Latina. I started off thinking that the two ideas of my identity were distinct and separate and that somehow to be Latina I needed to be a different person armed with fluent Spanish, a close circle of Latina friends and a cookbook.

Yet now I see the difference was all in my head. The reality is fundamentally very simple. Many, if not most, Latinos have Native American and Spanish/European ancestry—mestizos, like me. With or without the three steps on my checklist, I have always been Latina. This is truly American—my ancestry stems from the Americas, North and South. As more Latinos call the United States home, the Americas bridge into a closer community of families, nations and people diverse in history, language and food. And this is what it means to be Latina in the new America.

Lynn Thomasson is a journalism major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If you have a story to share or know a college student who does, e-mail info@latinastyle.com.