Out of the Water

I find I have to prove that I'm Hispanic. As if somehow, saying that I was born and raised in Colombia, my dad is Colombian and me self-identifying as a Colombian is not enough to give me space and credibility within the latino community.

I spent this last weekend on a latino retreat with InterVarsity. Their latino fellowship is called LaFe and doesn't really exist on the U of I campus. However, there was a regional retreat going on called Encuentro and we gathered together a carload of latinas and headed off to a weekend of fun and fellowship.

When we arrived and got into the elevator, on our way to meet everyone else, I felt quite apprehensive of what the following social encounters would be like. I was glad I did not have the ability to read minds as I did not want to verify what I assumed they'd all be thinking, "Why's the white girl here?" Maybe a kinder version followed the lines of, "Oh, she's really into building cross-cultural relationships..." But never in a million years could I fathom the others in the room seeing me walk into a room full of latinos and have them assume I was one of them.

This weekend threw me back into that season of my life where all I did was process my bi-cultural identity. I realized that building relationships with latinos on this campus has been harder for me than building relationships with any other student groups.

At best, they're nice and quite polite, but often I feel evaluated... continually. If I'm late and running on latin time, then that's a latin point for me. If I don't/can't dance well, then that's a white point for me. White. Latin. White. Latin. White. I wonder when they'll tally up the score and share their verdict with me.

And then, to go full circle...

I had dinner tonight with a lovely couple interested in going to Colombia to work at ECA. They wanted to know all about Colombia. They asked about the food, the language, the culture, the people. I didn't need to convince them I was Colombian; they believed me. I wished that loving Colombia as intensely as I do and that the gut-wrenching homesickness was enough to create a space in that culture for me to be at home there.

And yet, I know that I'm not 100% anything and it frustrates me quite often. I want to be able to claim an ethnicity and a people group and culture as my own. Instead, I'm suspended between two, and find myself swinging toward one or the other. Some days I feel so Colombian and so comfortable with latinos and in the place I call home. Others, I feel like a fish out of the water, wondering why I don't just let them think I'm white and leave it at that. Some days I feel like I've begun to adjust to white American culture and others, I've never felt so foreign before.