All the answers

The past 24 months has been a year of exploration into the black community, and communities of color in general. Shockingly, I know little of the experiences of people who I relate to most. I have blamed my history teachers and the education of a dominant culture, but truly, I haven't been forced to dive into who I am until I moved to the South. 

Every time I think about how removed I have been from my culture and from the experiences of people of color, I think of my Latin American studies class and a fire-y Latino that would constantly sound off in class. He constantly challenged the teacher with facts he had tucked away in his back pocket. He spoke with a confidence that only someone certain of himself, his education, and his identity could do. I was envious of this confidence. 

With the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, I sat myself down with the modern writings of Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ijeoma Oluo, Carol Anderson, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and currently with Austin Channing Brown. I needed to understand their struggle, and I found myself embarrassed that I had a canyon-sized gap in my knowledge of the injustices of the black community. I wrote about social justice in college, and the struggles of the black community wasn't even on my radar. 

I am so grateful that these writers have labored so I could understand and become an ally. Beyond an ally-ship, I started to see similarities in their struggle with my own. Their words illuminated hidden pain and hurt that I had longed forgotten or continued to ignore at the expense of myself and the benefit of fitting in with the dominant culture.  

While I have benefited from rejecting my culture- I'm convinced this was a subconscious effort by my parents as a means of surviving racism- I find myself mothering two young children and trying to determine how to reclaim what I've lost and how to make sure they don't lose themselves as they grow up in the South. A lot of my writing will be for them, but also an exploration of what it means to be a third generation Latinx who speaks very little Spanish and does not practice traditions that belong to Mexicans, and what it means to confront generational racism and what it has taken from me and my family. Because even after extensive self-education and long discussions with other minorities in the same boat, I still don't have all the answers.