This weekend I had an insatiable craving for 'Spanish' music. "I must," I thought to myself, "listen to 'No Me Queda Mas' by Selena". Why Selena? I had watched this music video a few days before my trip. Selena waits for her date in a cafe. A mariachi band plays nearby, the melody of the song she is about to sing. Then, the waiter gives her a note, "This is for you, senorita", (I am paraphrasing in English). The heartbroken Selena runs away, rejected and forlorn because he will not be coming.
I wanted to listen to No me queda mas, or there is nothing left for me, because it was the essential mariachi music when I was little. My mother played many different styles of 'Spanish' music while traversing America on our summer vacations. My favorite, and the one artist we all sang along to, was Selena. I told my mami, "I want to be a mariachi singer when I grow up!" But today I could not sing those blue songs.
Mariachi songs are the blues. The blues from my culture. Well, part of my ethnic heritage. My mother is full Mexican and my father full Puerto-Rican. So, that makes me Latina? Hispanic? Lo que quiera. Both were raised partly in the United States. My mother says we are from a line of indigenos. Even some of our ancestors were Sephardic Jews. Recently, my abuela in Puerto Rico passed away. She had caramel wooly hair and darker honey-brown skin. Many people came to her funeral. I learned the custom of a wake, where the casket is left open for an entire day for family and friends to sit with the departed. I had never seen my father's side of the family. Some were fair complected, but many were not. My cousins, who were my father's age, approached my younger sister and I. My sister wrapped a shawl over her bleach blonde hair. Her bright green eyes looked stunned, but inside there was something shaking her. My cousins hugged us, their arms sagging and their gait slow because of their age. I beheld not a caramel face like my abuela's, but a flat nose, dark wooly hair and beautiful dark skin. My sister and I whispered to each other "They're black, does that mean...?" So my sister went over to our father and asked "Dad, are we part black?" He replied as if we had always known, "Of course you are, your great-great grandfather was a descendent from the slave trade and your great-grandmother was black as well." I rejoiced in this news, and we took pictures and smiled at a sorrowful time because we were more family.
This brings me to present day. I have to make these trips to see my mother, because she does not live far away and I need her more than I like to admit. I need her calm voice. I need to hear "mija" leave her lips and I need to sit on her bed and hear the mystical prayers she taught me that I'd forgotten. I told my mother I found a second job at a grocery store. While filling out paper work, the woman from human resources stayed only briefly on a page that I will remember for the rest of my life.
She said, "This page just tells us more about you. We have already hired you, so really there is no sense in not filling this out. Otherwise, I'll have to call you in the office and decide just by looking at you if you're male or female. So please just mark one and sign because we've got a lot more paper work to go."
The boxes for male or female were indiscriminate to the monster that took up the entire top half of the page. Asking politeley as possible, it read "Which race are you?" I had almost decided to leave the whole page blank. Let her call me in, let her feel uncomfortable deciding whether I'm white or maybe I'm pacific islander, but then again it's Oklahoma so it's safe to say she could be Native American. Alas, I felt the pressure to identify myself with on or the 'Other'. Obviously, this was the issue the woman from HR did not want to talk about. This is the issue I do not wholly understand. I do not understand why I must identify with one race, and how, in 2013, my ethnic background is important to my employers.
She said, "This page just tells us more about you. We have already hired you, so really there is no sense in not filling this out. Otherwise, I'll have to call you in the office and decide just by looking at you if you're male or female. So please just mark one and sign because we've got a lot more paper work to go."
The boxes for male or female were indiscriminate to the monster that took up the entire top half of the page. Asking politeley as possible, it read "Which race are you?" I had almost decided to leave the whole page blank. Let her call me in, let her feel uncomfortable deciding whether I'm white or maybe I'm pacific islander, but then again it's Oklahoma so it's safe to say she could be Native American. Alas, I felt the pressure to identify myself with on or the 'Other'. Obviously, this was the issue the woman from HR did not want to talk about. This is the issue I do not wholly understand. I do not understand why I must identify with one race, and how, in 2013, my ethnic background is important to my employers.
On November 6, 2012 Oklahomans voted on an amendment to ban affirmative action. This meant no longer were we going to hold our employers to a standard of hiring 'minorities', including women. Calling this 'special treatment', many in Oklahoma wanted to do away with affirmative action. I voted against that bill because I wanted to protect my own. I was sad when it was passed, I did not believe in my Oklahoma. I was disappointed in her. I did not believe this state could look past the color of one's skin or the abilities of a woman versus a man.
When I told my mother about the frustration I had with filing out that piece of paperwork she said "I always mark other because it's true." My own country makes me feel like I must identify with one or the other, but I believe this 'otherness' is exactly what defines me. I am a Mexican/Puerto-rican. I am an African from the diaspora, and a descendent of the Sephardic Jews. I am not just 'Latina' and I could not just be 'Hispanic'. I feel invisible on those forms, when I take a standardized test, when I take a survey, when I say my name. I am informing someone not of who I am, but of who they think I am. I feel alienated, because I am a mezcla. Forms of these kind are the only physical piece of proof that is needed to show the mixing of races is ignored and one is wrong for thinking otherwise.
Driving back on the Interestate-44 turnpike, I listened to Clair de Lune. The road laid straight in front of me, cotton ball clouds gathered at the horizon.
I thought, "I will mark 'Other' or I will mark nothing."
Either way, I was already hired for being me, right?
-Marilyse Figueroa Valdez
