At six years old, I can’t remember thinking about skin color or heritage. It wasn’t until a few years later in Mrs. Anderson's fifth grade classroom did those concepts become relevant. I sat in my chair, shifting my weight between two opposite steel chair legs wondering which one of the two was the culprit for the lack of symmetry. Speculating which chair leg was shorter seemed more like an answerable question, but instead I was stuck trying to fill in the bubbles with my no. 2 pencil what race and ethnicity I identified with. Okay, White? Maybe. Black? Nope. Not cool enough.
Pacific Islander? I have no idea what that is. That sounds like a Capri Sun flavor.
Spanish/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano/Latino? Geez. That’s a catch all.
I thought back to my old school in Great Falls, Montana. The kids there were predominantly white. There was a couple of black kids, but not many. So if I had a fifty-fifty chance to guess, I’d say I was white. In my mind, Mexican referred to the children that spoke Spanish. They donned tanned brown skin from hours spent playing in the sun. My outside escapades of burning holes through leaves with a magnifying glass, establishing rolly polly providences, and making mud pies with twigs to decorate them with fallen pecans and plucked clover never seemed to turn my skin the same caramel color. I also didn’t speak Spanish. In fact, it wasn’t until we moved to Texas that I heard a different language.
My first day at school in the small town named after a Spanish senator for Bexar county, Juan Seguin, confused this child of seven years old. The various bad words and insults the children spoke in a different language on the playground, and the different appearance of a darker complexion paired with an even deeper shade of hair color, prompted me to ask my mother what country we were in.
When I was told we would be moving to Texas, I expected cowboys with ten-gallon hats and horses, but so far there had not been one sighting. Instead, there were a variety of vehicles with shiny glitter and metallic paint jobs fitted with tires that appeared to be too small to withstand the vehicle's weight and whose bumpers hovered dangerously close to the ground. There were no cowboys with ten gallon hats, but instead grown men walking down the streets holding up their oversized khaki pants with white-t-shirts. My mother stopped washing the dishes and turned to face me with a puzzled look. “Why would you think we left the United States?”
“Because the kids are brown and they speak a different language sometimes.”
Her puzzled expression turned to a smile. If she elaborated, I didn’t pay any attention because she gave me the confirmation I needed. We were still in the USA, but now we live in Texas. The people here were simply different. After this exchange, I didn’t care to dive deeper into things as I was too busy focusing on making new friends and figuring out what the norms were at my new school.
I tried to balance myself and the chair so that neither leg was touching the floor. I was determined to make the wobbly chair stand on its last two legs.
Someone once told me that my best friend’s last name meant flowers. I was told that was a translation from Spanish. Boys would tease and refer to us as Flowers and Alonzo Morning. Whatever that meant.
I became aware that my chair balancing act was disrupting the silence. “Okay, let’s finish up so we can move onto the next section,” Mrs. Anderson announced. I still had not filled in all my bubbles and I started to panic. I raised my hand and waited for her to make her way over to me. She stood above me as I whispered, “I’m not sure what to put here,” pointing to the ethnicity section. Almost as she didn’t hear me, she leaned down closer. “Here. This part.” She looked at me like I was stupid. I was unsure about how I might do on this TAAS test, but at that moment I felt like I was definitely in over my head and I was probably going to bomb this.
“Well, what are your parents?” she asked. “I don’t know……Italian?” That was the best I could come up with. After all, I really enjoyed pizza and lasagna was a family favorite.
Her expression was a mix of annoyance and like she was staring at a second head I sprouted suddenly. “I can’t tell you what to put, but with a last name of Alonzo, I’d say this one.” She pointed to the long descriptive list for Mexicans. “But I don’t speak Spanish……and neither do my parents," I argued.
Mrs. Anderson was out of patience and I was running out of time. With my cheeks hot and no doubt red, I took one last look at the descriptive words for Hispanics and bubbled in my answer.
Christine - 5th Grade circa late 1990s
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