Figured out what it means to be part of this members only club.
By: Sara Bolanos
During my sophomore year was around the time I should have been planning my quinceañera. For a Latina a quinceañera is the equivalent to a sweet 16, but more on a wedding size scale, it could put all those 'my super sweet 16' shows to shame. A couple of other girls I knew already had theirs. They wore big pink princess dresses. They had a court of ladies and men to dance, sort of like a bridal party and groomsmen. There was always tons of music and food. The celebration was meant to signify a Latina girl’s transition from childhood into adulthood. The ceremony, which entails the father removing the girl’s flat shoe and replacing it with a high heel is always emotional, and someone always cries. For some families parents start planning it from the moment their daughter is born.
But I wasn’t planning mine. The reason was that I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate. I remember the moment I had started questioning it. When I was in the 7th grade, I left my Facebook page open on my friend’s laptop. She went in and changed the ‘n’ in my last name to an ‘ñ’. ‘You are a Latina’ she told me. “Be proud of it,” and I was. But I didn’t look Latina. And that was the sticking point. Growing up in Northern Virginia where almost everyone seemed to be bi-racial, a game of ‘guess my ethnicity’ was always fun. No one could guess where I was from, because I ‘look’ white. Typically the response would be along the lines of “You’re probably German and British.” Well, they weren’t wrong. My mother’s ancestry is German/ Irish, but my father is a full blooded Costa Rican
Traditionally at a Quinceañera there is a father daughter dance, much like those at a wedding. My dad and I had one pictured above. I'm wearing a traditional pink dress, but it's not big and poofy instead it was understated.
I was proud of where I was from, but I didn’t feel comfortable fully embracing my identity in public, mostly because people were cruel. I was told by the other Latina girls in my school, that I wasn’t ‘Latina enough” to have a quincinera. In my mind I always considered myself Hispanic. I held dual citizenship with Costa Rica and the United States, and although I didn’t speak the language, I was taking it in school, and could understand enough of it to know when I was being talked about. A quincinera meant a lot to me, it was a way for me to contect with my heritage; which although I had plenty of I felt that I was lacking in my practice of it. My abuela never had a girl, so this was an even bigger deal for her than it was for any of us.
Ultimately, we decided to have my quincinera in Costa Rica, where the celebration would be a lot less controversial. But the experience stung. It left me wondering what it even meant to be not Latina enough. Was it race? Was it ethnicity? Maybe it was both, or maybe it was neither, maybe they didn’t know the difference between them. If I wasn’t Hispanic enough, than what exactly is ‘enough’, and how is it measured?
My cake at my Quinceañera in Costa Rica
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Unofficially the ‘one-drop’ rule was considered ‘enough’ to be of any race, this ‘rule’ clearly has racist roots, as it was used to determine the size of the black population in the United States tracing back to the early 1900's. Essentially the rule goes if you were 1/8th of a race or ethnicity you fell under that category and were to check it off on the U.S. Census. On the Census forms there are four categories provided for race, white, Asian, black, and Native American/ Alaskan Native. The 2010 census was the first with the option to check off multiple different races. However for the Hispanic community, we fall under white, so the Census wasn’t going to help me solve my dilemma. So I abandoned race and turned towards ethnicity.
First, I tried to understand what ethnicity even is. Janie Lee, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Mary Washington, points out that race itself is a social construct that has no biological or genetic association. “Race is based on phenotype,” Lee said. “Which is, what you look like, your skin color, the size of your mouth, the ways your eyes are shaped. That’s it, purely physical. Whereas ethnicity is regarded more as cultural heritage.” According to Lee, Latina falls under ethnicity category, not race. this includes family name, values, and traditions, and each country has different traditions. I measured myself according to these. My last name was a dead giveaway. Most Latin American countries are Catholic, check. Did we cook traditional Costa Rican food at my house? Yes. Do I visit the country to stay in-touch with my ‘roots’ so to speak? Yes I do. Do I speak the language? No, I do not. On a pro and con check list, I have more pros in the category of Latina than cons. The most factor of course was that I identify myself as being Latina.
I found an interview online that dealt with some of the issues I was facing, particularly the dilemma I had about whether I was Latina enough based on my language abilities. On The Huffington Post, Jane the Virgin actress Gina Rodriguez, addressed these issue head on. When asked by the interview if she believes that a latina does not need to speak the language fluently to be proud of their heritage Rodriguez replies with ‘That’s bananas’. “We are the Latino Community.” Rodriguez said. “Under that umbrella we have 50 or so countries, to put us in a box in unfair.”
However the question remains, how much of your language is tied to your ethnicity? Well according to Rodriguez not a lot.
“We’re all different,” Rodriguez said. “We have different food, different slang, different cultural garb, and different skin color, so put us all in a box is unfair.”
Rodriguez herself doesn’t speak the best Spanish, and recounts why her parents never spoke their native tongue in the house when she was growing up.
“My parents were terrified of us having accents,” Rodriguez said. “Because they were made fun of their whole life for accents. So they chose to only speak English in the house.”
Since my mom doesn’t speak Spanish my dad only spoke English in the house. He claims that he remembers trying to teach me and my brother Spanish, but we wouldn’t listen and run away from him, so he gave up my household became a monolingual household. But I shouldn’t be any less Latina for lacking the language, I knew people who considered themselves Philipino and never spoke a lick of Tagalog, yet no one ever questioned them.
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I concluded that it wasn’t fair to have a series of guidelines for me to check if I was Latina enough. I was Latina enough because I said I was.
I thought about the anxiety I faced around my quincinera, at first telling people that I thought I might combine it with a Sweet 16 and finally, deciding with my dad to have it in Costa Rica. Nearly 500 of my dads closest family came to the party. They all knew who I was but I had new idea who they were. I was able to meet people I had only heard stories about, but I still wished that my best friends could have joined.
I didn’t have a big poofy pink dress, or a court of my closest friends, instead I had a court of cousins my age that I had never met, and short pink dress that my abuela bought. We didn’t do the shoe ceremony we did something much more meaningful, everyone all 500 or something had a candle, and I was the first to light mine and it was passed around the room until everyone’s was lit where they then told me that I was always welcome in Costa Rica.Upon coming back I had a whole new sense of what it meant to be Latina, and while I disagree with what those girls said about me not being Latina enough, I agree that its rooted deep in culture. I had always freely called myself Costa Rican, but now I freely call myself a Latina.