Dearest Disbelievers

I mentioned in a previous post that I might be posting one of my slam poems and I thought why the hell not? So here we go. Up next comes a strong opinion about being biracial, more specifically about being a white Latina.

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Dearest Disbelievers

Contrary to popular belief, Spanish was actually my first language.

I’m Dominican American, you see.

“Wait, so if you’re like… Hispanic… why are you like… white?”

Well, ignorant, uncultured stranger, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret:

Not all Latinos are tan.

I know. Shocker!

Just like we also don’t wear grass skirts and drink piña coladas by the beach all day.

My parents decided that if my siblings and I were to grow up in America, mingle with Gringos and speak English all day, we might as well have Latin sounding names, hence: Yan Diego, Javier Alberto and Maya Isabel.

When I was seven, my family moved to the Dominican Republic.

Lunch was always the mingling fireworks of sancocho in my mouth, the salty sweetness of platano maduro and the garlic aroma of arepitas.

Abuelo would hum to the tune of old bachatas while he spiced up the kitchen.

Mami always said she’d teach me to dance merengue because she claimed Latin music was in my blood.

Papi would laugh and stumble over a language he only learned to speak at age thirty, trying his hardest to blend into a culture that was too loud for his Californian vibes.

At first, I didn’t feel any different at school than I did at home.

But then the stares never left my straight hair nor did the kids remember that I, too, could speak in their language, forgetting I knew whom they were talking about when they snickered “la blanquita.”

I was only a little white girl to them, you see.

I wasn’t Dominicana. I didn’t dance salsa.

I couldn’t dip into every valley that was the rolling of my r’s.

But then how come Abuela called me nieta since birth?

How come I only feel at home when my hips are swaying to Bambas?

How come when I went home every night, I sat down to eat La Bandera?

How can a culture so present in me, so loud, so THERE be silenced by the color of my skin?

How come my cousins, sun-kissed and coil-haired, who have never step foot in Dominicana, be considered more Hispanic than a white girl who’s lived there more than half her life?

How come my first words were in tongues only found overseas?

Abuelo’s spoken to me about Trujillo—about a dictatorship that smothered our music, smothered our freedom; trampled the stamp that is our flag so we couldn’t raise it any higher than our feet, so we felt we had nowhere we belonged to.

When I go home over break, I want to dance in syncopated rhythms, speak the song that is Lengua Española, gorge myself with con-con, paella, tostones, mangú, fritos, guandules, yuca y salami—stand tall in a land I was not born in, but a land I call my own.

There’s a Dominican flag hanging above my bed in my room here at the Abbey.

It’s a red and blue treasure map, raised with pride, always guiding me home.

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There we go. Kinda proud of it, I will admit that. 

And with that, I leave you lovely humans/creatures/preferred-noun.

Hasta la próxima,

Much love xoxo

Maya