Recently, racial identification has become…challenging. For most of my life I identified as Mexican American. My mom is from Mexico, my dad is from America. Made sense to me. In the last census, 10 years ago, I remember being flummoxed by the fact that Mexican/Hispanic/Latinx was an option for ethnicity but not for race. So I could select Hispanic, but I still needed to choose a race. I don’t remember what I chose then, but this year I chose “other.” My dad is an olive-skinned white man, but I don’t identify as white (alone) because my skin color is not white. My facial features are not white.

Mom used to tell me that Mexico is just like the USA: there are people of all colors/races. Blue-eyed blonds, red heads, etc. Not everyone has brown skin, though “Mexican” has become shorthand for brown-skinned people, particularly in this country. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that Mexican wouldn’t be a “race.” No more than American would be if you were in another country.

Thanks to a couple of DNA tests, I know my Native American DNA is around 27% and I figured this is where my brown skin comes from. But it never felt right to claim it on forms that ask because I didn’t have any details in terms of tribal connections. I knew I wasn’t likely connected to the Native tribes most Americans are familiar with (Cherokee, Sioux, etc.) and I wasn’t sure if it was only those tribes that the forms were referring to (thinking only of North America rather than the Americas).

I decided to ask my aunt, my mom’s half-sister, if she had any idea about the Native background. She told me that my great-grandmother was part Native American, believed to be Yaqui, an indigenous group living in northern Mexico and Arizona. She said she never talked about it (and I should note, the desire to search for this information is one of privilege. My mom’s family in Juarez had a hard life and whether they were Native or not was not something they cared about. They were Mexican.) She said she remembered my great-grandmother made an adobe oven in the backyard to make bread and gorditas and she wore her hair in long braids. (There is a photo of her in my Instagram with my mom and uncle that show her with the braids.) And she was likely more than half Native because I’m 27% which means my mom was more than 50% which means her mom was nearly full…so that must mean my great -grandmother was nearly full. (Of course, maybe DNA breakdown doesn’t work out so cleanly).

Now I have a bit of detail with the hope to get more. And it has helped with my self-identification. Most of my DNA comes from Europe (mostly British and Irish followed by French and German and then Spanish and Portuguese.) Native American is the next largest part of my DNA. One of the challenges with identifying as Mexican American, Chicana, etc., is that I don’t speak Spanish. I was raised in the middle of Ohio, surrounded by white faces (except my mom’s and brother’s). I (sadly) don’t have much connection with the Mexican culture. I don’t even speak Spanish. (Both things I’m trying to address.) Then the question for me becomes, Is having brown skin and a Mexican mother enough to self-identify as Mexican American/Latina/Chicana? What is the expectation from others in those groups if I claim that background? Would they, at the minimum, expect me to speak Spanish? So the word I’ve selected to describe myself is mestiza. Mestiza (which I learned about in high school) is a person with a mix of Native and European ancestry. That sums me up perfectly. And it feels like there is less of an expectation of language tied to mestiza.

As far as claiming Native American (along with White) on forms…I still haven’t done it. I had another opportunity while filling out forms for my new insurance. It just feels like I’m claiming an experience I haven’t earned because I know there are people from all these tribes that live on reservations or live within tribal communities and that is not me. For now I’ll keep marking “other.”