What Selena Taught Me About Being Mixed Race

Words by Natalie Hernandez Moses / / she/her / / @natalieemosess

Selena Quintanilla, Illustrated by Anushua Shua // she/her // @shuasinha.art

I love my mom and I love my dad, and for a while, they loved each other. They lived in Annapolis, Maryland with my older brother, and then moved back home. Home, El Paso, Texas, where they were raised separately and eventually met and eventually separated. It's in the “separate” that things get tricky. My dad was raised in a half-Protestant, half-Jewish, full-white household and my mother in a Catholic, Mexican-American one. When they came together and added children to the mixing pot, our mouths were a little too full from all the hyphens. My brother and I were raised under the much more simple identity of Mexican-American, but to me, it felt like I had these fragmented identities cooking up inside of me and making a weird meal that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place. I’m Mexican-American, but I’m also white. I’m Jewish, but I’m also Catholic. With all of those identities, what does that make me? For a while, I was just plain confused. 

With every year comes Hispanic Heritage Month— a time when we can make jokes about being entitled to financial compensation or say that parties should exclusively play Hispanic music. My favorite joke of all was that mixed kids got to work out their personalized Hispanic Heritage Month plans. The joke was that we had a couple of choices when it came to celebrating. We could celebrate for 12 hours of the day, every other day, even a clean two weeks. I was always partial to the idea of the first option so that I could “sleep off my whiteness.” We joked about it every year, but it would hit close to home sometimes. I remember thinking one of the best compliments I had ever received was when I was once mistaken for being fully Mexican and therefore entitled to the “full month plan.” The sun shined a little brighter that day.

It’s only when I question why that compliment was enjoyable that I start to feel bad. I realize that by attempting to come off as completely Mexican, I’m erasing my whiteness. By that logic, I’m also erasing my father. That’s where this whole other level of the shame that comes with being mixed with white. Like everything wrong white people did to people of color, particularly the Spanish colonization of the Mexican indigenous people, feels like a completely irrational weight on my shoulders. Like, I can’t enjoy being Hispanic because half of my heritage includes the genocide of my other half.

It gets even more complicated when I think about Spaniard conquistadores forcing their culture onto indigenous tribes and the ultimate near eradication of prior indigenous languages. Here I am, being insecure about not being able to speak Spanish fluently when, as a Hispanic person, it’s not even a language I was supposed to be speaking in the first place. Evidence of colonization exists everywhere, even in a common, ridiculous place like my name. My middle name, which is also my mothers maiden name, is Hernandez. That’s a Spanish name, not Mexican indigenous! The name Moses is probably Jewish, so that leaves me with a white first name, a Spanish middle name, and a Jewish last name. To me, there is very little that is Mexican-American about my name at all.

See, my mothers side of the family, while fully Mexican, has been living in America for at least four generations. I have no family in Mexico so I’ve never had a real excuse to travel there, and my mother was raised in a predominantly English speaking household. My grandmother made the decision that her children would be English natives instead of Spanish so that they would face less challenges in what was a deeply racist education system. I had the opportunity to be in bilingual classes up until seventh grade, but my mom had no such option, so it makes sense that with an English speaking mother and a white father, I would be raised without an emphasis on Spanish. That’s not to say that I wasn’t spoken to in Spanish, but I was never pushed to reach fluency like I am in English. Language is complicated when it comes to its cultural ties; there’s no denying that knowing the language of your culture can make you feel closer to it, but that doesn’t mean that those who weren’t taught are any less connected. But, when people see my name, and they hear me pronounce the H-E in Hernandez instead of leaving it silent, they recognize the whiteness in me, like it's shameful to speak Spanish with a white accent. Wanting to be titled as Mexican-American, in that regard, felt ridiculous. But whatever, Spanish is the colonizers language anyways.

It’s important to make the distinction between my identity being an internal versus external struggle. It’s easy to get lost in feeling like the world is against you because you don’t fit in, but the struggle does not come from the world, or society, or whatever else you want to blame, the struggle comes from internal hate. A lot of mixed kids’ media falls under the stereotype of being too preachy or too whiny, acting like no one in the world understands what it’s like to feel like an ethnic outsider and that everyone is against you. Maybe I’ve just been lucky enough not to experience real adversity, but I really don’t think this is a “society hates me” problem. It all exists inside of us, the ability to overcome some kind of internal hate for the part of us that we don’t understand, whether that’s whiteness or something else, and just move on to a point where we don’t even think of ourselves as half anything anymore.

I’d like to thank my early obsession with the Selena movie for helping me to reach consciousness of my ethnic dilemma early on. If you haven’t seen it,  there’s this scene where legendary Tejano star Selena Quintanilla is riding in the car with her father/manager Abraham Quintanilla and her brother/bass player/producer AB. At this time, the Quintanilla family was renowned as a talented group who had worked hard for their dreams; they had faced adversity as a woman-fronted Tejano show, but managed to get several No. 1 hits under their belts. Here they were, scared to play in Monterey, Mexico because, while Selena sang perfectly in Spanish, she spoke it less than perfectly. Abraham, Selena and AB talk about how they, as a multi-generational Mexican-American family, felt “too American” for the Mexicans and “too Mexican” for the Americans. I watched this as a little girl and laughed because it seemed ridiculous to me that someone who is so thoroughly Hispanic, the perfect role model, was just as insecure with her identity as I was, and she wasn’t even half-white. No matter what, people are going to find something to criticize. But just like I continue to learn Spanish and connect with my Mexican-American identity, Selena played that show in Monterey and won everyone over with her kind soul. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t remember the word for excited in Spanish, and it doesn’t matter that I struggle to speak Spanish all-together.

So I think I’ll make my peace with whatever I am— a mix of white, Hispanic, Mexican, American and everything else— to be just me. While I continue to struggle to define my identity, I will turn to everything else I know about myself to be true as a marker for who I am: just me. And that will be enough.