NOT LATINA OR BLACK ENOUGH
But in the 7th grade, things began to change. The girls at my majority-white private school in Maryland snickered at my hairstyles, which, because of its in-between texture, I could never quite get to look like theirs. When I tried to speak Spanish to my Puerto Rican family members, they laughed at my “gringa” accent. When I attempted to fit in with the Black students in my class, they called me Mexican and told me I acted like a white girl—comments that were supposed to be funny, but hurt deeply.