They call me beaner, and I’m not Mexican.
Those screaming, broken letters,
Make that word, thrown at me in anger,
And I didn’t even know what it meant.
So I laughed it off.
I look at my skin and I’m not brown,
I’m not caramel, or toffee, or dulce de leche.
I am a pale, pale white.
My veins, blue and green and purple, visible spiderwebs up my arms.
Am I latina enough?
The face that moves in my mirror is pale and pink from the cold,
Button-nosed, freckled, green-brown eyes and thin lips.
I speak and no accent comes out.
“Notifications” and “cookies” give me away.
And then the looks come forth.
The fetishizing and the disgust and the curiosity.
Like I’m a white-passing zoo animal.
And yes, I speak Spanish.
And yes, I am latina.
And no, I am not Mexican.
I sit here and I watch the news.
“Mexicans are stealing our jobs.”
“Illegals jump the wall and steal our women and our money.”
I sit here and the jokes begin.
“Oh, right! You’re an illegal!”
“I’ll get you deported. Ha, ha.”
I sit here and I laugh into the night.
I was born latina enough.
It’s easy now to pretend I don’t care,
To hide my accent and blend,
To weave in and out of the stereotypes,
The images that are thrown at me,
Accusing of not fitting into them,
Celebrating when I do.
As if I was made entirely for their entertainment.
The hoops, the curves, the accent, the crazy.
I look in the mirror and see me
Crying over another job saying “no,”
Screaming at my visa,
Ripping up the paperwork.
And I know I shouldn’t,
But I raise the finger anyways,
Because this should not be so goddamned hard.
And I am not another curiosity to be stared at.
And I am not just another stereotype.
And yes, I speak Spanish.
And yes, I am latina.
And no, I am not Mexican.
I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.
And I was NOT born
And raised
Right here.
Patricia Smith writes the poem Skinhead from the point of view of a white supremacist. She uses violent and bloody images that carry a crazed sort of intonation throughout the poem. The words jump out at you in their violence and aggressiveness, immediately invoking the pain of thousands of oppressed peoples around the United States. You can feel the fear and the pain, but you can also feel the anger and the hatred that the White supremacist point of view experiences, creating a chilling combination for the audience. There are a lot of specific words with religious connotation within the poem, such as ‘righteous’ and ‘anointed’ and the line “I was born to make things right,” as if indicating a divine, wholly white, purpose – creating a direct connection between religious fanatics, religious history, and the white supremacist movement. Towards the end of the poem, she wraps the whole commentary on the United States as whole, commenting on the institutionalized and conditioned hatred that this white supremacist experiences by saying, “I’m your baby, America, your boy… And I was born and raised right here.” Although the poem, as you travel through it, alluded that this is the country’s doing with the very American-history-related slurs, these last couple of lines drive the point home with a poignant confirmation of that pervasive creeping suspicion.
While Smith’s poem is written from an alien perspective to her own, which makes it all the more chilling as she portrays what she thinks a white supremacist thinks and feels and says in response to her own experience and oppression by that group as a black woman. I wrote my poem from my own perspective, as an international Latina woman living in the United States. I don’t have a lot of experience with poetry in its technical composition, but I could see that the division of the stanzas and the amount of lines in each were significant, especially considering that there was a sort of pattern in the amount of lines. So I attempted to write my own poem along those same quantities of lines within each stanza. Although Smith is talking about overt racial aggressions, because I am a white-passing latina, I don’t experience those types of aggressions, so instead I wrote about my own experiences with discrimination. What is very important for my poem is my own identity as a white Latina woman.
Growing up, the Latina stereotypes were already known to me through popular culture, such as TV shows, movies, even books. Because I grew up with one foot in the United States and one foot back in Paraguay, I was always exposed to all the stereotypes that Americans had for Latinas. One of them would be that anybody south of the border is broadly considered to simply be Mexican; others, that latinas are loud, crazy, sex-driven, dumb, great at housework, incredibly attached to their mothers, daddy-issues, and so on. So throughout my time in the United States, I have had the unique experience that because I look white and have virtually no accent in English, except for a few key words or when my emotions are running high, people confuse me as American. So when I’m meeting someone and am having a conversation it is assumed that I am from the United States and as soon as my accent comes out, I am presented with a range of different emotions, which I can narrow down to three specific categories: disgust (at me being a foreigner), curiosity (either positive or negative), and fetishizing (continuously sexualizing Latinas for nothing other than the stereotype-caused sexual promises). When reading the chapter from Gina Torino’s “Microaggression Theory,” one of the examples they wrote about when explaining microaggressive comments framed as compliments hit a little too close to home. Throughout my educational career I have been asked and “expected to speak for, and on behalf of” (Torino, 262) the Latin American community, as well as receiving comments such as, “Wow! Your English is really good!”, “Oh, you are so articulate in English!”, and other variations of the same thing, indicating that they found me “smart, articulate… relative to how they perceived” (Torino, 280) other members of the Latino community. My poem is based on these, and other, microaggressions that I experience, if not every day, then on a significantly regular basis.