Maria Vargas > Recent Status Updates

We are socialized to seek admiration and approval to a fault. When does the social performance end? How many of us will follow the prescribed roles—marriage, motherhood—just to be respected, heard, or legible as adults?

We call mujeres locas, lloronas, putas, and a slew of other terms that are specifically meant to shame women for not following the rules and for speaking up for themselves.

Women tend to do a lot of work to justify the actions of the men in our lives, while our men do little to nothing to acknowledge our pain, much less try to alleviate it.

Even when speaking English, regional accents or accents that come from speaking multiple languages get toned down for the comfort of white ears—a lot of BIPOC call this their “white voice.”

We all adhere to a version of respectability politics—“we” being BIPOC. We all switch our speech, accents, behaviors, appearances into more palatable ones around normative culture, which I will rightfully refer to as white culture.

Some days, you will forget that you are smart and worthy, because you might stutter when you have to speak English in front of a room of native English speakers.

To assimilate requires erasing your ethnicity; you have to perform in a way that puts white people at ease, to the point where you earn honorary whiteness: “You’re not like the others.”

When women began to be recognized for their professional successes, impostor syndrome led them to believe what they had been socialized to believe—that any accomplishments resulted from luck, teamwork, and outside help.

When you are made to feel like you are not beautiful, and society teaches you that the worth of girls and women lies in their beauty, then you start to feel unlovable.

Because I have my papi’s Brownness but mi mami’s gender, a curse—I was born female and Brown, in a cultura that hates females and especially hates the darker ones.

We did not create anti-Indigenous sentiment; we were taught it, we were forced to accept it, and then we internalized and perpetuated it on our own. That is the insidious nature of colonization. Many people have survived by assimilating toward the dominant group’s values, and this internalized racism continues to traumatize entire nations.

I call short-term white “helpers” voluntourists because that is what they were doing: touring our country and our people and disguising their tourism with the “good deeds” of helping us. Do not let them fool you into believing otherwise.

As a non-Black and also a non-white person, I am often prompted to pick a race category that does not include me. I am either given a white or black box to check, and I did not always understand where I belonged.

Your laugh carries liberation in it.

Race is not biological. It is political and personal.

Latino is defined as a person whose origins are in Latin America, or who have ancestors from Latin America. The linguistic roots of the word aside, Latino was a term invented in the United States.

The weight isn’t a burden, but it is a heavy load to carry. I want to take care of my mom. I want to help my family. But family is supposed to be a mutual support system. When one person becomes an ATM for the entire family, when the help they expect is always financial, then beautiful values devolve into open wounds.

Why don’t you speak English? Why don’t you speak Spanish? Being Latino in America means the answer to both of these questions holds us to an impossible standard to prove we’re both sufficiently American and authentically Latino.

It is not against the law to speak Spanish. In fact, it is not the law to speak English, as the United States does not have an official language.

The volume of my voice offended just as much as my manner of speech. After my boss told me I was too loud, I learned to tame my laughter. This was a reminder that taking up space will make others uncomfortable because they only want to see us quiet and thankful.

Papers do not define undocumented people, but the lack of them certainly outlines much of our lives—what we can and cannot do, what we do anyway. I didn’t remain undocumented because I wanted to—no one does.

A white person today can simply say, “I am white; therefore I am American,” but a Mexican with centuries of history in this land must explain where we are really from.

“There is nothing more potentially hostile than the indigenous ego interpreting the laws of his conqueror upon his own people.”

I love us. I believe in us. We don’t need the kindness of the white gaze to celebrate ourselves. We don’t need our stories to be translated so white people can see us as human. They are not our saviors. We are.

We are all caught up in a system designed to help advance white supremacy by replicating the behavior of our oppressor, sometimes out of ignorance, for protection, or because we have a false belief that we, too, can become white, and therefore have the power, money, and privileges white people do.

The lies of assimilation culminate in telling immigrants that if we do it “the right way,” we’ll be welcomed with open arms. But there is only one correct way to exist in America, to have unquestioned belonging, and that is to be white.

I didn’t find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden.

Americanizing was supposed to help me fit in, but even after I learned English, became a citizen, got my coins, I still wasn’t welcomed.

Having an accent said I was from someplace else; sounding like a white girl fooled me into thinking I could belong in the United States. If I sounded like I was from here, who would question whether I should actually be here?

It’s terrifying knowing that people can dig their fingers into our lives and twist things around.