Since High School, I’ve enjoyed looking at artwork and trying to guess the gender of the artist by only looking at their piece. I am usually pretty good at it. In fact at Artomatic this year, I correctly guessed the gender of the artist on all the pieces I saw except for one. The one I couldn’t decide on was a transgender piece. I’ve learned though that my ability to guess gender on blogs is not so good.
For example until recently I thought Tortilla Sandwich was written by a male and Prentisis Riddle by a female. I’ve also been wrong about ethnicity. At first (long ago) I thought El Oso was Xicano and I hate admitting it but I questioned the intentions of his writing once I found out he wasn’t.
I find myself unintentionally assigning gender, ethnicity, relationship status and sometimes location to bloggers. And while sometimes I base these assumptions on little to nothing I still find myself surprised when I find out a blogger is not what I expected. The sad truth is I read their blogs differently once I find out.
Seyd, told me that when he first started reading my blog, he thought that “I was white girl trying to hard”. I felt really hurt by that.
When I was in DC a few weeks ago I was driving around with Alexi and one of his friends. Alexi made some comment about me being noticeable different in some neighborhood because I am white, I agreed with Alexi. His friend interrupted and said “Elenamary, you consider yourself White?” “Yeah, I do.” he looked out the back seat of the window and said “But you don’t look white. You look Hispanic. I guess I can just tell because I’ve been to Latin America.” On the other end of the spectrum Seyd was shocked to learn my mother is morenita / cafecita (dark skinned). It is odd to me. White people see me as “brown” and “brown” people see me as white. My (white) boss at work says I look “ethnically-ambiguous”.
Truth is I think I do look white and find that people don’t know I am anything but white until I tell them. I think Latinos see the reality of me being white and I think white people once they know I am Latina want to see something different.
However, it makes me just as sad trying to prove to Latinos that I am not just “some white girl who is trying too hard”. I am both White and Latina. My Mexican Abuelita is just short of five feet, dark brown, with long braided gray hair. My Irish grandfather was the shortest of his siblings at 5’10 with pasty-white-skin and blue eyes. I am both of these people. And while I may look more like my Irish grandfather, I am culturally both. I don’t like white people telling me they can tell I am Mexican, and I don’t like Mexicans telling me that I don’t look Mexican. Woe is me.
