VivirLatino

The 2010 Census has appeared in my hood and when I say it has appeared in my hood I mean it. There are posters, billboards, flyers and stickers in English and in Spanish encouraging my vecinos and me to fill out the form. The 74th Roosevelt Ave subway station is lined with psa’s, as you can see by the picture attached.

My own census form arrived on Tuesday and so did my my mom’s. Last night I helped her fill it out and cringed a little when she got to the question on Latinidad (on the form it says “Hispanic Origin”) followed by race. As exemplified by the conversation after Bianca’s post on claiming Afro-Latinidad, many Latinos struggle with the concepts of race as they play out in the United States. For example, my mother and sister blame me and the way I filled out the 2000 Census for the visit by a census worker.

I don’t claim Afro-Latinidad, as that hasn’t been my personal identity experience growing up to now but I also don’t claim whiteness, as my experiences do not reflect that reality either. Rather, as a Puerto Rican I identify as mixed race, including “white” Spanish colonial roots, African roots, and Indigenous. So, I check off all three. For my older daughter, I write in Mapuche for tribal affiliation. My younger daughter, a ChileRican gets the same check marks that I do.

My mother is horrified by this. She checked off Puerto Rican and white for herself and my sister, without asking my sister how she identifies racially. This doesn’t surprise me but it makes me sad. When I was a child, the aunt that raised my mother would pull out old Puerto Rican history books and point to conquistadors with my same last name. As a middle schooler, I identified as “Spanish”, denying my Rican roots. So this is a common narrative that has been passed on in my family, a narrative that shifted directions with me through my own process of politicization. The narrative my children are growing up with is complicated but clear in it’s complexity of not denying any part of our real history.