This is my first time telling this to anyone so I'm really nervous. I'm Hispanic but my skin is very fair so it caused problems for me making friends with my own race because they didn't want to hang out with a "white girl" and I wasn't "dark enough". It caused me to be ashamed of myself and ask myself things like "am I really Hispanic even though both my parents are?" People would tell me that I looked and acted white so that's what I became and now I'm too ashamed to call myself Hispanic.
I’m going to answer a few things in this question that you didn’t ask bc other people are asking similar things.
Ok first of Hispanic/Latinx isn’t a race. There are black, white, Asian, mestizo, indigenous, and any other race you can think of that are Latin American. When people say someone doesn’t look Latino they have a stereotypical image in their head of what someone from Latin America looks like.
Let people know that people from Latin America are not a monolithic group. We don’t all look the same, or act the same. Of course this can be hard with people of our own ethnicity since I’ve noticed a lot of the times, they try and regulate who is or isn’t latinx enough.
There are plenty of white Latinxs and you shouldn’t feel like you aren’t one. Just look at Univision, there’s white ones everywhere (this is bc of colorism, but that’s a different story).
Now I want to add why latinx/Hispanic/mestizo are different identities one could take. Latinxs are people who have ancestry to Latin America. Hispanic means someone who comes from a country that speaks Spanish. Not all countries in Latin America speak Spanish, like Brazil and Haiti. Some people don’t like the term Hispanic because it associates them with the Spanish colonizers. Mestizo is someone who has mixed Spanish + indigenous blood. This category includes a lot of people from Latin America, because of colonization.
- Ingrid
