Every one of us is a cultural person. You can see it in our language, art, food, and customs.

If you pull back the curtain a little further, your cultural identity reveals itself in how we perceive ourselves and in the roles and responses we decide to take up in social situations. It helps us understand our personalities, social norms, beliefs, and standards. I believe that becoming aware of your own identity cannot be separated from the cultures which have built and structured it. Only recently have I became aware of my own cultural identity, transforming the way I see myself today and understanding how I interpret the world around me. Growing up on the border between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, in a very Hispanic community, I was the daughter of a Chicana mother and an English American father. My mother was the only one in her family to marry a caucasian, and while I would not say she lost her heritage during their marriage, it was certainly disguised and out of sight. We were, as some would be identified, an entirely white family. While my cousins had quinceneras, I had the sweet sixteen celebration equivalent. Even my schoolmates, predominately Hispanic, labeled me gringa and excluded me from various social situations that bonded them as a community. While I always had an ear for the Spanish language, nobody attempted to speak to me in Spanish, limiting my social reach. When I found new schools to attend, teachers assumed I had just moved in from a different state, probably up north, despite having grown up in the same neighborhood my entire life. I had a brief stint at attending an All Christian Private School, up on the mountain, where the first time in my adolescence, I was surrounded by other gringas and gringos like myself whom I rarely met in public school. That didnt last too long. Feeling cold and isolated in such a rigid environment, I was happy to return to

public schooling almost immediately. It was okay if everybody pointed to me as the white girl and called me guerra or gringa; I simply had accepted that identity, not yet having fully understood it myself. But I wasnt a white girl living in a white girl world. No, I was a white girl living in El Chuco town, as we locals still refer to it as. It has been almost 10 years since I have lived in El Paso. I became independent at age 17 and have lived on my own in San Francisco ever since. During this time, a full recognition of self identity finally revealed itself to me, without the help of outside societal stereotypes. It was through my own preferences, standards, styles, beliefs, and social interactions that really highlighted my self makeup. I had flashbacks of never having liked my fathers conversational topics of technology, statistics, and wall street jargon, and I almost always preferred to hear the family gossip over rolling tacos with my mother. That had to of been the beginning of my ethos. I had started to pay attention to this. Living in a more modern, technologically advanced city, a girl from Old El Paso, had been for me, like a fish out of water. This was where I had realized, to my surprise, how incredibly mexicana I actually was. You may laugh like no big deal, but let me tell you how frustrating it was to feel duped into believing I was not someone I actually have been, for years. Could you imagine trying to discuss with your friends American pop music, unable to follow along, because you were too shy to admit you actually listened to Elvis Crespo and Celso Pina? You would know how embarrassing that would be, If you were Mexican.... My audience slimmed a little, unable to figure out my style. There were a few things that I caught myself doing that would make any comedian joke, Youre a Mexican if..., and these inside jokes only pointed out my norm; coming from a white girl, it was pretty funny. I only started to take this new identity seriously when the next phenome-

na began: every person I knew and every person I didnt know was speaking to me in Spanish. How did they know to do such a thing? I hadnt changed one bit on the outside; I was still the same me. I was spoken to without hesitation, like they knew I understood their joys and their struggles. I did understand them, it turned out. I understood them more than any other human intersectionality and I felt right alongside them. Spanish, my new found communication, evolved naturally. I knew more what was going on, on Telemundo than CBS. If you asked me how I made this mestizaje, I couldnt tell you. Perhaps I always had more of my mother in me and it finally just emerged . All my past mannerisms, awkward conversations, and social/cultural viewpoints now made sense to me now that I understood my other half. I could stop denying my ethnic complexity and start to embrace both sides of who I was. Once I made this realization, understanding my place in this world made so much sense.