Angelina+G’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

The America I Want to Live In

My mom makes the best green pozole. For the majority of you who have probably never heard of it before, pozole is a Mexican soup containing hominy, meat, salsa, onion, and a bunch of ingredients that can cure my cold better than Tylenol. In Mexico it is usually made with pork, but my mom makes it with chicken, which is kind of considered an American version of pozole, but tastes great regardless. As much I would like it to be, this speech is not about delicious Mexican soup. I am Mexican-American. Many of you probably don’t know what that means; even I find that the lines can be a bit blurry sometimes. But to my family, it means being born in America, speaking English around the house, and still carrying bits of Spanish culture.

Being Mexican-American isn’t easy. I went to middle school at De Anza, where pretty much everyone looked like me. But because I didn’t live on the avenue and didn’t speak fluent Spanish, I never really fit in. When I got into Foothill, hardly anyone looked like me, at least not in the Honors classes I was taking and would continue to take throughout my high school career. The truth is, I could never really fit in here at Foothill because I don’t live on the hills of Ventura and wear Patagonia or own a pair of birkenstocks. Being Mexican-American, I have always felt like I had to work twice as hard as everyone else. To my Mexican friends at De Anza and to some of my peers here at Foothill, I was “whitewashed,” a term I have grown to loathe. Not that I have anything against… most white people. It’s just that using the term insinuates that I am less Mexican than I know am, a word that is used by ignorant people to try and diminish my identity which they have no right to manipulate. To my American friends at Foothill, I am an outsider, because I’m copper-skinned and will die before I even step near a pair of birkenstocks. I have to be twice as Mexican and twice as American as everyone else just to be taken seriously by either side.

The judgements about my ethnicity have extended beyond the classroom. On my dad’s side of the family, where everyone spoke Spanish, I was teased at family parties for sounding like a “gringa,” which translates to white girl. I embarrassed myself at taco stands and swap meets when I had to order or buy something in Spanish. On the other end of the spectrum, I have been judged by the color of my skin by white people, even more so in recent years. Occasionally, I am followed around stores, undergoing stares from an employee or two. Sometimes I am spoken to like a child when someone assumes I don’t speak English. One day I was riding my bike to the mall with my older sister. We were riding on Telegraph Road and had just made it past Kimball Park, which was the hardest part of the bike in our opinion, and were finally zooming past the long strip of downhill road before Balboa. When a stop light eventually turned red, we ended up by Buena. We were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to turn green again, when a truck whizzed past us and a man inside it pointed out and yelled at us to go back to our country. Before I could even react, the truck was long gone, and the coward inside went with it. That only happened two years ago and it just makes me more and more angry every time I have to recall that memory.

Under all of the sarcastic comments and dark humor, I would still consider myself an optimist. I do my best to give people the benefit of the doubt and to never judge a book by it's cover.. In elementary school, I always read signs saying, “treat people how you would like to be treated.” But my mom taught me to treat people equally and fairly without expecting anything in return, even when some people didn’t deserve it. When I told her about what happened on Telegraph Road she said I had to be strong. She even told me that the man couldn’t have known we were born in America just by looking at us. At the time, I was angry at her. Why was she taking the side of a racist? But looking back now, she wasn’t taking his side. The advice she gave me wasn’t meant to be applied to only this incident. She was giving me instructions, instructions that I wish naively that I won’t ever have to give to my own children, on how to cope with the fact that the world is filled with ignorant people in this country, and the only way people like me can live on, is by being the bigger person, even if those people do not deserve it.

Now don’t be confused, this is not an anti-white speech. Rather, it is a speech about privilege, and how many white Americans still refuse to acknowledge its existence. It is a speech that should make you think about what it is like to live as a minority in America. On a less depressing note, I admit, that I think we are all extremely lucky to be a part of a generation that has so many active supporters of diversity. But even though we are inching our way to a more equal future, we still have some ways to go.

The America I want to live in, bring children into, grow old in, and die in, is one that is accepting of diversity. It does not discriminate against non-Anglos. It does not judge simply by the color of one’s skin. The America I want to live in does not hate or judge what it does not understand but instead is willing to be educated. To put it simply, the America I want to live in.. is a melting pot of my mom’s pozole. Thank you.