There was a weird smell coming from my backpack. I was six years old, three and a half feet tall with uneven bangs that I had chopped myself with a pair of safety scissors, and I was missing a few teeth. And there was a weird smell coming from my backpack. My mom noticed sometimes, and then she would take out the brown paper lunch bags buried under the mess of notebooks, folders, and loose worksheets in the bag. She’d sit me down and ask me why I hadn’t eaten my lunches, why the food was rotting inside the ziplocs she’d put them in, why the tupperware had mold on it. Each time, I came up with a new excuse. I was never honest about it. How could I be? Telling your mother you’re ashamed of your culture, and by correlation, her, isn’t something even the most blunt child would feel comfortable doing.

    I sat at the lunch table each day, though, and watched the other kids pull out lunchables, uncrustables, gushers, foods that I believed were superior. My stomach would growl as I watched them eat. But I was too ashamed to do the same. 

    My school was pretty much sixty-five percent white, twenty-five percent latino, and only about ten percent made up of other races. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t grown up in one of the smallest towns in California, a town with white men with big trucks and confederate flags that flew off them. A town where racism was so normalized, I never realized it for what it was. I don’t know how I wholeheartedly believed that racism was dead, a thing of the past, as they taught us about it in history class. As if Martin Luther King Jr died, and with him, all of racism did too. I was incredibly ignorant. I was incredibly racist.

    I hated Mexicans. I hated the way Mexicans were so hairy. I hated their dark skin tones, their accents, their curly hair, their brown eyes. I hated that they were poor, I hated that they had no shame, that they were stupid and uneducated. I hated the way their houses smelled. And I hated myself, I despised myself. I despised my stupid dark hair and brown skin that would tan so easily, my stupid, boring brown eyes. I hated myself so much, I wasted all my wishes, birthday candles, loose eyelashes, shooting stars, I wasted them wishing to wake up the next day and be white.

    There is no single memory I have that can easily explain and excuse my racism, like in Hollywood, when the racist homophobic bigoted character gets redemption because their racism is rooted in some sort of one dimensional trauma. There are, however, a series of events that further pushed me to become this angry, hateful racist. 

    In elementary school, I was put into the gifted and advanced group for certain lessons. I loved to read and write from a young age, and because of this I had an advantage over some of my peers. There were six kids in my group, and I was the only brown one. I had already developed a prejudice against brown kids at this point, and I’d done my best to distance myself from them in any way possible. I had this incorrect belief that being brown meant that you were less intelligent, as I saw mostly kids of my own race in the groups that were being taught easier lessons more slowly. So I used my intelligence as a way to create division between myself and other members of my race. In reality, I was just privileged. I had parents who both graduated college, ample time to read and write for fun, and sisters who encouraged creativity. 

    But, I was given a group of intelligent white people, who, like me, believed themselves superior to the rest of the class. I spent my time with them, and soon enough they were my best friends. I knew I looked different than them, but at least, I thought, I could blend in in every other way. I’d had no idea that my race was more than just skin deep.

    It started the first time that, instead of pulling out a sandwich for lunch, I’d pulled out tupperware with leftovers from dinner, beans and sopa de conchitas, a kind of Mexican soup. I noticed a girl scrunch her nose up, and in sudden embarrassment, I tried to cover the dish up as best as I could with my arms. The boy next to me was more blunt and curious, in the way that kids lack shame, and outright asked me what I was eating, and said it smelled weird. Another boy from our group laughed and called it gross. At that moment, I panicked; I could feel my heartbeat in my ears, my eyes started welling up, my hands balled up into fists as I tried to laugh it off. My heart dropped to my stomach, my throat closed up in my neck, and I felt lonely.

     Lonesomeness has a way of making the most panic-inducing events last a lifetime. It causes time to slow, even when you seem to be moving at a faster pace than normal. My body froze, yet my emotions overflowed as, for the first time, I felt ashamed of something as simple as food, but as complex as culture and identity. As I sat there for the rest of lunchtime, with my ears red and my jaw clenched, I realized that I never wanted to be the weird kid again. No matter what, I didn’t want to feel like that. 

     So I erased that part of me. I decided to be as white as I could. My Dad and cousins would call me a coconut, or an oreo, in the years that followed, brown on the outside, white in the inside. Slowly but surely, I changed the flawed parts of me little by little.  A white friend of mine, Abbi, once told me that she thought that all races were beautiful, but brown girls just had to try harder. So I became obsessed with makeup, fashion, anything I could do to make myself “beautiful.” I plastered blotchy foundation that was three shades too orange and light for me all over my face in sixth grade. I shaved my face, arms, and legs after a remark from a friend about how her legs never grew hair like mine did. I plucked my eyebrows until they were too far apart and made my face look strange after we learned about Frida Kahlo in fifth grade, and I felt that all the eyes in the classroom gravitated towards me.

     The worst change came in seventh grade. I was hormonal, angry and weird, and totally, completely enamored. His name was Cameron Hooper, and he was dreamy in a way that only boys on TV are. He was already six feet tall at thirteen, with pale skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect smile. In a way, he was everything I wanted to be. And I was obsessed. I was sort of like a dumb puppy, following him around, letting him make crude jokes at my expense, then be kind to me in private. At thirteen, I had a more developed body than other girls my age, and I think he liked having me in his back pocket. I didn’t care, as long as he let me walk with him to class. 

     One day, I was walking into my history class, where he was sitting with a group of boys, discussing every middle school boy’s favorite topic: women’s bodies. The sophisticated debate of the day was a common one: which race was the sexiest? The boys shoved at each other and laughed and argued, saying that white girls were too flat, that black girls were ugly, that asians had no chest. And then, they looked at me, standing off to the side, where I had been too afraid to approach them, and Cameron pointed at me and said, “Latinas have big breasts, though.” I remember laughing with my face flaming, my heart racing, confused. I think I told them to shut up, but smiled. I think I crossed my arms over my chest, but rolled my eyes, laughing. 

     He wasn’t my boyfriend. He was a white boy who had this strange power over me, that let him control me. I never was mad at him over this, because I wanted him to like me so badly. I never was mad at him over this, because I felt I had no worth. I allowed him to degrade me. I let him call me a beaner as part of a “joke” several times. I let him laugh at me, and I joined in and laughed at myself, because at that point, I hated myself, but I held onto this hope that he would give me validation, affection for doing this. And then a year and a half later, he dated a girl who looked exactly like the opposite of me. The blonde, thin, naturally stunning type of girl I would have killed to look like. 

     I’d had mental health problems throughout middle school. But, when I saw them together for the the first time, I took a pen to my face and body, and wrote everything wrong with myself. My nose was not a thin, small white girl nose. My face was too wide and my chin jutted out. My body was covered in skin that felt like a trap that constricted me. I couldn’t breathe, and I imagined, in a dark moment, taking a knife to all the unsatisfactory parts of me and just cutting everything off. Sliding my skin off like a blanket, so maybe I could finally breathe. It was disgusting, but it was honest. 

     Life went on. I watched tutorials on skin bleaching on youtube to pass the time. I put on face masks that were meant to brighten your skin. I took up a conservative view on immigration, so that no one could accuse me of being an illegal immigrant. I forgot how to speak spanish fluently. I buried myself away.

     I wish I could say that there was a single moment where I realized that my race and culture were not disgusting or wrong, but it took years for me to get where I am today, and even now I’m still not always in love with my mexicanness. There are some moments, some thoughts, however, that make their way into your core memory, embed themselves into the very fabric of who you are, and change you forever. One of mine came in my junior year, when my grandfather died. My grandfather was a great man, an immigrant who brought his family to the US through hardships and sacrifices. He was taken advantage of as a field worker and screwed over countless times because he had no papers, yet he persisted.  He supported and lead my mom to becoming a college graduate. His sacrifices and love for his family are why I have the privilege I have today.

     I walked into a hospital room last Spring, and saw the face of my sick grandfather, and my first thought was, “how sad that the melanin has disappeared from his skin.” He was pale, as I had always wanted to be pale, but he lacked the smile that made him my grandfather. He lacked the color in his cheeks that made me recognize him. I couldn’t touch those, pale, calloused hands, and recognize who he was. I sat in the hospital room for minutes, without knowing I was looking at a dead body. 

     That thought that crossed my mind made me sick to my stomach. I was at once ashamed of myself for all these years of racism. All the years of hating mexicans, hating brown skin, hating my nose, my eyebrows. Because all those years of that hate, had made me blind to how much I loved my grandfathers’ tan skin in the sun as he barbequed for me. How I loved the way his nose crinkled when he laughed. How I loved the furrow in his brow. 

     I began to look in the mirror and wonder which parts of myself I’d gotten from him, and later, which parts of him I had deliberately lost. Because he was so proud. To be Mexican, to be an immigrant, to be my grandfather. He was a proud man. And I looked in the mirror, and for the first time, hated what I saw, not for what I still needed to change, but for what I had already changed and lost. For the culture I had gotten rid of, the way I can’t roll my rs like he could, the way I can’t dance to his favorite song. I had a moment where I realized that I had killed myself, over and over again, to be someone he would not have recognized. And the shame was unbearable. 

     I am now, 5’8, with uneven bangs I chopped myself, with all my teeth. My backpack usually smells fine. It’s hard to find the child in me, the one from before I lost myself, the one my grandfather carried in his arms and took to the neighborhood grocery store to get a paleta. But I try to learn, and to change. To make his pride his legacy, something he had passed down to me, and I can pass down to my children. One day, I might have to pull out rotting food from my kids’ backpacks, and look down at them with a sorrowful understanding. But I’ll do everything I can to avoid that moment.