Being Latina Is Like Trying To Hold Water
Written by Ryan Colon
Being Latina is Eddie Santiago’s “Lluvia” over the surround sound on a Saturday morning to signal the start of our weekend cleaning routine.
It’s Jerry Rivera, Frankie Ruiz, India, The New York Band’s “Soltera,” and obligatory “Suavemente” at every family gathering.
It’s singing along with the music and not actually knowing the words because
being Latina means being stripped of my language.
It’s people approaching me on the street, often in a panic, asking for my help in Spanish
and my personal guilt and shame of not being able to connect in the way that they expect me to be able to.
Being Latina is winning a scholarship through a local Latino heritage organization and standing at a podium to accept
trying to publicly grapple with the way my Latinidad and Blackness have always been mixed up.
Being Latina is crying when I heard for the first time the term Afro-Latina because it is the closest to home I’ve ever felt in an academic space.
It’s legit writing on my dating profile:
“If you feel the need to ask me where I’m from or tell me how you love exotic women, please swipe left.”
Y’all know the dating struggle is real!
It’s responding, “I'm from Ohio” and cringing at the follow-up:
“No, where are you really from?”
Soy de Orocovis y Maunabo, damnit.
But that’s not what you want to hear.
I’m Black and Puerto Rican.
It’s the “oh” and the “I knew you weren’t just Black/Spanish”. It’s the never-being-enough of either and trying to understand how to be whole in that space.
Being Latina is making pastelillos with my Wela and being able to share that tradition with Ari, Chris, and one day Quinn.
It’s wandering around a Brixton market looking for the ingredients to make my own sofrito while studying abroad.
It’s splitting a pastele with my cousin on Thanksgiving and requesting rice and corn with steak and tostones every time I come home.
Being Latina conjures the tastes, the smells, the sounds that feel like love. It’s salsa and merengue and the student who said,
“Come on, Miss, I know you know bachata!”
Being Latina is like trying to hold water. I see it, I feel it, I know it’s there, but I can barely grasp or comprehend it.
Not quite enough is how I’ve always felt.
I thought Latinidad had to be bestowed upon me, but it is mine, not in spite of the discord, but because Latinidad isn’t easily defined for any of us.
It’s bigger than me, yet capable of shape-shifting to fill this space I exist in.
It’s feeling connected and ripped away from home all at once.
Being Latina means holding all that heartbreak, (neo)colonization, assimilation, erasure, genocide, along with the beauty and love of family, art, food, and tradition.
Being Latina means displaying the flag in my Zoom background so I know you know where I’m from.
Borikén, the land of my ancestors.
Yo soy boricua.
Ryan Colon coordinates the design and execution of math professional learning so that PL services are high-quality, research based, user-centered, and focus unwaveringly on racial and educational equity. While her undergraduate majors were in Neuroscience and Africana Studies, her focus has always been the intersection of race, class, and education. Ryan came to Teaching Lab after several years of teaching middle and high school mathematics.
