When I was in middle school, my nickname was "sasquatch." "Squatch" for short.

While never explicitly confirmed by the lovely boys of my middle school class, it was undoubtedly a reference to my thick eyebrows, dark hair, and tan skin. I am certainly not the first person to write about what it's like to be a middle school girl, to look back on those years and cringe so violently that you have to get up and walk around a little bit just to shake off the feeling. “Everyone goes through their awkward phase, it's just part of growing up," we are so often told. The one thing I was never told, however, was that I was being called these names because I wasn't white—and I never was!

Growing up in a town like Armonk, New York—a place actually referred to as a “village” and described by Google as “picturesque” boasting an “upscale lifestyle,” it feels ungrateful to complain. The truth is my childhood was full of magic. I had everything I needed and wanted, my parents were more than loving, I had friends and endless space to play and grow. What more could I ask for?

Looking back on my childhood from the perspective of a 20-something-year-old post-college-graduate however, I can’t help but feel a tinge of sadness for that little girl—the one who couldn’t put a finger on what it was exactly that made her feel like she was never 100% in. I spent most of my childhood thinking I was just like everyone else in my overwhelmingly white town. There was one thing though, I was half Puerto Rican.

It seems obvious now, but the majority of my upbringing, this felt mostly irrelevant to me. I never fully understood how my ethnicity might affect my life, or even that I had an ethnicity to question in the first place. Still, there was almost constantly a quiet, yet overwhelming feeling of being “other” — like I didn’t quite belong, even if no one said it out loud.

But, as I look back, I now realize they sometimes did say it out loud.

One particular instance has stuck with me since I was 13. I was at a sleepover party after a friend’s bat mitzvah with a bunch of girls from my middle school friend group. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember the bat mitzvah’s mom all of the sudden saying, “Kyra, is it hard being, like, the only Hispanic at school?” Maybe it was the way she said Hispanic, like the emphasis she added to the word made it sound like some sort of flaw. I felt like she had just insulted me. She probably didn’t mean anything by it; maybe she was genuinely curious. (In retrospect, what a strange thing to say to a 13-year-old in a room full of her friends. Had she forgotten what it felt like to be 13?) My friends looked at me with blank stares, my cheeks flushed with heat. Up until then, I had never been so directly confronted with the fact that I was Puerto Rican. It was like, for the first time, I realized, oh, this is something people can see.

Another incident I distinctly remember happened in high school, when I thought I had finally ditched the “Sasquatch” alias. That was until I was at my friend’s house playing beer pong senior year (for legal reasons I will specify we were definitely playing with water) and I was called “a monkey” by, you guessed it, another teenage boy! Prior to this incident, subtle jabs at my complexion and references to certain primates had come up every now and then, but this time was different.

By this time in my life, the US had just entered its first wave of Trump-ism. I was more politically aware than ever before, developing my own beliefs and values amidst a country where hate speech and blatant racism seemed to be more casually woven into conversations than I had ever experienced—or ever thought to be acceptable. It’s because of this that I unfortunately understood exactly why he called me that. This wasn’t just the typical middle school teasing I had grown used to. It was something uglier, something explicitly racist. And yet, even though I recognized it for what it was, 17 year old me wasn’t ready to fully process it or confront what it said about how others saw me. I wish I could say I had some sort of sharp retort, something that flipped the embarrassment to the other side of the pong table—but I didn’t.

It wasn’t until college that I truly began to reflect on my ethnicity. At Oberlin, open-dialogue about race and identity is the norm. Students take immense pride in their backgrounds, expressing their cultures through fashion and pop culture, but also in the classroom, where they openly share their experiences and enrich discussions with their cultural perspectives. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I could be considered a minority. Being half Puerto Rican never felt like enough for me to claim an identity beyond whiteness. I just couldn’t bring myself to group my experience with those whose identities were deeply woven into their upbringings, while mine had always felt more like a footnote, rather than a foundation.

One evening I was getting dinner with my friend Rania. We were chatting about something, and I replied back to her “...well, I wouldn’t understand because I’m just a white girl!” Rania got quiet for a moment, literally took my hands into hers and said “Kyra…you’re not white.” I adore Rania for the way she handled that moment—so gentle, so full of empathy, like she understood I needed to hear it but also that it wasn’t that simple for me. I appreciate how she didn’t make me feel ridiculous for having gone so long without fully grasping this about myself, Rania’s a good friend.

There was something so validating about hearing this from someone else, especially someone who wasn’t white themselves. She confirmed something I never felt I had permission to believe: that I wasn’t imagining this complexity, that my experience was real. Despite this, it left me in a strange in-between space. If I wasn’t white, then what was I? Latinx? The word felt too big for me, like it belonged to people who had been steeped in the culture, who grew up with Spanish rolling effortlessly off their tongues, who didn’t have to pause before checking a box on a form. Rania’s words were a turning point, but they didn’t come with a tidy resolution—just the beginning of a deeper questioning of what it meant to belong to a heritage I had never fully claimed, and whether I even had the right to.

Who gets to decide if I am enough to call myself Puerto Rican? Was it my family, who had never really emphasized the culture? Was it the people who saw me as different before I even knew I was? Or was it me, trying to piece together an identity from fragments that had never fully been handed down? I often worried that claiming it would feel like an overstep, like taking up space that didn’t belong to me. But at the same time, wasn’t it already part of me, whether I claimed it or not?

And now, years later, as we enter a second Trump administration, I feel an urgency to understand this culture more than ever before. Attacks on the Latinx community, along with essentially all other marginalized groups, have escalated to levels many of us have never witnessed in our lifetimes. The rhetoric of the current administration has made it unmistakably clear that people of color are not valued, and they’ve taken deliberate steps to inflict real harm on these communities. But that sentiment doesn’t remain confined to the halls of power—it reverberates throughout society, shaping the way people are treated and seen in their everyday lives. Through policy and fear mongering, we are witnessing the normalization of hate, the emboldening of everyday people who are granted permission for their racism to be spoken louder, acted upon more freely, and with fewer consequences.

In a moment like this, I find myself questioning my role. Do I have a duty to speak up, to be an advocate? Or, because I am half white, is it not my place? How can I even do that with little cultural context that is my own? What does it mean to claim an identity that I once kept at a distance?

Lately, I’ve been looking back—analyzing my childhood, identifying instances of overt racism I experienced, and retroactively unpacking the emotions I never had the words for at the time. I think about the feeling in my stomach when I would catch my own reflection, my black, unruly eyebrows seemingly taking up all the space in the bathroom mirror. Simultaneously, I’ve been reckoning with the moments when, in a room full of people of color, I felt closer to whiteness, and I subconsciously distanced myself from the idea that I, myself, was considered a person of color. In both instances, the feeling was the same. It felt almost like shame.

And the more I examine my own experiences, the more I realize they don’t exist in a vacuum. This isn’t just about me. It’s about my family—what does this all mean for my brothers? Have they dealt with similar feelings? What about my dad, the one I inherited these features from? And his parents? How many generations before me made choices—conscious or not—that led to the version of me that exists today?

When I think about my Puerto Rican side of the family, I can identify glimpses of culture—an affinity for West Side Story, the sound of my grandmother and great-aunt speaking in Spanish to each other, coquito on Christmas Eve. But even the way we refer to the one beloved dish passed down generations—Spanish rice—reflects something deeper. Arroz con gandules is its real name. (Fun fact, I just googled it, and it’s the national dish of Puerto Rico.) The fact that even this has been softened, diluted, renamed, speaks to something larger— the ways culture can get so smoothed over until it barely registers at all. On my mom’s side, though, it almost feels like her family’s Irish heritage is more proudly embraced, when in fact, we are more distanced from it generation-wise. I've seen it in things like shamrock and family crest tattoos—symbols that carry a clear, public pride in that ancestry. It’s through small things like this, that makes it feel as though there's more room for the that side to be celebrated, more space for it to stay intact. But why is that? Why does our white ancestry seem so much more visible and valued, while our Puerto Rican side feels muted, like it has to fit into a less distinct version of itself?

I don’t want to speak for anyone in my family. Their experiences, like mine, are their own. But as I mentioned above, in the discovery and understanding of my Latinx heritage, to me, it feels obsolete without their perspective. So, recently, I talked to my dad.

From our conversation, I gathered that my dad and his parents always saw themselves as American first—not in opposition to being Puerto Rican, but as a way of moving through the world with fewer obstacles. Assimilation wasn’t just a matter of convenience; it was a strategy for survival. My dad understands what it is to be different in a country where difference is often viewed through a lens of inferiority. His response to me, much like the experiences described in a paper I found online, The Hispanic Identity Challenge, was to focus on upward mobility, to work within the system to ensure his children wouldn’t face the same barriers. The paper highlights how “ethnocultural identities are often challenged by the demands of American society,” leaving individuals in a constant balancing act between cultural preservation and the pressure to conform to mainstream ideals (Nathalie Moreno, 2023.) This balancing act was something my dad and his family navigated every day, quietly disassociating from their heritage in order to have a better shot at success. The irony, though, is that in doing so, this has inadvertently distanced us from the very culture that shaped our family, leaving me to later try to reclaim pieces of an identity on my own.

And that’s what lingers—the disconnect, the knowledge that Latinx identity is so often rooted in family, in a shared history, and in stories passed down. But what happens when that history is lost in the pursuit of success? Of safety?

As it turns out, I’m not the only one struggling with all of these questions. According to Chandra D.L. Waring in Appearance, Parentage, and Paradox: The White Privilege of Bi/Multiracial Americans with White Ancestry, the experience of navigating multiple identities often results in a paradox where individuals with white ancestry may find themselves occupying an ambiguous, in-between space. Waring explains that “multiracial individuals, particularly those with white ancestry, can sometimes be granted the privileges of whiteness while simultaneously facing the marginalization that comes with being identified as nonwhite." This phenomenon, referred to as "honorary whiteness," is a complex aspect of the lived experiences of bi- and multiracial people, reflecting how race, privilege, and identity cannot always be neatly categorized.

As I continue to navigate my identity, I’m increasingly aware of the paradox described by Waring: the simultaneous experience of privilege and marginalization that many multiracial individuals with white ancestry face. While I may experience the benefits of "honorary whiteness"—being accepted into spaces where my appearance is perceived as close enough to white—there’s a constant awareness that this privilege is conditional and, oftentimes, subjective.

This exploration remains largely unfinished. When I set out to write this, I wasn’t sure where it would lead, what questions I would ask, or even how vulnerable I was willing to be. There’s still so much more to unpack, and many more difficult conversations ahead, and it feels like I have more questions now than before. But this process has been an important step in my growth, pushing me to confront uncomfortable truths and reflect on aspects of my identity I had previously avoided.

I want to reiterate that this process isn’t simply about categorizing myself to help me feel like I belong somewhere. Culture is important. While it doesn’t define us, acknowledging what has shaped us—what has been erased and what we choose to reclaim—is crucial for challenging narrow definitions, especially in a time when diversity, once a pillar of our society, feels especially at risk.