Canto A La Madre

Hellooo! 

I am writing this blog surprisingly early. It is 1230 on my work day and It is also Latin Heritage Night! Yay! I have been looking forward to this night for about a month now. 

I have been so excited thinking about what i was going to wear, all the food that parents may be bringing, and a general feeling of just getting to share in something so important to so many of our kids.

Then today, I came to work in my Salvadoran jersey and my black skirt and here come the questions. 

"How are you Salvadoran if you were born here?" "You speak a lot of english... so... what?' "You look asian, are you sure?" 

These questions are of course, coming from kids, so I can't do anything but explain to them the concept of being a mixed kid raised in the bay area. 

I love being Salvadoran, and I love being Filipino. Truly, and sometimes even equally. But in all honesty, i feel as though I will never feel entirely one or the another. I will always be in the space right in between. 

When i was growing up, my parents had gotten divorced. My mom is a Filipino woman, who speaks no tagalog and she has a mom who has no interest in knowing me well enough to begin with, let alone to even try teach me (that is a trauma for a different day) I never went to my Lola's house to watch the tagalog only channels, and have home cooked Filipino food. I did not have the pleasure of experiencing all those traditional Filipino experiences. I did however grow up in Daly City so i was not entirelyyy lacking but even now there are so many things I do not know. The same goes with being Salvadoran. 

Ok, not to that extent at all. I grew up seeing my Abue pretty much every single day, lived right behind her for the majority of my life. I ate all the foods, learned spanish in passing, i watched all the novelas she watched, i even studied a spanish dictionary in the summer. . Then, when i was in middle school, she passed away (Another trauma for another day) When she passed, I lost a lot of it. I didn't really need to speak spanish anymore, I had no one to speak it with. I didn't watch novelas anymore, she wasn't recording them. I didn't pick up the dictionary again. So as i got older, entered my teens, I didn't feel very Salvadoran at all. I mean I was in my blood, the same way I am filipino in my blood. But I didn't know what that meant. I wanted want (?) so desperately to related to all the things and experiences everyone else has. 

It feels super dramatic to say, like wah wah wah. way to whine. about whatever, such a silly dramatic thing to be so in my head about. But that is how it feels in my head today. I just want to know more and celebrate it without feeling like a fraud. Is that universal? 

ANYWAYS..... see ya! ◡̈