Identity.
What does that even mean? To me.
I am Latina, yes. But no one walking down the street sees me as such.
I grew up Mennonite, but anyone who hears that assumes I wore a bonnet and rode in a buggy. No one recognizes me as either as I walk down the street. I can be whoever I want to be. Or maybe I can only be the white woman with polite manners who will give them a smile.
The core of who I am is really an intermingling of both of these identities. Two things that really don't belong together. Two things that were brought together by war, not peace. That continues today because of obligation and patterns that have been set, and paths that have been deeply worn. But that is not to say that I don't appreciate both of these identities and hold them fiercely dear to my heart. That is just to say that I struggled to allow them to get along for many years, and once I finally did, I realized who I was. I allowed myself to be me.
Peruvian culture for me was forced telenovelas during dinner, rice with every meal, and sitting quietly when we visited relatives in Peru. Mennonite culture also included food - it's the one equalizer when there is a culture to uphold. But it also brought with it quilts, community, and social injustices to right. Together they both brought on a sense of shame, not about our culture - there was always pride in that (though Mennonites are not to be prideful). But a shame of not fitting in with that group, of doing something out of the norm, of being truly who you were, of having feelings. Feelings were not allowed. Or maybe that was just the culture of the 80's.
Maybe that has nothing to do with being Mennonite and Peruvian. And let's be clear, I am not a Peruvian Mennonite. They exist, I think. But that is not me. I was born to a Catholic Peruvian mother, and a very white Mennonite father. They happened to fall madly in love and marry within months of meeting. My father, as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war doing his alternative service in Bolivia. My mother, as a flight attendant, trying to help out the young white kid who didn't speak Spanish. One believed marriages just work, the other believed she was marrying a "priest" who was allowed to marry. Aw, young love.
That brought along my sister, and then me, and our search for who we were, and where we belonged. Growing up in the Willamette Valley, but being dragged along to as many Peruvian cultural events as my mother could find while we were children. Mennonite church on Sunday where dancing was shunned and I often heard "you know what dancing leads to", right after having been to a 'celebraci6n', dancing the Marinera, the Saturday before.
When I applied for college, I marked the box for "Hispanic". My friends told me that wasn't accurate, that I was white. I felt confused and like somehow I was gaming the system. Was I a minority? I mean, I didn't feel like a minority. Does anyone actually feel like a minority? Oh wait. Yes. I am sure lots of people do. So, does that mean I "don't count"? I wrestled with this and asked my parents about it. And while both of them told me to stand proud, that I was just as much Latina, as I was American, I still doubted. I mean, I had grown up in Oregon, I had visited Peru, but never lived there. We lived in Venezuela for 6 months ... did that count? While I went ahead with the application as is, I still wasn't sure. I still felt like an outsider.
But I wasn't just a little white girl either. I spoke Spanish, almost as well as I spoke English. There were words I knew ONLY in Spanish, because there really wasn't a good English word for them. One of my earliest memories in grade school was when I was in the bathroom with another little girl, and I asked her if she had a "cachito". She looked at me like I was crazy and didn't know what I was talking about. I looked right back at her like she was crazy, "how do you not know what a 'cachito' is?" I tried to explain what it was, but didn't have the right words. "It's like a rubber band, but it's not a rubber band, you use it to hold your hair up." We sorted it out, but for the first time I realized that I was missing something - some very important information that made me not like the other kids in my school. I didn't even have a word for something I used every day.
It also made me feel special, because at that young age, I also believed that we had a perfect word in Spanish for these hairbands, and in English, it could mean any variety of things. Low and behold - my Mother told me many moons later, that it was just a word she made up to mean that - it doesn't actually mean "hair rubber band" in Spanish. But that is what it will always mean to me.
This fits with what I believe today. My cultural heritage is a large part of who I am. This mix has created its own identity inside me. With words that don't even mean what they are supposed to mean in the language I am speaking at the moment. That likely mean nothing to those outside my own family. And yet isn't this true of every family, every small group of community? And isn't that the beauty of growing and meeting others outside of it?
I think so.
This article was the second-place adult winner in the Exploring Identity writing contest, part of the 2025 Salem Reads: One Book, One Community program, which delved into the themes of Why Didn't You Tell Me? A Memoir by Carmen Rita Wong. The contest invited writers, in short story or personal essay form, to explore how identity has impacted them.