A Dialectical Erosion: On Being Black, Mexican, and Both
This week's guest host of Liminal is the brilliant writer Jessica Mendoza, who discusses complicated feelings about her dual identities.
Hello, Liminal Family!
I have a special treat for you this week. As I am increasingly occupied with sorting out the next steps for me medically and otherwise, I have invited my fellow writer Jess Mendoza to pen a guest column. Jess and I met this summer at the Craigardan artists’ residency in the Adirondacks, where I was entranced by her writing, her intellect, and her constant readiness to dissolve into laughter. I’ve had the privilege of hearing part of her novel-in-progress, and am impatient for it to be out in the world! She is a true light and I am honored to call her a friend. Without further ado, I give you Jess:
A Dialectical Erosion: On Being Black, Mexican, and Both
On the first day of my very first (and only) internship with the local chapter of a Black activist group, the Black coordinator I was assigned to work with answered the door wearing nothing but a slip and bonnet and in mid-tirade against the man tiling her roof. "Trump is gonna deport all the Mexicans, so you better lower your rates!" she yelled. She then looked at me standing there in my most professional work clothing and declared equally loudly that I was "Mexican by my daddy!" The Mexican worker she hired to retile her roof—because yes, my first day was, for some reason, in the coordinator’s private home along the Long Beach marina while she got her roof retiled—stared at me, puzzled. I looked back at him, mouth opening and closing, unsure of what to say. A profoundly confusing ethnic kinship passed through me - a kinship I shared with both the coordinator and the roof worker. The dual racial ties that tether me to both the Black and Latina cultures curdled and soured, and I was left feeling, in some way I cannot explain, caught in a lie.
I am visibly Black - dark brown skin, my mother’s full lips, wider, rounded nose, type 3C hair. I was raised more with my mother’s Southern Black culture, too; my childhood smelled of okra, grits, and gumbo, sounded like AAVE and loud family cookouts, and felt like the scrape of a boar bristle brush along my temples, laying down my edges. Yet I am also, indeed, Mexican. The half-dressed, middle-aged coordinator had hit the nail right on the head. I am Mexican by my daddy. The roof worker wouldn’t have known to share in my humiliation had the Black coordinator not pointed this out. Instead, he would have looked at me with a twin contempt shared with the only other visibly Black person in the room.
The thing about being socially Black and yet also, somewhat discreetly, Mexican, is that you must always answer for the thing people perceive you to be that day. I have had people make overtly racist remarks against Mexicans to me, unaware that I share half my heritage with that beautiful country. Today, when I reveal myself, I do so in style. Just as a magician lifts a rabbit from a hat, I revel in the reveal. Yeah, you don’t get to say that shit, dude. My last name is Mendoza. I’m Mexican, dumbass. I delight in the shocked embarrassment permeating their faces. As amusing as this is, though, their confusion is what always startles me. How is it so confusing that someone may identify as more than what their appearance dictates they ought to be?
But, at the time of that fateful internship, though I was discreetly Mexican, I shared a more visible heritage with my Blackness - and the Blackness of the coordinator. What humiliation, on that day, to be made to answer for my people! This is not something many White people will ever have to contend with. White people are given the privilege to be individuals. When a White person does something wrong, other White people do not (often) feel obligated to answer for the work of their community. They are not part of an interwoven collective they must answer for; they are singular. Of course, this comes with its own issues: Many White people are disconnected from the wrongs of their own people, and, consequently, do not grapple with what it may mean to be a part of a connected community. I, on the other hand, was made to feel a dual offense and humiliation. That Black woman was my sister; that Mexican man was my brother. I felt the bizarre urge to apologize for actions that were not my own. I also wanted to yell, point fingers, storm out in solidarity.
I was only nineteen, however, and I’d never worked a job in my life. The weight of this bizarre ethnic conflict anchored me heavily to the loveseat where I slouched into the cushions, as red-faced as my melanin would allow me to be. In the end, I said nothing.
I’d never thought I’d been confused or conflicted about my racial identity. In my day-to-day life, I consider myself Black. I was raised with my Black culture; I am regularly perceived as Black, for better or worse. When I walk down streets, people see a Black woman.
When another Black woman catches my eye and inclines her head in recognition, I am welcomed into a Black sisterhood. When a White person’s gaze passes over me like I am lucky to be in their presence, lucky to be in the position I’m in, lucky because no way am I not a diversity hire, I am a Black woman. I am, at the very crux of me, a Black woman. Everyday I must contend with - and rejoice in - being a visible Black woman.
Which is why it’s so funny when people call or read my name and then do a double-take when they see the thick, curly hair that cascades down my shoulders, the fullness of a Black body, the brown skin I purposely lay out in the sun so it darkens like copper. When I worked as a professional writing tutor for Long Beach State, many students, when booking appointments with me, would only see my name - Jessica Mendoza. A very Mexican name. I’ve taken in students who expect a non-Black tutor and have written anti-Black essays. I’ve read the n-word written out by cocky eighteen-year-olds who don’t think the object of their racism would look them in the eye. I’ve read anti-Black sentiments from my own people - other Latinos. They think that, because my name is Mendoza, I’ll get what it is they’re trying to say about “the Blacks”. Conversely, I’ve gotten the opposite - anti-Mexican papers from Black students who squirm when they hear the name of their tutor, then relax when they see my face. A Black face. A Mexican name. It’s not as rare as it used to be, yet it still sometimes leaves me feeling like an exotic animal being paraded around. The Latina with a Black face.
Regardless of whether I am, at first glance, only Black, my last name is always reliable in giving me away. Mendoza is a Basque-Spanish name that means cold mountain. A gift from my ancestral White conquistadors that colonized and subjugated my indigenous predecessors. A cold mountain. Hilariously, the Black side of my family’s primary name, Charles, means free man. Unmoving, stationary mountain, meet the blustery, slippery concept of freedom. I imagine, in this ancestral imagery, wind battering high peaks, shaping them, giving them the gift of plasticity. Of a changing form.
I think back, now, to that first - and last - day of my internship. The way in which my identity morphed based on who called me what. The Black coordinator yelling Mexican; the Mexican roofer looking at me Black. Pinned under dual labels, being both and neither. How am I meant to reconcile that embarrassment, that kinship? How to craft Black and Latina pride from this convergence of identities?
As I’ve grown older and more settled in myself, I have found an answer in ceasing my search for one. I’ve always found comfort in abstraction. When faced with a piece of abstract or enigmatic art, one gets from it what they put into it. In this sense, I am defined by the way in which I approach my ethnicity. It’s a gift, though it felt like a curse at the time, to be given the beauty of ethnic ambiguity. My Blackness and Mexican heritage come together and inform each other. I am in constant dialogue with myself; the pleasure of conversation wrapped in a dark-skinned inexactness. There is no easy answer, although, for my own comfort, I often concede to the greater social perception of my visible Blackness. Still, I delight in my obscurity, the blurring of myself. I am of a dialectical race. A mountain, cold and distant, ancient and enduring, still here, still here. Yet, when touched and shaped by free winds, it is reborn in each passing moment, and no two who perceive it can definitively say they’ve seen the same natural wonder.
Jessica Mendoza is a writer and English lecturer in Long Beach, CA. She holds a B.A. in Film Theory and Practice and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from California State University Long Beach. She has been previously published in The Good Life Review, Streetlight Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, and La Piccoletta Barca. Jessica spends most of her time feverishly grading essays and raving about the semicolon's usefulness to her students, who kindly humor her fits of punctuation passion. She can be found on Twitter/X @JessMProse.