A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I usually identify as Mexican. My mother is from Mexico, and my dad is white. I grew up steeped in white culture in rural Appalachia and had to actively seek out a connection to my Mexican heritage. We lived far from my mom’s family, so I didn’t see them much. My mom didn’t include a lot of Mexican heritage in our home or customs. My parents decided not to teach us Spanish so we wouldn’t have an accent (eye roll) and because my dad didn’t speak it (double eye roll).

Because of the effort I put into building my own connection to my Mexican heritage, I choose to use Mexican in conversation, or Mexican American when completing forms. I don’t mark white on forms because that feels like a complete erasure of my Mexican side. I usually mark ‘other’ or ‘multiracial.’

At the same time, I’m very aware of the privilege I carry being half white and white-passing, and I haven’t quite figured out how to fit into these categories. It really feels like the categories should change to accommodate real people with complex heritages.

I usually say I’m first generation, even though my mom was born in Mexico and I was born in Wisconsin. When she came to the U.S., her family moved to Miami, and that’s where she was raised. She was able to speak Spanish and continue to center her culture without societal pressure to conform, since everyone in her section of Miami neighborhoods were immigrants and Latinx too. When she met my dad and moved north (eventually to West Virginia), all that changed in how she raised us. It was like she cut off her Mexican identity to better fit with him, the life he envisioned, and the environment.

My dad never truly embraced our culture, besides liking the food or finding my mom attractive. He never learned Spanish, never learned customs or holidays, never verbalized respect for the culture and importance of traditions, and never prioritized spending time with our family from her side. It was strongly implied that my mom’s side was ‘less than,’ troublemakers, and not as worthy of our time and effort, whereas his side we saw for almost every holiday, despite it being an eight-hour car ride. To this day, he considers my brother and me white and rolls his eyes or disagrees when I affirm that I am Mexican or brown.

His attitudes made it hard to feel connected to being Mexican, and I was ashamed of this identity for a long time. No one else in my elementary school was brown, so they bullied me, and I started to hide my identity, but something was always missing. In college, I was surrounded by more diversity, and I immediately gravitated to learning more about the history and complexities of my Mexican culture, Latin America as a whole, and what it all means for me personally. These connections saved me from the constant disconnect I felt of not belonging. I love being Mexican and embracing my heritage. I love being Latina and bonding with other BIPOC folks.

Growing up in a very rural area without many other BIPOC people was really hard, and I like connecting with others who had that experience.

At the same time, I wonder if I have the right to claim such strong roots when I’m ‘only half’ Mexican, and I appear racially ambiguous but more white-passing, I don’t speak Spanish well and it’s accented, and I sometimes feel like an imposter, like I take up space in an identity group I don’t actually belong to, because both my parents aren’t brown or immigrants and I was ‘raised to be white.’

My mom was told she needed to assimilate and be the best American, and I think she carried that mindset into how she raised us, so we could have the best chance at success. It’s so hardwired in her that when we talk about it today, she pauses when I say I’m Mexican. She doesn’t contradict me, but she doesn’t seem to fully support that I embrace this identity and continue to seek out avenues of connection with it. She seems torn about it, but never says anything outright, the way my dad will.

One of my happiest memories is from college, when a professor pulled me aside after class and told me about the new Latin American Studies major. I immediately met with the advisor of the program, joined, and immersed myself in learning. I was exploring my heritage and identity while understanding complex systems that exist throughout Latin America and the U.S. and impact folks on an individual level. I felt embraced; my identity was celebrated and respected without contradiction, and I couldn’t get enough of that. I loved being in those spaces and meeting other Latine people who were just as excited to be around other Latines as I was.

There are painful memories, too. I had been dating a white man for several years, and we had bought a house together. I think my father thought we would get married. He saw a lot of himself in this guy, and I did too, which is why I ultimately couldn’t stay with him. He told me that he ‘didn’t see me as Latina,’ and I knew I would live the same half-life as my mother. I refused to give up my identity to fit with him. My dad was upset about our breakup and couldn’t understand that I didn’t feel loved by someone who saw me as white. He responded that I am white, and I felt so unseen and hurt.

I really wish I knew the story of my family’s migration. My mom won’t speak about it at all. My tía told me that they moved from Mexico because my abuela missed her family, who were already here, and wanted to be with them, so my grandfather agreed, and they moved to Miami. I don’t know if this is the truth or what actually happened. My aunt won’t ask my grandfather about it. He only speaks Spanish, and any time I try to talk to him in Spanish, he tells me I don’t speak Spanish and rolls his eyes. We’ve never had a conversation, let alone the opportunity for me to interview him about the experience. I really wish I knew more about it, and I’m scared that when he passes, a huge chunk of family history will be lost.

It seems like their migration came with required silence. My mother, growing up, needed to be American, and that was it. She could be Mexican in the home but not outside of it. My parents also struggle with substance abuse and have since I was about nine. Any questions or conversations about identity are almost always occurring when they aren’t sober. I can’t get much history or anything from my mom because of her substance misuse. Most of the history I have is from my aunt. But my mom is the oldest and probably the only one that actually remembers, since she was about eight or nine when they moved here.

I don’t doubt that the intense trauma of migration and assimilation, relocation after marrying my dad, and the violent passing of her own mother (a firearm accident in the home) contribute significantly to her substance misuse. But we don’t talk about it, or anything, really, so I don’t know. For me, it is a strong cutoff from the heritage, and I am forced to find connections to it on my own.

I wish I knew more about the history of my family and why my culture was hidden from me. I love being Mexican, and I wish my mom could feel that love in embracing who she is. My aunt, who lives in San Antonio and married a Mexican man, seems so much more at peace. They speak Spanish together and celebrate holidays and traditions. There’s still machismo they navigate with his parenting, but they connect on culture. I met my husband while staying with my aunt during COVID, and I’ve never felt more connected to my true self than when I lived there. We are constantly embracing our shared Mexican culture.

When I think about words like ‘immigrant,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘alien,’ all of it just feels gross. I can’t quite pinpoint what about it bothers me, but it feels like a way to emphasize otherness. It bothers me that this is a priority in identifying people when there is a complete erasure of the inherent otherness of everyone who isn’t Indigenous to this land. Everyone who isn’t Indigenous to the U.S. is an immigrant or migrant or whatever term they came up with. So why force some of us to hold these labels when everyone else should too? What’s the point of this separation?

I know that it’s so, politically, people can be marginalized based on classification, but it’s all bullshit.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“Technically, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and that has always made the whole ‘generation’ question hard for me to answer. My father was born on the island and came to New York City when he was seven years old. My mom’s generation is the first to be born off the island. So am I first generation? Second? Neither? In my head, I joke that I’m generation 1.5.

My Spanish is terrible. I understand a good amount, but I’m too embarrassed to speak it because I’m afraid of being made fun of.

That fear has always been there underneath everything. When I was in kindergarten, though, I was part of a show put on by Latino kids that included dancing and singing, and in that moment I felt really proud and accepted, like I clearly belonged.

Because I am white passing and have a non-regional dialect, thanks to my parents, who didn’t want me to have an accent and really discouraged any sign of a Nuyorican accent, I often feel like I’m living between two worlds. Not white enough, not Latina enough. Every time I share that I am Latina with someone, I’m met with: ‘Oh, I had no idea!’ or ‘But you don’t look/speak like a Puerto Rican!’ Depending on the person, it’s meant either as a compliment or a veiled insult.

My dad’s family came to NYC in the 1950s. He was one of ten children, so they came over piecemeal, the older siblings getting jobs and sending money back to Puerto Rico for the others to come. My mom’s parents also came in the ’50s but met in New York City, at a boarding house on the Lower East Side.

They both had children from previous relationships and had left those children on the island to start a new life in NYC for their families. Within a few years they were married, brought their children over, and then had another four children together.

My grandparents worked in all kinds of factories. One factory made dolls, and my grandmother would bring the leftover parts home and make dolls for my aunts. My grandmother’s sister was also in NYC and worked in a candy factory; she would bring broken candy home. My mom’s family was very poor, but when they talk about that time, they do it with smiles and laughter, as if those broken pieces and scraps were treasures.

Sometimes I feel as if I am not entitled to the culture, because I wasn’t born in Puerto Rico and I haven’t been there in many, many years. I feel closest to it during Christmas, when I incorporate some of our favorite traditions, foods, and music. That’s when the island feels less far away, when the pieces of my identity seem to line up for a little while.

I don’t know what other lives I could have lived if I hadn’t been born here, so I don’t really wish I lived anywhere else. Being of Puerto Rican descent is a different experience because my family migrated to another part of the same country. They were considered citizens already. I feel like those big legal words like immigrant, migrant, and alien might apply in feeling, but not in actuality.

So I move through the world as someone who is constantly told I don’t look or sound like what people expect a Puerto Rican to be, carrying stories of factories and boarding houses and broken candy, holding my culture closest during Christmas, and quietly occupying that 1.5 space between island and mainland, between what people see and who I know I am.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I identify as Latina, Hispanic, and Mexican-American. My mom, who was born in Mexico, calls my siblings and me Mexican, but since I was born in the U.S. and don’t have dual citizenship, I don’t really identify as Mexican. I feel that the identifiers I use are accurate, but I look and sound plain white, so I’m uncomfortable with the assumption of discrimination that sometimes comes along with these labels.

I consider myself second generation because my mom was born in Mexico, although my dad’s family has been in the U.S. for several generations. My mom is an only child who moved to the U.S. with her parents when she was young, so my Mexican grandparents stayed close and often helped care for me and my siblings as we were growing up. I can tell I’ve been surrounded by culture and traditions that most of my friends did not experience, and those experiences instilled values in me like a strong work ethic and a deep connection to family.

At the same time, I’ve also seen how people treat me compared to my relatives who have darker skin or accents. That contrast has made me understand white privilege and given me a sense of obligation to take on the task of educating white Americans and breaking stereotypes, because I don’t have to directly deal with the constant burden of racism face-to-face. Sometimes, I feel a bit like an impostor because I never became fluent in Spanish, even though I had opportunities to learn. Being far away from most of my Mexican relatives has made it hard for me to convince myself to prioritize that aspect of my heritage.

My dad is Jewish, but since Judaism is passed through the mother, I can’t consider myself Jewish, even though I’ve experienced more Jewish culture than the average American through his family. I don’t look obviously Mexican or Jewish, so it feels strange to identify with only one side of my heritage while never being assumed to be part of either.

My family’s migration stories cross oceans and borders. On my dad’s side, his grandmother was one of eight siblings who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when their parents recognized the rising anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe.

They crossed the Atlantic on a ship that nearly sank in rough waters. Over the years, most of the descendants of those first immigrant relatives have stayed in the U.S., although some emigrated to Israel.

On my mom’s side, she and her parents moved from Mexico to California so that her father could be a minister for migrant farmworkers. This meant my mother was working in the fields as a child. Her parents told her that the only way out of that lifestyle was to do well in school, so my mother studied so hard that she ultimately started college at 15, with my grandparents doing their best to support her and shield her from the racism within the school system.

My mother’s family stayed in the U.S. because of the opportunities and quality of life that were possible through hard work, regardless of background, and I’m proud of that aspect of the U.S. and of myself as an American. I’m also proud of the aspects of Mexico that gave my relatives the personality traits that make them so successful and enjoyable to be around. I feel like I’ve been able to cherry-pick the best parts of each country’s culture and make them my own. I know that both countries are deeply flawed in different ways, and that I don’t have much way to change Mexico, but I am in a position of privilege in the U.S. that might allow me to make this country better for everyone.

There are moments when all of these pieces of my identity come together in ways that feel beautiful and whole. My PhD graduation party was one of those times. It was a ton of fun and felt really special because so many of my Mexican relatives were able to attend, along with many of my local friends. I was going to school in Tucson, so it was easy to find authentic Mexican ingredients and desserts. I opened up my party to the families of two friends who were graduating at the same time; one white American, one Panamanian. My white friend’s family had a lot of dietary restrictions, and my mom and grandma were happy to accommodate them by making and reserving special portions of food. Everyone felt welcome and had a great time, which reminded me of how my mom and grandparents always welcomed my friends as I was growing up, except this time, I was the host.

There are also memories that bring out my feelings of fraud or disconnect. I once attended a recruiting event hosted by my company for Latinx STEM professionals. I was there to talk about how much I loved working for my company and to reassure people that they’d be accepted and valued if they joined us. Throughout the night, many people from different Latin American countries walked up and tried to speak Spanish to me, and that’s how I learned that I can only really understand Mexico City Spanish, I just couldn’t parse the words in the other accents. I felt like a fraud not being able to hold a conversation in Spanish, and I felt like I was a bad representative of Latinx people in STEM because I obviously wouldn’t face the same discrimination as many of the people I was talking to.

Despite the complicated feelings, I often feel lucky that this is the country I was born and grew up in. In many ways, it seems like this is the place where I can maximize my potential to improve society. I’m proud to be American, and proud to be connected to Mexico and Jewish history, even if those parts of me are not always visible to others.

When I think about the official words and definitions like Migrant, LPR, Deportable person, Alien, Immigrant, Refugee, National, my own meanings mostly match the official ones, but with some differences that matter to me. I would define an immigrant in the U.S. as anyone coming from another country with the intent to stay in the U.S. and contribute to their community. It makes me uncomfortable to only count lawful immigrants, considering how many people without such status helped build America as part of living here long-term.

I would define a refugee as anyone fleeing conditions that make their home country uninhabitable for them, even if such a determination isn’t made in advance, how are such vulnerable people supposed to jump through those political hoops? It’s frustrating to see that as part of the definition.

I would define a national as a person claimed by a particular country; a person’s allegiances can change and can’t be known by anyone but themselves, so having the definition refer to the person’s ‘permanent allegiance’ seems silly.

In the end, the labels never fully capture who I am. I look white, I navigate the world with a lot of privilege, and I carry the histories of Mexico, Jewish migration, and the U.S. all at once. I try to honor that by using the access and safety I have to make things better for people who weren’t given the same protections, and by remembering that no government definition can decide who I really am.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

The overarching systems which create liminal spaces are born out of a cultural nationalism, which develop themselves into demands for “aesthetic product and interpretive models devoid of outside influence.”3 These are not authentic understandings of the cultures they aim to interpret, but instead empty and ingenuine aesthetic reproductions. The safety of spaces which are gatekept are lacking, not allowing for complexity of identity, or respecting the memory or the experiential as forms of knowledge. Coco Fusco illustrates this in her statement regarding the civil space, in that “it’s all too easy to conflate cultural hybridity with political parity, and doing so can become convenient perfunctory solution that substitutes tokenism for serious engagement with the power dynamics that shape specific intercultural relations at both the ‘centers’ and the ‘margins’ of global culture.”4 Constructions around liminal spaces additionally focus on the wrong courses of action when attempting to bring diversity within their purview by “handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression, regardless of […] what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand.”5 Actions such as these fail to acknowledge liminality as an ever present body, and utilize these attempts to placate diversity gaps, while not decentralizing the systems which create these gaps to begin with.

Systemic pressures on liminal spaces breed violence toward Latine/x-American communities, acting as invisible lines of separation that displace genuine engagement and human connection. These concealed barriers formalize segregation, leading to variables of open and inflammatory acts of discrimination and racism. Schools and media conscript students into narrowed interpretations of “immigrant America,” that both racialize and discipline them.6 This restrictive condition is lived on campuses where identity work unfolds under cross-pressure and conflict,7 and in K-12 settings where Latine/x-American youth are “policed, contained, and treated as criminal threats”8 in schools and neighborhoods. The media’s portrayal of Latine/x-American youth “as ‘truants’ and ‘troublemakers’ recast exercises of constitutionally granted freedoms of expression into undesirables and even criminal behavior.”9 Legal restrictions also exist in mixed-status households, where children who are citizens may forgo chances or benefits out of fear of a family member being deported, which can worsen poverty levels even in the face of “official inclusion.”10 According to a study by the Migration Policy Institute in October 2025, over 6 million children, 5.3 million of whom are citizens of the United States, faced the possibility of being separated from at least one parent who does not have legal status in the nation.11 Additionally, The Children’s Equity Project reported in February 2026 that the number of family units with children and at least one parent in family detention facilities increased from 425 in October 2025 to 1,304 in January 2026, a more than 200% rise.12 Generational rifts can also form within families as children growing up in the United States feel the dual pull of assimilatory pressure and the roots of their Latinidad. These layered dynamics are illustrative of how the dwelling place for compression of identity is produced and enforced institutionally through school policing, political immigration regimes, and experientially through “othering,” which all shape daily navigation for Latine/x-American youth.

Rafael Cardoso identifies this in his critique of the art historical canon’s treatment of Latin American art as “liminal.”13 It is familiar enough to be robbed of alterity, “strange” enough to be denied equivalence. Despite the violence imposed by the West on the art historical canon, Latin American art is intersectional, political, and embodies the knowledge and memory of the experiential. Cardoso’s prescription is structural. Decenter these treatments as the standard narrative.14 By decentralizing these narratives, we deny the co-opting of liminal spaces. Latine/x-American agency and identity acts as forms of cultural survival, of “Weaving through power and of always re-centering oneself in and through diasporic communities.”15 In this survival, there’s a practice of creating space, and of preserving knowledge and experience, which often does not receive its due justice because these acts are grown within liminal spaces. Andrea Giunta clarifies this as “beginning with what is given,” and inverting the direction of cultural transfer by “eating” the center’s forms, metabolizing them, and exporting your version back.16

The stories within this very publication are grown from liminal spaces. Born out of experiences of migration, assimilatory pressures, and the difficulty of trying to conceptualize the internal versus the external identity. Yet, when reading these stories we find perseverance, strength, love, joy, and the spectrum of the human condition. Despite liminal spaces being weaponized around them, Latine/x-Americans do not solely exist in them, but they navigate and carve out spaces to connect, engage, and create.

The Chicano Art Movement is a dynamic example of this, as artists within the movement have used their work as a “vehicle for social change and as a form of resistance and recontextualization of global cultural flow.”17 Creative communities, such as the Chicano Art Movement act with creative autonomy, and place “the artist and artistic communities as the authorities for the continuity of local meanings, in which the art acts as a site for political critique and resistance.”18

The Afro-Latine/x community has felt the confines of barriers from both Latine/x-Americans and systems of whiteness, where those who identify as Afro-Latine/x are marginalized within their own communities, despite the fact that in 2022 more than 27.5 million Hispanics (over 32.7% of the total Hispanic population) identified as more than one race.19 In the United States, Afro-Latinidad is a movement that calls for Latine/x-American to claim their own Blackness in the face of “homogenous identity and white supremacy.”20 Artists within the Afro-Latine/x community advocate for the articulation and acknowledgement of Latin American and Caribbean Blackness21 through various ways, such as underground Afro-Latine/x hip-hop artists from Cuba incorporating “Afro-Cuban, African themes and religious symbols into their music, which was marginalized in Cuba’s larger public sphere due to Eurocentric collective memory.”22

This is a conveyance of the deepest of losses when barriers remove the advancement of movement from liminal spaces into the civil space and demand silence. How can we quantify the violence to humanity when entire communities are solely reduced to tokenism and political rhetoric? The abundance within liminal spaces stands as a stronghold against co-opted narratives. Being “unreadable” by Western and whitened standards is not a lacking, but a glowing, powerful presence.23 Through each act of resistance within these space, there’s an activation of spirit that embodies the full breadth of the human experience. Creating space within Western narratives is an act of self-determination which states that despite the best efforts of systemic injustice, we are present, active and changing the landscape of the world around us. It remains a space of passing down traditions and cultural values through the generations, of active resistance, and creative thought.

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I am, first and foremost, Cubano.

People sometimes refer to me as ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ I think of Latino as more of a modern representative term for us, an international community, the scattered diaspora of what was once Nueva España.

Hispanic, to me, is a political term, rooted in a probably well-intentioned but ultimately wrong way of categorizing our roots as Mestizo people. Under all of that, beneath every label, I am Cuban.

I am, in every way that matters, first generation. I was adopted at 4 years old. I didn’t speak any English then, and the Spanish was beaten out of me, literally, to the point where I didn’t speak a word of Spanish until I was 34 years old. I even managed to get through two years of high school Spanish without ever uttering a word.

At 5, they sent me to speech therapy to ‘fix’ my accent and my tendency to speak at a lightning-fast pace. Ironically, now I have a speech impediment in both languages.

Being forced to assimilate that young created a mindset that I was being made to give up something essential. I was always referred to as an object of interest, introduced as ‘my adopted son,’ whereas my three brothers, also adopted, all white, all born in the U.S., were just ‘my son.’ I don’t know how others in my situation react, but for me it made something crystal clear: I had something special that others wanted, something different they never let me forget.

I knew from a young age that I was different. They made sure I knew they saw me as inferior. That treatment built a deep self-hate, because at that age you can’t rationalize your feelings; you only know what you are told. I assumed something was wrong with me because I was told something was wrong with me. I only started to reconcile that after a relationship that had lasted sixteen years, a mortgage, and two children fell apart entirely because of my race.

The short version of my migration story is this: I remember more of Cuba than I let on, but it’s a sore spot and I’d rather not dig into it too deeply. I was abandoned in the U.S. by my father at 4 years old and adopted by a family who wanted to participate in the trend of adopting ‘dark-skinned’ babies to show off their wealth. In my mind, I’m forever the ‘adopted son.’ Every day I wake up and realize I’m not from here and that they’re never going to treat me like they treat each other.

I have faced racism, violence, and incarceration based solely upon my appearance and ethnicity. Not reacting to it is part of my daily existence and always has been. I suspect it will only get worse for all of us, as current politics has more or less given the green light for open racism and discrimination against the Latino community.

As far back as I can remember, I was always seen as a ‘troublemaker,’ even if I was just sitting in a sandbox playing by myself. It didn’t matter how well liked I was by everyone else I was always seen as a criminal element. Girls would date me just to piss their racist parents off. I went to church once only to get interrogated by a nun about how I ‘could ever dare date a pretty blonde girl.’ She said, ‘She was such a good girl, why did you have to date her?’ as if I had defiled this girl who chose to stay with me for sixteen years just to spite her racist parents.

I’ve been demoted and told that ‘only real Americans can be managers,’ and I’ve been told, ‘You can go back. We don’t need immigrants when we have veterans living on the streets,’ by someone who wanted me to quit so he could have my job. I’ve had managers sit in front of me and declare all Latino employees to be ‘illegal,’ then question if I stole someone’s identity because my adopted last name isn’t Latino, then have the nerve to defend their racism by saying they ‘couldn’t have known’ I was Cuban when I got hired because I’m ‘not as dark as those Mexicans over there.’ I’ve been told I only deserve ‘Mexican pay.’

If I get pulled over, the cops will acknowledge that my registration is valid but question how I could afford a nice car if I’m not a criminal. I was in a fight once and the newspaper darkened my skin in the mugshot, as if I’m not already a completely different color than everyone else here. I get followed around in stores and accused of stealing, and when I pay and they see I have money, they accuse me of being a drug dealer.

I’ve been called a ‘Hispanic Uncle Tom’ because apparently, I was just supposed to let white men speak for me. I’ve been pulled aside for extra screening at the airport because I ‘appear to be Middle Eastern,’ and then questioned about drugs when I corrected them and said ‘I’m Cuban.’

All of this has taught me something I wish I didn’t know so well: racism against Latinos is not only tolerated, but pretty much encouraged. I’ve accepted that it will just be a part of my life. And in a strange way, I’ve never felt more Cuban.

In recent years, I have withdrawn from American society due to rising racial tensions and have reverted almost completely to Spanish. I rarely associate with anyone outside of the Cuban community, with the exception of a few Mexican and Nicaraguan friends, and I have never been so at peace with myself. In a way, I’m healing. To this day, my favorite ‘joke’ is that I love being at home because it’s just Cubans here. It’s not really a joke.

The island is still in me, no matter how much of my language and culture was stolen and suppressed. There is one memory that stands out above almost everything else. In April 2021, I was standing in the water at Fort Pickens in Pensacola. I could feel the island and my people on the other side. I had the strongest urge to actually use my passport and finally go home. If it wasn’t for the pandemic and travel restrictions, and the fact that I had COVID and nearly died from it the following week, I would have booked a flight.

I love Cuba and I love my people, but I can’t bring myself to go back for anything but a short visit. Cuba cast me out, as it did to so many others. At the same time, I am a citizen of the United States, but on paper only. They never saw me as such, and I don’t consider myself one anymore.

As the U.S. has become more racially charged over the last 30 years, I actually feel more connected to my identity than ever. Maybe that, in itself, is the disconnect when compared to how Cubans on the island feel. Wishes are what remains when all hope is gone.

When I think about the official words, ‘alien,’ ‘immigrant,’ ‘migrant,’ I know those words are meant to dehumanize us. There’s a reason that judges never look us in the eyes. A coward can’t face his victim. It’s always a shot from behind. I don’t put much stock in what a handful of racist old men wrote down to make certain human beings more vulnerable to their prejudices.

Neither should anyone else.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I was born in Cuba and came to the United States when I was three years old, so I think of myself as first generation to this country. By the time I started kindergarten, I already spoke English. I grew up with only two or three other Spanish-speaking children in our schools, so I assimilated very well into American culture. Except for the times when what we ate was different in grammar school, I didn’t feel different than the other children in my class.

My parents learned English and spoke with a heavy accent. I’m happy for the traditions I was taught by my family, and I’m also glad that I assimilated into American culture and did not only have Cuban or Latin friends. I never dated a Cuban or Latin man. My two husbands were American, and again, I assimilated into their families beautifully. I love that I am Cuban American.

In 1961, my father saw the writing on the wall, that Castro was not who he said he was. Castro had taken my grandfather’s farm and was showing signs of dictatorship.

So we left Cuba. My father was 33, my mother was 28, with four children in tow, only with the contents of a suitcase in hand, $100 in my father’s pocket, and a plane ride to Miami, Florida. At the airport in Cuba, I had on a child’s bracelet. That bracelet was taken from me because it ‘belonged’ to the Cuban government, or so they thought.

We stayed at a family friend’s apartment in Miami as my father looked for work in the area. He could not find any. So he boarded a bus with my brother, who was five years old, and went to New Jersey. In New Jersey, my aunt Adela already lived with her spouse, Uncle Charles. His family found my father his first job at a spice factory in Union, New Jersey. Our first home was in an Italian neighborhood in a two-family house. The Italians did not understand us. I found Italians to be prejudiced and not kind.

There was an awful incident where my brother was playing with toys left outside in the yard. The teenage boy who lived there started hitting my brother for playing with his toys. That teenager took a bat to my mother when, in her inability to speak English, she started yelling at him for hitting my brother. My father came home and would have killed that boy.

I came when I was three, so I don’t remember much about our migration story except for bits that were shared with me. I do not remember being hungry, even though I was told we were. Sunday dinners at my parents’ house were filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins, all sharing arroz con frijoles negros. I did not realize the struggles my parents had.

As I grew up, I read about Cuba and at times yearn to see my homeland, but I have not gone. I think I have buried that desire out of fear of what I may find inside of me if I return. I wish Cuba would have had good political leaders. The island had all of the modern structures and thinking of the U.S. in its day. We would have stayed in Cuba if communism had not infiltrated the country. I would’ve liked to have traveled to the U.S., but the country you are born in is sacred, a part of your soul.

While traveling, especially to the Miami, Florida area, this is where I feel more Cuban. Even though at times now I am struck by the way only Spanish is spoken in South Miami, I feel strongly that if you come to a country, you really should not lose your traditions, but keep trying to learn the language of the country you live in.

I consider myself white, even though by Census standards, Cubans are not white. I love my Cuban friends and the similarities we share. I am proud of the successes we have had as Cuban Americans. As much as I love the similarities, I also enjoy the differences that shared cultures have offered me.

I struggle with seeing some of the Cuban population think of themselves as different than the newer immigrants into this country. I know it’s not all, but having political asylum into this country made us some of the luckiest immigrants into the U.S. I struggle with the idea that we are better than other immigrants. No one leaves their country unless they are suffering in the country they were born into.

When someone speaks of Spanish-speaking cultures as so different than themselves, it still makes something twist inside me. These official definitions and labels we’re given...’alien,’ ‘immigrant,’ ‘migrant,’ are horrible. They make me feel as if you were talking about a possession, not a human being. These names are given to make people feel less human.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I identify as Latina. I have pride in being Latina, but I feel kind of ‘meh’ about it sometimes, like it’s an identifier I use because I don’t have another one available. It doesn’t quite fit. I am Texan. My maternal family was here before there was even a state called Texas, but we’ve lost the Indigenous history. My paternal family is Mexican, so Mexican-American sort of fits, but still not really. So I use Latina because I refuse to use Hispanic.

My father is first generation, so I am the second generation to be born in the States. My maternal family has been here for generations, literally, the border crossed us. It’s hard to explain to many people, so in general, I identify as ‘second generation.’

Overall, this experience was harmful because I was forced to assimilate due to racist experiences my families had. I was encouraged to NOT speak, because having an accent would harm my chances for jobs or progressing in life. My parents are Boomers; they were suspended or disciplined for speaking Spanish at school. I am also very light-skinned, while many of my family are a wide variety of skin tones. Being second generation, light-skinned, and ‘American’ meant I had opportunities and could ‘do better.’ It’s exhausting and shameful to manage familial expectations and endure the effects of colorism in your family and your country. I consistently live in the world of in-between… never white enough, never Latino enough, never Mexican enough, never American enough.

Being from an older generation, I struggle with how to publicly identify as bisexual and when I should. This identity is still seen as not quite right. While Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more accepting of other Queer and LGBTQIA+ identities, somehow, being bisexual is still stigmatized or rationalized as not a true identity in many spaces. This is complicated by marrying a man, having my own child, and living in a state where not self-identifying is safer, if you don’t need to, then don’t.

One of the memories that brings me the most joy is completing my doctorate at the age of 45 and being introduced as Doctora, then having other folks from marginalized identities (even those who are not Latine/o) greet me as Doctora. There was such a deep sense of recognition in that title, a claiming of something my families were told they didn’t deserve.

And then there are the memories that cut the other way. I remember trying to advocate for Latinx students in my former work setting in higher education and someone being surprised that I am Latina. I do not have an accent, and they assumed, with my fair skin and my doctorate, that I was white or mixed race, especially because I had been using my husband’s last name (Of note: I have refused to take my husband’s name because he is white and I refuse to give up my own.) It was a shameful and heartbreaking experience to have to explain myself for defending and advocating.

My family’s migration stories are layered and messy. On my maternal side, the border crossed us. But that didn’t stop the discrimination or the ‘go back where you came from…’ like, we literally were here before you. My mother’s family didn’t have to move anywhere for work; they picked cotton or herded cattle.

On my paternal side, my grandfather came across the border from northern Mexico for migrant farm work. There was travel back and forth between Texas, New Mexico, and Michigan, then back to Mexico. It gets messy and hard to describe. Some of the family kept migrating for apple and potato farm work in the north, then citrus orchards in the south. In the north, they eventually transitioned into working in automobile factories; in the south, they worked the oil rigs. The 60s and 70s were unusual decades for migration stories of finding and keeping work. I’m not actually sure if either of my grandparents ever sought citizenship. There might be messy histories and stories about citizenship, but I don’t know because of unions in the north. My paternal grandmother was married at 13 years old, maybe, and she had to travel with her husband back and forth for several years. She eventually left him and then met my grandfather. I do not know her whole story, what part of Mexico she came from, what price was paid for her marriage, or how her migration was impacted by any of this.

I wish I didn’t live in Texas. The racism and structural impacts on so many lives are just rampant and overwhelming. The new laws and consistent threats of further marginalization are exhausting and infuriating.

I hate the word ‘alien.’ I hate how people are politicized differently depending on their countries of origin. What I think I hate even more is the Americans who move elsewhere and call themselves ‘expats.’”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I never felt like I fit in. I still feel like I don’t fit in. Spanish was my first language at home, we weren’t allowed to speak English there, but English was all I spoke out in the world.

Growing up in a “white” town, I didn’t fit in with my friends, and the few Hispanic people we did know didn’t fully accept us either. They would say, ‘They act like they’re white with the nopal on their forehead.’ It was hard to identify with either side. Being mixed with Chinese, Spaniard, Nigerian, and Indigenous, I just didn’t look “Latina enough.” It would have been nice to have one foot on each side, but I felt like I had nowhere to stand.

My father hired a lawyer for my three siblings and my mom and dad to enter the U.S. I was the only one born here, and our family was the only one that migrated; no one else even wanted to come, since they had, and still have, good lives in Mexico. My parents were told they needed to assimilate, and they went to the extreme. There was nothing Mexican allowed in our house. My mom didn’t even cook Mexican food. I feel bad for my parents; they tried their best to give us a good start at the expense of our heritage. I wish it had been different.

Even with all that, I’ve always seen myself first as American. One of the best memories I have, the kind that still brings me joy, happened a couple of years ago. A childhood friend told me I was the most patriotic person she knows. As simple as it was, that meant a lot to me.

There are still small, almost silly moments that remind me how “in between” I am. When I go out to eat Mexican food, the waiters never speak to me in Spanish.

When I talk to them in Spanish, the surprise on their faces is almost comical. They tell me, ‘You don’t look like you’d speak Spanish.’ And I’m left thinking, still not sure who I am.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is home. Although, with how things are now, maybe living elsewhere wouldn’t be so bad.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“In my Puerto Rican línea materna we kept going back to Puerto Rico to give birth while living, for three generations, between New York and Guayama, PR. We are a colony of the United States, always en destierro. Living in liminal spaces, between life and death; trying to make sense of the words happiness and joy as an immigrant in a country that forgot that THE America is South América, founded at least 130 million years ago, and Puerto Rico 5,000 years ago, before North America was built 15,000 years ago with Native Americans.

My point is that we are dismissed, erased, betrayed, assaulted, dumbed down, burned from our homes, bullied and bulldozed, called rapists, stupid people, pigs who are dirty, and thieves. I had always struggled with writing from my psychological, and social, cultural linguistic shifts center. That was true until March 8 of this year. Now I am a storm, organizing women writers and trying to fundraise $50,000 so that 10-12 Latina women can write cómo les plazca, bajo ‘ALviLda Sophia Anaya - Alegría y Su Junte de Escritoras Literarias.’

It is this time, to liberate our inner-land, non fiction characters, como hace Alejandro González Iñárritu (película Bardo de ejemplo), cortando bruscamente escenas, hablando de otros temas en una misma conversación, interrumpiéndonos y abrazándonos en esos espacios metafísicos; NOLINEALES.

The memory that brings me the most joy is to have been born, lived, played, gone to the Universidad in Guayama, Puerto Rico, and made friends. BEING CRADLED by the Caribbean wind, water, sand, burning sun, and crystals caressing mi piel also mattered. Understanding that we are a culture with great African and Taína lineage, with soooo many Goddesses, is still a bliss of safeguarding when I feel unwelcome in any North American state. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what it is to feel loved by the many arms and hugs I would’ve liked.

Sigh. Deep breath here.

Joy and pain sit together. When I am constantly told that my writing is not clear enough, it literally goes with seeing the mean, cruel, intimidating gaze of white men.

Imperialism. Slaughter. War. Children’s cages. Genocide. People of Color prisons. Rape of women and girls. African slavery and lynching.

Cada cual por su casa.

Ufff.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I use different words for who I am, depending on what I’m trying to name. Hispanic is a term I find acceptable since I view it as historically Spanish.

When I want to better clarify my cultural background, I use Mexican-American. In the state of Texas, Mexican-Americans were politically included as Caucasians, but I do not agree with this label of identity.

Both of my parents were born in Texas and have familial roots in Texas. They occupied a land before either Mexico or the U.S. were interested. My mother’s family has Indigenous roots, but since they were not documented as a tribe or sent to a designated reservation, it has been difficult to gain official recognition as an Indigenous person.

First of all, the land mass the U.S. acquired from Mexico included a variety of Indigenous people who were not necessarily alike. The people of California, New Mexico, and Texas could technically all be labeled as Mexican-American since their ancestors were originally born Mexican but chose to remain on their land and in their established homes that were now on U.S. soil. The political U.S.-Mexico border created a cultural schism.

My parents grew up in migrant working families who followed different crops. I was born in Casa Grande, Arizona, because my parents were picking cotton. Growing up, they moved back and forth between the Los Angeles, California area and Phoenix, Arizona. My father’s family lived in California and my mother’s lived in Phoenix.

My parents decided to move their growing family to El Paso, Texas, where my father went into the army. As a result, I didn’t grow up with that extended family or community.

My mother was born in San Antonio, Texas, but was left in Wisconsin with relatives for the first few years of her life. The story is that she was a sickly baby, and my grandparents thought it was best to leave her behind as the rest of the family continued their migratory work following crops. When my mother was reunited, about the age of four, with her own family, her siblings rejected her, and her mother was bitter that she had bonded with the relatives in Wisconsin.

My father was born in Yorktown, Texas, where most of his older siblings remained when the rest of the family established themselves in the Los Angeles area after years of migratory work.

Because my mother’s family was not Catholic, my sisters and I were raised according to Baptist doctrine. As an adult, I am now trying to reclaim my cultural identity, but without the extended family. This is how I came to live in San Antonio, Texas, my mother’s birthplace.

And then there’s the other aspect of being a queer brown woman in a very patriarchal society. I hold tight to certain memories. One of the memories that brings me the most joy is doing laundry with my mother in Southern California.

She was using one of those old washing machines with a hand-cranked wringer. The laundry was done outside, and Southern California weather is the best, lots of sunny days with occasional rain. I was old enough to be running around, but too young to actually help. The memory of white sheets hanging in the breeze on the clothesline, sunshine flashing, music from the radio, and the smell of freshly laundered clothes is a strong memory.

A love of music is something we all have in common in my family. Music has carried us in good times and crises. Music has fed and nurtured my other love, which is reading and writing poetry.

But family gatherings were always difficult for two reasons. First, being a military family, we did not live close to family, so gatherings were awkward. Second, we always felt estranged, probably because my mother was considered the black sheep of the family. There were even rumors that my mother had a different father. And since we were only three girls among families with five or more children, we really were made to feel ostracized.

We usually stayed with my mom’s oldest sibling in a family of thirteen. She was the matriarch in the family and spiritual leader. One Sunday we all went to church together. Sunday school was held before the service. My cousin, my sister, and I were about the same age, so we were sent to the same Sunday school class.

However, my cousin walked ahead of us, entered the classroom, and sat down with her friends, leaving my sister and me at the entrance as if she didn’t even know us. That small moment of being left standing there captured a much larger feeling of not belonging.

My life continued to move with the military. While in college, I met my future husband and he had a 20-year career in the army. After being stationed two years in South Korea, I wanted San Antonio to be our last posting before he retired.

I am divorced now but have remained in San Antonio, making it the one place I have spent the longest. I was born in Casa Grande, Arizona, but have never been there except for passing through on a bus. My sister, who is 11 months younger than me, was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and another sister was born in Los Angeles General Hospital. Only my youngest sister, who is 13 years younger than me, was born while my father was on active duty and stationed in West Germany.

When it was still just the three of us sisters living in El Paso, Texas, the family easily drove across the border into Juárez, Mexico. My parents spoke Spanish, but we didn’t. My parents embraced their Mexican heritage, so we embraced it too.

Later, when I was a freshman in college and had a Mexican national as a roommate, I quickly learned the difference between our being Mexican. Edward James Olmos was spot on in his portrayal in the Selena movie, how Mexican-Americans have to straddle a border of two worlds, in which I belong in neither.

As an adult, I am still trying to reclaim my cultural identity, this time with the lens of a queer brown woman who has grown up in a military, Baptist, Mexican-American, historically Indigenous family that has been pulled across borders, states, and identities.

I have never not wanted to be a U.S. citizen. Maybe it is growing up an army brat and having lived abroad. Before getting married, I too was pursuing a career in the army. Or maybe it was the years I spent as a military spouse that instilled in me an appreciation for my country, no matter how imperfect.

I am comfortable with all the terms with the exception of ‘alien.’ Personally, I have a sense we are talking about people unless the word ‘alien’ is used. Dehumanizing people, making them political fodder, makes it easier to not have to care about their plight or even treat them humanely. It makes it easier to turn a blind eye when they are targeted.

So I keep naming myself, over and over: Mexican-American, Hispanic, queer brown woman, army brat, poet, San Antonian, daughter of migrants, child of a land that was ours before there was ever a border.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

The purpose of Interpreting Self: A Latine/x Public History Archive is to disseminate Latine/x stories and research, and to support Latine/x creators, academics, and community resources by sharing their work and routing citation to the Global South. This is by no means an exhaustive list of Latino/a/e/x creators on Substack. If you or someone you know is not currently on this list, please comment below so they can be added.

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V - X

Y - Z

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I have always considered myself part of the first generation. My parents were both born in Mexico. I was born and raised in Massachusetts. To be honest, I thought my hypothetical future children would be second generation, because they’d be some percentage of Mexican from me. That’s how I have always identified myself.

Growing up, I mostly struggled with coming to terms with whether I was Mexican or American. Years passed and I learned more about identity. I started identifying as Mexican-American. My family would go to Mexico for vacations and my cousins would make fun of my accent. Anywhere I’d go, people would say something about my accent. People in Mexico would make fun of me for being American. A cousin of mine used to pick on me and tell me to ‘go back to Boston.’

Back home in Mass, people would make fun of me for being Mexican. Basically, I wasn’t Mexican enough in Mexico, nor American enough in the United States.

Being born in the U.S. impacted my identity by making me feel more assimilated to the American lifestyle. I didn’t feel Mexican enough. Not connected enough to my parents’ roots. There are moments when I’m talking to my parents and family members and, for the life of me, I can’t think of the word in Spanish, so I just say it in English. Speaking in ‘Spanglish’ has become a thing for bilingual children. I’d get embarrassed, but as long as I was understood, that was all that mattered.

My parents migrated to the U.S. in 1989, not long after getting married on August 4/5. My mom says it happened a week after getting married. They started a family in 1991, when my older sister was born. I remember living in Mexico in 2000 with my mom and three siblings, my older brother and sister, and my younger brother, who was 3 years old at the time. My dad moved us to Mexico so he could work on getting my mom her visa, to bring us back home. My father was already a resident (green card).

There are times that I wish I didn’t live in the U.S., because then I would feel more in tune with my parents, relate to my family more. My dad decided to migrate to the U.S. and start a family here. He wanted us to have a better life in the U.S. than the life he had growing up in Mexico.

Still, there are moments of joy that make everything feel like it fits, even if just for a night. I took my mom to a concert for her birthday. We went to go see Los Ángeles Azules. I loved seeing so many people there who look like myself. I didn’t have to hide a part of myself.

Then there are the moments that remind me how different I am seen. I was visiting New York for the first time, and a stranger walking by me stopped, looked me up and down, and asked me why I’m brown. I honestly had no idea how to answer; I was shocked. No one has ever asked me anything so outlandish before.

To me, they can give our status different names, ‘immigrant,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘alien,’ most of them mean the same thing. These definitions don’t make me feel anything, because they don’t define me.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I was raised by my grandmother, who was born and raised in Mexico, so I could be considered second or third generation depending on how you look at it. I would say second generation.

I’ve always said I’m half Mexican because my biological mother was white and my dad was Mexican. But I was raised by my dad’s mom, so I completely identify with that side of my family. The other side never wanted anything to do with me because I have Mexican blood in me. It was only natural that, as I grew older and people asked what kind of blood I had in me, I would just answer, ‘Mexican.’ I also knew they were only asking because I look like my dad. I ‘look exotic,’ as they say.

About five years ago, I was criticized by someone I thought was a friend. She accused me of hiding the fact that I’m half white. I was taken aback because she was well aware that my mom’s family, who are white, never wanted anything to do with a ‘half-breed.’ Yes, one of them actually called me that. That so-called friend has not spoken to me in years now.

That’s a tough part of my identity. I think I’m truly only comfortable about it around my family. When strangers meet me for the first time, their most asked question is, ‘What heritage or ethnicity are you?’ They know I don’t look white, but they aren’t sure what I am. I used to just answer that I’m part Mexican, but I started to feel very uncomfortable answering after the whole immigration debate got out of hand, and some people became hostile toward Mexicans.

I lived for 36 years in Arizona, and racial profiling got really bad there for a while. I remember getting my nails done at a salon I had been going to for some time. A couple of female patrons started speaking very unkindly about Mexicans and how they should all just go back to Mexico. A little while later, the nail technician asked me what my heritage was, and I leaned forward toward her and whispered, ‘Mexican.’ She stopped filing my nails and told me to say it out loud and to be proud of it. I was so afraid of the two women hearing and causing a scene. Nothing happened, but I was ashamed for being afraid to say it aloud.

My grandma, who raised me, was first-generation here in the United States. She came across the border undocumented at Eagle Pass, Texas. They lived for some time in an abandoned train car. She raised us to assimilate and wouldn’t speak Spanish to us because she didn’t want us to have accents; she had been told she sounded stupid because of her accent. I didn’t suffer the way she did, but I didn’t come through unscathed either.

In junior high, a group of boys called me ‘border jumper,’ ‘Frito-Lay,’ and ‘taco vendor.’ Such hurtful and embarrassing memories. I had a difficult time making friends because I was different, being raised in Iowa with no other Mexican families around. I have always felt that, growing up, I straddled two different cultures.

By the time I was 13, I rebelled. I couldn’t take my grandma trying to force me to be raised the way she had been. I was put in foster homes and stayed in the system even after my grandma asked me to come home. I told her we got along better when we weren’t living together. It was then that I began my journey in the ‘white world.’

Even with all of that, I don’t wish I lived anywhere else. I am American first, no matter what others might think. This is my country, and I’m proud to be here. As for the words people use, ‘immigrant,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘refugee,’ they could identify each other. They are interchangeable to me. But I despise the word ‘alien.’ No human being is alien or illegal. It’s complicated. There are many layers.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

The United States rewards conformity to dominant norms while policing cultural legitimacy and the boundaries of Latinidad, creating a staircase where each step essentially narrows. This narrowing encodes hierarchies that channel Latine/x-Americans towards assimilation. In schools, educators have been described as “pushing to dilute the curriculum,” coupled with calls to “speak American,” signaling that English monolingualism and mainstream content mark the proper student.2 Historically, perceived threat magnifies these pressures, such as during the Great Depression, when Latino leaders publicly called for the scaling back of speaking Spanish, downplaying Latino heritage, and foregrounding American citizenship as a defensive tactic of assimilation.3

Latine/x-American children account for over one quarter of all children in the United States, and their parents are more likely to underutilize community and social services.4 Due to this, parenting programs that are offered in Spanish have the potential to increase engagement and retention rates of Latine/x-American families.5 In recent history, the 1998 Proposition 227 in California required that all children be taught English by being placed in English-only programs, essentially outlawing bilingual education.6 It was not until 2016 that Proposition 227 was overturned by Proposition 58, which removed the restrictions on bilingual learning, allowing public schools to utilize bilingual programming to teach students English.7

Inside households, acculturation reorganizes authority when compared with Latino-oriented parents, “English-speaking/bicultural and U.S.-oriented parents view authority as less absolute, approve of younger ages for autonomy, and implement fewer rules and less supervision, effectively socializing youth into U.S. autonomy norms.”8 Professional pipelines also transmit similar institutional boundaries as “Latinos are 17% of the U.S. workforce, but only 8% of STEM workers, and just 26% of Hispanic adults see scientists as welcoming of Hispanics (34% for medical doctors),” signaling limited inclusion at the top of prestige fields, implicitly rewarding those who assimilate.9 In healthcare, “only 7% of physicians and surgeons are Hispanic, 52% of Latino adults report at least one negative experience in health care, and roughly a third prefer a Spanish-speaking provider.”10

Racialized assimilation into the dominant culture “can be interpreted as becoming white because it implies becoming an unhyphenated American, and the unqualified term, American, assumes whiteness.”11 Within Latine/x-American communities, authenticity is policed through language, and terms such as “no sabo” equate as shaming of second-generation youth, though advocates note that “being bilingual does not equate to being bicultural,”12 and call for “letting go of shame as a gate to belonging.”13 Even when Latinas leverage schooling as gendered resistance, “a high school diploma [...] means that she has achieved more than any other woman or man in the family,”14 they do so within institutions that still privilege assimilation over pluralism. The process is not linear, and racialized assimilation reveals barriers (racism and discrimination) which, when encountered, do not disappear the identity, but rather, reinforce collective identity as a necessary strategy for survival and recognition.15 Across school, family, work, and care, the message can be a conflicting one. Relational whiteness is synonymous within social systems as the standard to adhere to, but ties to cultural identity through family and cultural identity can feel like a secondary wall pressing in from the other side when authenticity of identity is judged.

If assimilation is a systemic narrowing tactic, the right to opacity is a counter-method. Edouard Glissant asks us to refuse structures that measure solidity by an “ideal scale” which becomes the grounds for comparison and judgement; opacity protects complexity against reductive legibility.16 In practice, opacity looks like permission for contradiction: loving your abuelo’s Spanish, while lacking its fluency; moving through English-dominant institutions while refusing to collapse yourself into them.17 It looks like portraits saturated with symbols whose meanings are not owed to the viewer. But, opacity is not evasion, but the preservation of depth. Assimilation denies depth and requires one to meet the codes of social norms dictated by a white standard. These standards do not solely dictate, but they also inform one’s place in relation to whiteness.18 If these standards were strongly held within all communities, every person would be judged on a strict system that denied the growth, change, and dynamism of the human experience.

Assimilation scripts also operate through capture by extracting testimony while centralizing authoritarian decision-making, at the expense of the community involved. A counter to this is instead a proclamation of self-definition and embodiment of difference. Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “feeling brown”19 develops a new path, where a like-minded community embodies their differences and the differences between themselves.20 A process in which naming becomes making, where acknowledgement of difference becomes a new chapter of moving through space in solidarity with difference. In this register, “belonging” is not the prize; instead, embodying difference becomes a practice of agency to define one’s own identity. The model does not deny that difference is used within white-centered systems to create boundaries, but rather, it proposes a counter-infrastructure in which the embodiment of difference allows us to choose a different path from assimilation. And difference is not defined by the status quo.

In line with Muñoz’s ideology, Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty highlight how activists in social movements [...] who chose to utilize identity as part of their platform held firm the beliefs that “identity as resources of knowledge, and that oppressed groups need to be at the forefront of their own liberation.”21 Movement organizers from African-American and Latine/x-American communities “built between people’s movements for freedom [...] and the United States erects barriers to divide humanity from itself in a fit of historical amnesia.”22 The expression of Homegrown by bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains describes this as “a declaration and a bearing witness of solidarity. It is a denial of the notion, the false assumption that we are not connected.”23 Furthermore, research in the reconstruction of Latino ethnic identity in students found that “movement points were prompted by the reconstruction of knowledge, and the student’s ability to integrate this new way of thinking into a holistic sense of self.”24 The embodiment of identity can be a powerful tool when navigating the socio-cultural and political landscape.

This is a way of creating new terms of belonging. Latine/x-Americans become code breakers and striders of two worlds, translating, negotiating, and thriving in spaces that demand conformity yet deny full belonging. They craft culture as artists of intersectionality, drawing strength from multiplicity and crafting new languages. They break ceilings and redefine success; they weave histories, knowledge, and carry memory forward into new worlds that rise above narrow definitions of Americaness. Not as flattened ideals imposed from above, but as layered, expansive, and self-defined: a world made from many worlds.

Through Spanglish at a dinner table, teens after school at the bodega, the alliance of “No sabo” kids finding community in living between two worlds, the blending of fashion between contemporary street-style and your abuelito’s old zoot suit, the picking up of una vela at the Dollar Tree that you light while you watch television, the 8% of Latinas in the United States that hold a Masters degree or higher, the 77% of Hispanic-Americans that supported the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020,25 the tens of thousands of Latinos and Chicanos that fought for civil rights in the 1960s and 70s,26 the 30,000 Chicanos that protested the Vietnam War,27 the 1500 students who gathered for the National Youth and Liberation Conference in 196928 and the 10,000 students protesting inequality in East Los Angeles,29 the Women’s Rights champions like Dolores Huerta, Helen Rodriguez-Trías, Felicitas Mendez, Virginia Montes, Denise Oliver, Connie Cruz, Iris Morales, and many more,30 the Dreamers, the first generation students, the kids who translate bills and parent-teacher meetings and then watch Spongebob, the influencers, the icons, the designers, the artists, the writers, the engineers, the rebuilders of community and culture.

The temporal politics of assimilation for many first-generation families is quietness and the choreography of speech. Keep your head down, work, swallow your words, sound “American,” and get to work. In classrooms, the soft violence of corrections places legitimacy on systemic barriers indexed in English, while curricular dilution instructs students which histories are expendable. Children translate, adolescents negotiate shame against pride, and adults weigh promotion against invisibility. These signals are not just pedagogical; they are identity directives that narrow what counts as acceptable or capable. Shame becomes naturalized, and young people, especially, are measured against mythical ideals and then punished for failing them. Erasure, masquerading as standard.31 How do we instead adjust the terms to invert the gaze, refuse the audition for the social standards of Americanness, based upon a white narrative?

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I came from Cuba during the Mariel boat lift in 1980. We were sent to a refugee camp in Wisconsin, and then our family claimed us, and we went to California. I have pretty much lived here ever since.

I think that my migration made a huge impact on my identity. I was Cuban, and then when I got to the States I was an ‘other.’ Once in California, everyone assumed I was from Mexico. And when I shared I was Cuban, I was either not Cuban enough or not American enough. I, too, have felt that I’m not Cuban enough or American enough.

When I studied in Michigan, I felt like I wasn’t connected to any part of my identity. In part, it was because I felt I had to explain myself, and it was exhausting, so I was just me, without much of an identity.

Noche buena brings me a lot of joy because I see all my family members, play dominoes, dance, and talk with one another. Those moments feel like home, like the pieces of who I am finally make sense together.

Leaving Cuba was, for me, the best decision ever. I have family in Cuba, and it seems that they have had to, and continue to, struggle a lot. I have mixed feelings about the way people and systems label us. I understand there is a need to define legal status, but the one term that I don’t like is being called an ‘alien.’ That one for sure is so upsetting. It continues to stress to folks that we are not from this planet, not welcome. Such an awful term.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

When identifying both the impact and meaning of Dialectics of Isolation, the exhibition must be placed into the context of the time. The exhibition was on display in 1980, which stood as a weigh station in transition from the late 1970s into what would become a turbulent era. After the 1960s, whose political activism, Civil Rights Movement, student riots, Women’s Rights Movement, and the impacts of the Vietnam War created a time wrought with change and socio-political uncertainty. The transition into the 1970s was juxtaposed with dispersal and an undetermined direction.

Entering the 1980s, the previous dispersal of thought and action came together into formalized, actionable groups in reaction to the lack of direction in the former years. 1980 stands as the keystone for the opening of a new era of social activism that would charge forward with Second Wave Feminism, the Gay Liberation Movement (with a strong focus on the AIDS epidemic), and a focus on the expanse of technology that would soon lead to the technology boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

This keystone year of 1980 is where we find Dialectics of Isolation serving as a landmark of its time in the representation of women that stands separately from the Second Wave Feminism movement, which was characterized as being a white-women-focused movement, and refutes the past dispersal of the 1970s by bringing together women of marginalized backgrounds in an exhibition that calls for an alliance of voices.

From Concept to Exhibition

The A.I.R Gallery was the first all-women’s cooperative gallery founded in the United States2 and stood at the height of the Second Wave Feminist Movement. The gallery itself, despite being women-focused, stood as a physical manifestation of exclusion, where only a handful of women from BIPOC communities were members. Therefore, Dialectics of Isolation “stood defiantly in critique of the very space in which it was held and of the brand of feminism that A.I.R. embodied.”3 Together, Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina developed an exhibition whose “curatorial mission elaborated a reflective critique of the liberal feminist movement and offered a collaborative alternative that broadened its lens to include issues of race, class, and colonization.”4

The exhibition’s introductory essay, written by Mendieta focuses on the idea of “Third World Women,” a play on the social construct of the third world, where “In the 1970s, the designation “third world” was often used synonymously with “people of color,” but also linked to the radical activist work of groups like the Third World Liberation Front (a student-led group from Berkeley, California) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (founded in New York by Black women activists) that sought to organize across multiple ethnic groups for common causes.”5 The injustices of exclusion lay where American society was primarily dictated by a white and privileged majority, who deemed those of BIPOC groups lesser than through lack of representation, willful exclusion, and discriminatory practices within the well-guarded art world’s curatorial practices, and Dialectics aimed to revoke these exclusionary practices by claiming the demarcation of “other” as its own. Mendieta begs the question, “Do we exist?... To question our cultures is to question our own existence, our human reality. To confront this fact means to acquire an awareness of ourselves. This in turn becomes a search, a questioning of who we are and how we will realize ourselves.”6 Utilizing the A.I.R. Gallery’s political placements and lack of representation of marginalized groups as a vehicle for a progressive exhibition is one of the linchpins developed within the concept of the exhibition. Dialectics rebuked the standardized canon being utilized within the curatorial practices of gallery and museum spaces. By utilizing a space, polarized by primarily white women artists, the exhibition worked to decolonize space as well as give personal identity form.

Defying the Canon

In the present, Dialectics and its impact are often homogenized by its attribution to Ana Mendieta, whose later rise to prominence within the art world put a spotlight on her contributions. The aspect of the co-curation by all three women is often underscored, and Kazuko Miyamoto and Zarina are left out of the history that revolves around this exhibition. However, the three women cannot be separated from the exhibition, as their co-curation of Dialectics serves as the progenitor for the exhibition’s impact and core values. Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist, Kazuko Miyamoto, a Japanese-born artist, and Zarina, an Indian-American artist, are three women of color whose backgrounds and styles of work all stand apart, but are all deemed by society as women of the “third world,” and as artists labeled as “other.”

Dialectics of Isolation included eight artists: Judith F. Baca, Beverly Buchanan, Janet Olivia Henry, Senga Nengudi, Lydia Okumura, Howardena Pindell, Selena Whitefeather, and Zarina, all “third world” women, whose backgrounds included Chicanx, Black, Brazilian, Indigenous, and Indian.8 This group of women preferred the terminology Third World Women over the term “women of color,” which connected them not only as women from BIPOC communities, but also as migrants, refugees, and exiles amongst an international landscape that drew them together. This embodiment of personal identity was a defiance against the narrative that marginalized communities were often victims and voided Second Wave Feminism’s attempt to speak for these communities from a privileged platform. Dialectics was an exhibition that spoke its own narrative, one of women whose identity was decided for them within the socio-political and cultural space.

Second Wave Feminism failed to include Third World Women, while the New York City art scene kept the palette unmistakably white. Criticisms by Third World Women within the arts brought to the forefront topics of Indigenous and Chicanx sterilization, racial capital, the investment in the decolonization of contemporary practices, the exploitation of BIPOC communities, the kidnapping of children by the United States government, and other collective topics which showcased Second Wave Feminism’s indications to leave Third World Women in the peripheral. The active disregard for these issues not only represented discriminatory practices but also segregationist tactics. Dialectics flipped these practices by creating an equitable space and through an investment in decolonizing artistic representation within the gallery space by way of “resistance to representations of exoticization, suffering, and abjection.”9

The practice of resistance embodied by Dialectics of Isolation cannot be defined solely by logical conventions of practice alone, but also by the feelings that it utilizes to put forth a concept of alliance. In the exhibition space, the work is not defined by its movement or medium, but by its reclamation of the term “other.” Neither the artists nor the work aim to stand amongst peers of their style, but to declare that they are not required to submit themselves to the constructs set forth by the art world or by society. These women are not solely artists, but they are a culmination of their lived experiences, their abilities, and their cultural identities. Dialectics developed a new curatorial standard by denying the Eurocentric canon that prioritizes white voices over others. It removed the curatorial standard within the gallery space that deemed works to be placed in specific categories and exhibited as such. The A.I.R. Gallery space, a whitewashed and politically damp gallery, was ignited by a true collective of “otherness,” decolonizing the thought process of how and what an exhibition should be.

The methodologies and ideologies practiced in Dialectics is exactly what the Art Worker’s Coalition in America demanded in 1970, where “a list of 13 “demands” included the proposition that artists should form one-third part of the Board of Trustees in museums, that admission should be free (with evening openings to “accommodate working people”), that museums should “decentralize” to be inclusive of multi-racial, multi-ethnic communities, that gender equality must be achieved in exhibitions, collection policy, and staffing, and that artists should “retain a disposition over the destiny of their work, whether or not it is owned by them.”10 The vision of the Art Worker’s Coalition in America did not gain traction in the 1970s, but can be seen in relevance in Dialectics vision and execution.

In the 1980s, political practice by the Reagan administration further minimized the narrative framework of arts spaces. The administration’s cuts to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) pushed for the privatization of art spaces, and in 1981, Reagan eliminated the program as part of his 1981 Economic Recovery Program, cutting funding from $8 billion to $3.7 billion and eliminating 300,000 public service jobs. Alternative spaces, which represented artists that were not partial to the commercialized markets (BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+, and more), became rare, further marginalizing groups of artists and reducing their access to institutions involved in socio-political activism. Furthermore, the association and exhibition of women artists within the gallery or museum space was limited, while the Third World Women artists presented at Dialectics would have been almost completely non-represented. Dialectics was a progressive landmark in 1980, as the marksmanship of artists such as Guerrilla Girls, “whose posters and magazine ads beginning in 1985 made the absence of women and artists of color in museums, commercial galleries, and criticism a matter of public record,”11 is still five years away.

Connecting the Contemporary

In 1972, on the West Coast, Chicanx artists faced their “otherness” against the institutional barriers of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), whose ideologies on Chicanx art restricted the artists in a box as muralists or criminals. Studies of major U.S. art museums show that 85% of artists in collections are white and 87% are male. Latino artists, including Chicanx artists, make up only 2.8% of collections.12

Chicanx artists often feel as if they cannot claim their own identity for fear of being typecast into the role of a Chicanx artist, believing it will place limitations upon their own artistic careers and visions. Not wanting to be defined by a sole vision of their work and their identity, how does one navigate a landscape where one's identity is one's own barrier? We recount the question raised by Mendieta in Dialectics’ introductory essay, “Do we exist?” In 2008, LACMA’s exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, aimed to explore the conceptions of Chicanx art, removing these barriers, and allowing for the personal identity of these artists to be fully actualized within the space. It grapples with the confines of muralism as it has become a box that Chicanx artists have been placed in, despite their efforts to break free. The exhibition goes beyond the cultural binary and refutes the stereotypes that have been placed upon the identity by whitewashed tokenism.

In connection with Dialectics, we can see within Phantom Sightings the same embrace of personal identity. The exhibition creates a space that does not limit the style or medium but chooses to embrace the complexity of the identity instead of standardizing it to suit a justified or homogenized narrative. Unlike most exhibitions of Chicanx art that have preceded it, Phantom Sightings moves away from efforts to define a distinct identity or style and instead focuses attention on conceptual strategies that artists use to intervene in public spaces or debates.13 We can connect these parallels to Dialectics’ refusal to adhere to gallery or museum stipulations, but by embracing “otherness” as personal identity, and refuting the label of victimhood placed upon them. The ideologies inherent within the concept of Third World Women and the connection to migrants, refugees, and immigrants also connect to Phantom Sightings, as we can see the multitude of experiences of what it is to be a Mexican-American, an artist, and a member of an ethnically and racially focused society.

Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in the United States (1980), developed and curated by three Third World Women, is a landmark of progressive curatorial practice and visionary thought that stood far ahead of its time. The representation of marginalized groups of women that were continuously overlooked by Second Wave Feminism and ostracized by the mainstream art world not only provided an equitable space for the exploration of artistic expression, but it also defied the canon of thought during a transitional time between the 1970s and 1980s.

The 1970s were known for their dispersal of thought and action after the virulent political and social activism of the 1960s. Dialectics leads the way in 1980 into a progressive and unified collective of socio-political action that soon enters the vision and voice of the late 1980s. The exhibition stands at the forefront, before artists like the Guerrilla Girls, whose call to action called out museums and gallery spaces for broader and stronger representation. Dialectics is the embodiment of an alliance of personal identity, a reclamation of “otherness” that defies the narrative placed on Third World Women and artists. We can see its impact upon the broadness of art, echoing within the 2008 exhibition Phantom Sightings, which focuses on Chicano artists in an equitable showcase of personal identity. The parallels of contextual, artistic, and identity exploration are indicative of the power of unification within decolonized institutional walls and the importance of the recognition of marginalized groups, not as an implementation of fetishism or broad standardized multiculturalism, but as a true embodiment of personal identity.

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

I want to continue to expand this archive by collecting more oral histories from those who identify as Latino/a/e/x, Hispanic, Chicano/a/x, Indigenous, Boricua, Caribeño, and other identifying communities from Latin America and the Caribbean living in the United States, to document our own lives, on our own terms. I encourage all generations to participate.

The process is collaborative. By sharing your story (anonymous submissions are welcome and encouraged), you will:

• Co-author your representation: You choose the colors and symbols, and I illustrate the piece.

• Claim the archive: Together, we are creating a living record that centers those from the Global South and rejects Western narratives.

Whether you want to be seen or remain anonymous (using a chosen image to represent you instead of an image of yourself), this is about agency, memory as resistance, and reclaiming our right to self-determination.

If you are interested in participating, you can go to my university thesis form to submit your story by clicking the button below.

Share Your Story

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Why should I submit my story?

   1. The mission of Interpreting Self is to collect real human stories by Latino/a/e/x, Hispanic, Chicano/a/x, Indigenous, Boricua, Caribeño, and other identifying communities from Latin America and the Caribbean living in the United States. Our narratives are often erased, co-opted, or rewritten entirely by politicians, media, and institutions. Together, we are creating a living record that centers those from the Global South and rejects Western narratives. Alongside this, you are also co-authoring your own representation. Submitting your story is about agency, memory as resistance, and reclaiming our right to self-determination.

2. How did this project begin, and why should I submit my story to you?

   1. This project began in 2023 as my university thesis. I have spent the last 3 years of my life dedicated to this research. The final thesis was defended in November 2025, and it passed on the first attempt. A limited-edition catalog was produced for the thesis, and this archive is the second step in its evolution. The goal was always to make this research public, and the next step is to grow the research by collecting more stories, publishing them, and eventually creating video interview content and full-scale exhibitions. This is not only a safe space, but a trustworthy and cautious one. We do not publish anything without your consent. Your story can remain anonymous, and a pseudonym will be given to your story. Everything remains in your own words.

3. What if I want to remain anonymous, but still submit my story?

   1. We accept ALL submissions. If you request to remain anonymous, you will be fully anonymous. A pseudonym is assigned to your story, and your portrait will be an image that represents you instead of an actual portrait of your face. In addition, we proofread your story to make sure that there are no accidental mentions of your location or identifying details.

4. What is the portrait aspect about?

   1. The portrait is all about authoring your own representation. My first degree is in illustration, so I draw all of the portraits. You choose the colors and symbols, and I illustrate the piece. As part of your submission, you get a portrait for free. If you choose to be anonymous, instead of uploading a picture of yourself, you will choose an image that you love to represent you.

5. How do I know that my story will be published if I submit?

   1. Your story will be published. The only stories I do not choose to publish are those that are intentionally inflammatory, misogynistic, discriminatory, or racist. We choose not to publish stories like that because we believe it reduces the ethics of the publication to give voice to people who are using the platform to spread hate. Aside from that, your story is your story. We have had submissions discussing topics that relate to migration, assimilation, LGBTQ+ experiences, identity, religion, and topics that can be triggering, such as experiences of depression, abuse, racism, and assault. These are real and human stories of experiences.

6. Are there any limitations on who can submit?

   1. We accept submissions from all generations and individuals over 18 years old. We accept all self-identifiers as we understand that our communities are not a monolith. We all identify ourselves in different ways. This includes generationally. If you identify as Indigenous, you may not feel that generational identification is appropriate. You may identify as first-generation because you are the first to be born in the United States, and vice versa, you may choose not to identify this way because you believe that generational proximity to being born in the United States centers the requirement of citizenship, and you disagree with that. This is your story, so we want you to feel comfortable to fully express yourself.

7. What is the process of submitting my story like?

   1. It’s a simple process! The form is a conversation. You will be asked a question, you respond, and when you go to the next page, my personal response will be listed. I do not believe it’s fair for you to share so much with me, and I share nothing with you. Therefore, as you tell me your story, I will be telling you mine. The form is the same one I used for my university thesis, and it has been approved by a multi-person committee. Anything that could potentially be triggering is notified ahead of the question, and those questions are made optional for anyone who does not feel like they can answer them. It’s not all hard-hitting questions either - you also get to tell me about your favorite colors, things you enjoy, music you like, and more. That is all going to be what creates your final portrait. Any contact information you provide will only be utilized by me to send you your final portrait. The process to fill out the form takes about 30 minutes, but it can take longer depending on how long your responses are. There’s also no word limit, so you can take up as much or as little space and time as you want to tell your story.

For more information regarding this project, please visit: About the Project

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“My parents were of a mixed color. My mother was a beautiful Black woman. My father was considered in Cuba mulato because he was mixed with Spaniard and Cuban native Taíno tribe. So I was born mixed, which in Cuba meant…my childhood, both there in Cuba and here in the United States, meant not being able to see and enjoy the things of Cuba, like the countryside and the mountains.

Our story was like this: we came on what they called the last flights in the 70s. We came on a four-propelled airplane. I knew we were leaving Cuba when the plane took off. I remember I was sitting on my mother’s lap and my little brother on my father’s lap, and I happened to look outside the window of the plane and I realized that were were leaving our aunts and uncles and cousins and our home. I still cry about it even now. I miss my Cuba so bad sometimes.

You see, as children, we were not told much because our parents did not want us to tell anyone we were leaving, only family members. Our uncle, my father’s brother, was the only one here in the United States that was able to claim for us to come. I was only 10 years old and my brother was 8. We did not want to leave our country, but due to communism, we had to. I miss it. I still miss it. I will always miss it.

I thank God that He has brought us here to this country. It’s so sad to me that we had to leave everyone behind. I cry most of the time when I speak to my cousins in Cuba. For most of my life, I did wish we didn’t have to leave, but as a believer, God knows what He is doing and He has the last word.

I love the United States of America. I’m not at all into politics, but I do love the nature parts of both places, Cuba and here in the USA. I am a very proud person when it comes to saying: I AM Cuban.

We were refugees. The terminology does not change anything for me or my family.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

A Note on Preservation: We believe the power of an oral history lies in the unique voice of the storyteller. To honor this, we have chosen to leave the grammar and flow of these submissions exactly as they were received. Aside from correcting obvious and severe misspellings, no editorial changes have been made. Our goal is to protect the sanctity of the original writing and provide you with an unfiltered connection to the contributor’s experience.

A Note on Opinions: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities. These are human stories from differing perspectives and experiences. As the reader, you have the right to disagree with the views and opinions expressed. This project is focused on shared humanity, the power of memory, and creating a space of healing and agency for participants.

“I consider myself ‘zero generation,’ since my foundation began in Cuba and I arrived here at the age of ten. I think of my children as the first generation of Cuban Americans.

I grew up in what felt like paradise; gardenias and trumpet flowers, night jasmine and saline mist on my skin. I swam in a coral reef. My home was perfect for our proximity to the ocean. I had loads of friends and the only TV for blocks. My mother was the block’s ‘sacred keeper of the meats,’ which she stored for others in our tiny Amaña fridge. The climate was beautiful, cool ocean breezes flowing in the summer and warm in the winter.

However, there came the day when my feet grew too fast. That’s when I had no alternative but to wear my dad’s dress shoes to school.

Leaving Cuba was difficult. There was a 35-year age difference between my parents. My father, Héctor, was 70 when we arrived in Miami. It took us five years of vetting and paperwork to be approved to immigrate. I remember leaving my lifelong friends and not fully understanding that I would never see them again.

I also remember what I imagined the U.S. would be like. I wanted nothing more than to be a cowgirl, believing all of the USA was the Wild West. I expected John Wayne to meet me at the airport with my own pony, hat, and boots. I don’t believe I’ve forgiven him yet for standing me up. Every Saturday, they played a cowboy movie, often a John Wayne movie, at 1 p.m., and that fed my dreams.

When we arrived, my parents never spoke the language. This made it especially difficult when we moved to Indiana. I remember leaving Cuba with a strong concept of mathematics, yet I was placed in a very basic class. I was so insulted. I remember Escat (Scott), who was ‘my keeper’ in a full immersion classroom.

Everyone thinks I am white. When I share my nationality, I’m confronted with, ‘You don’t look Cuban.’ I’ve seen this with my children, too. Two of them look more like the white-people version of what a Cuban ‘should’ look like, while two are as white as cotton. I also have trouble identifying myself on the census. I don’t know if I want a hot dog or a croqueta. (Croqueta wins every time.)

Attending the very first Cuban celebration held in Chicago is a memory that fills me with joy. Being around other Cubans, feeling that shared culture, was powerful, especially because I am the only Cuban in the town where I now live. I consider this a privilege, my opportunity to educate those around me.

There have been choices in my life shaped by circumstance and responsibility. When I decided to marry my first husband, a white boy from Alabama, it was as a means to care for my dying father. It was nothing likethe life I’d known. I was only sixteen. Wow. I could write a book on this. Not easy, not easy at all.

I guess it’s my mannerisms, especially when I’m excited, that set me apart. I often talk too loud or use my whole body when I talk. Honestly, I find most white folks boring. A Cuban can make any occasion into a festive event.

My early experiences also make me very aware of politics and civic duties, more so, I think, than my current neighbors. All of this lives inside me: the child in Cuba swimming in the reef, the ten-year-old leaving home forever, the woman who still hesitates at the census box, who knows she is Cuban to her core.

I don’t know if I want a hot dog or a croqueta. But I know who I am.”

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.

Books

1. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

   A visceral look at the lives of undocumented peoples, focusing on the laborers and elders who are often ignored.

2. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar

   A profound meditation on the "Latino" label, stripping away the myths to reveal the diverse, complex, and often contradictory realities of race and identity.

3. An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz

   An all encompassing history that centers the intersectional solidarity between Black and Brown movements in the fight for American democracy.

4. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating by Maura Reilly

   A call to arms for the art world, analyzing how curators can actively dismantle the white, Western, male-dominated canon.

5. Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity by Paola Ramos

   A journalistic take that goes across the U.S. that explores how a new generation is redefining identity through the lens of the term "Latinx."

6. Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough

   A sharp and realistic account of Texas history that separates the heroic legend of the Alamo from its complicated reality regarding slavery and land.

7. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

   A necessary critique of mainstream feminism, arguing that true advocacy must include basic needs like food security, housing, and safe neighborhoods.

8. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa

   A foundational text of Chicana theory that uses poetry and prose to explore the "nepantla" (in-between) space of living between cultures and languages.

9. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

   A meticulous breakdown of how explicit government policies, not just individual prejudice, has created the segregated landscape of modern America.

10. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    A reframing of American history told from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples who resisted centuries of settler-colonial genocide.

Essays

1. Decolonizing the Canon? by Rafael Cardoso

   An inquiry into whether the "canon" can ever truly be fixed, or if the entire structure of art history needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

2. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

   A vital Aymara perspective on decolonization that rejects "multiculturalism" in favor of a messy, lived-in hybridity.

3. Digital plastic: Generative AI and the digital ecosystem by Leon Furze

   A timely look at how AI-generated content is acting as a pollutant in our information ecosystem, much like microplastics in the ocean.

4. The Invisibility of Latin American Women Artists: Problematizing Art Historical and Curatorial Practices by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill

   An examination of the systematic erasure of Latina artists from the global art narrative and the efforts to bring them back into focus.

5. Plantains 101 by Ghetto Gastro

   A brilliant blend of culinary history and cultural pride, tracing the global journey of the plantain as a symbol of resistance and diaspora.

6. Why can't I express my feelings in my mother tongue? by Observations On Love

   A reflection on the linguistic gap that occurs when the language of your heart doesn't match the language of your daily life.

7. For Opacity by Édouard Glissant

   A philosophical argument for the "right to opacity,” the idea that we don’t need to fully understand or categorize someone to respect them.

8. Identity Politics and Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

   A critique of how radical movements are often co-opted by elites to serve their own interests rather than the marginalized.

9. Amalia Mesa-Bains and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in Conversation by The Latinx Project

   A deep dialogue between two leaders of Chicano art on the evolution of "Rasquachismo" and the aesthetics of the struggle.

10. Challenging the Objectivity of Science by Sina Mirzaye Shirkoohi

    A look at how scientific "facts" are often colored by the cultural and political biases of the people who find them.

11. A Cure for Individualism by Tim Connolly

    A philosophical exploration of how we might move away from the "lonely self" toward a more communal way of existing.

12. The Entangled Brain by Luiz Pessoa

    A scientific argument against the idea that the brain is a collection of isolated parts, suggesting instead that emotion and cognition are inseparable.

13. From nothing, everything by Victoria Wohl

    A beautiful look at the concept of "creatio ex nihilo" and how we find meaning and art in the void.

14. Pity the Barefoot Pigeon by Ian Frazier

    An observational piece that finds dignity and humor in the most overlooked creature of the urban landscape, the pigeon.

15. Thoughts on Curatorial Practices in the Decolonial Turn by Ivan Muñiz-Reed

    An analysis of how museums are attempting (and sometimes failing) to address their colonial roots through new curatorial methods.

Disclaimer: This work is written by humans for humans. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x-American Identity & Narrative and its various interations and forms of publication, exhibition, and display.

To view more stories by Latine/x-Americans, please visit the Oral Histories page, which will have new stories posted regularly.

To share your story with this project, in which you can choose to remain anonymous, please visit the Share Your Story page.

To learn more about this project, please visit An Introduction.

To learn more about the sources of this project and the research gap it aims to bridge, please visit the Literature Review page.

© 2026 Joanna Arteaga Ferrin. All rights reserved.