From a young age, I always 
felt ashamed of my native 
tongue and heritage. It all came 
from a whirl of feeling physi-
cally insecure and verbally 
lost. Every morning, as the sun 
peeked through my window, I 
hid away the rich language my 
parents had gifted me since 
birth. I locked it in a mental 
vault, fearing the disapproving 
glances and wrinkled noses of 
my classmates. At school, my 
appearance was different than 
most because of my darker com-
plexion, and going home wasn’t 
always my savior because it was 
difficult to emotionally con-
nect with my family due to my 
lack of Spanish proficiency. 
In my mind’s eye, I pic-
ture a small, innocent ver-
sion of myself — a 7-year-old 
girl with dark brown pigtails, 
round brown eyes framed by 
glasses — sitting nervously in a 
classroom in the heart of Mid-
dleville, Mich. My friends only 
knew English. In fact, I can-
not remember a single person 
who was bilingual. Snack time 
became my greatest enemy 
because anytime I sat down to 
enjoy my Chips Ahoy cookies, 
little kids would ask me, “How 
do you say cat in Spanish?” or 
“How do you say my name in 
Spanish?” I felt like a token to 
them since they never cared 
to understand who I was as an 
individual. I felt isolated and 
wondered if I would ever fit in.
Going home every night, I 
felt the same sense of isolation. 
As we gathered around the din-
ner table, I felt like a stranger 
in my own skin. It wasn’t my 
physical appearance that set 
me apart from my parents, but 
my inability to express myself 
fluently in the language of my 
ancestors. At the dinner table, 
as I ate my home-cooked rice 
and beans with corn tortillas, 
I lacked words. My mom would 
ask me, “How was school? 
What did you learn?” but I was 
mute. Not because I didn’t want 
to speak, but because I couldn’t 

find the perfect words in Span-
ish to formulate my thoughts 
concisely. I simply responded 
with, “Bien Ma,” because creat-
ing a sentence in Spanish was 
an obstacle I could never tackle. 
Every day felt like a loss, a 
constant reminder of my lack 
of identity and fulfillment. My 
parents had instilled in me a 
deep sense of Mexican pride, 
but it always seemed to fade 
away the moment I stepped 
into a public setting. I never felt 
truly connected to my roots, 
and the idea of calling myself 
Mexican felt foreign, despite 
growing up hearing about our 
Hispanic heritage. 
But 
then, 
something 
changed. 
I 
was 
fortunate 
enough to visit my parents’ 
birthplace — Jalisco, Mexico. 
It is where Tequila originated, 

and the music is always per-
fectly intensified to match the 
atmosphere. Mexico’s vibrant 
streets overflow with the pul-
sating rhythm of joy, with the 
sounds and scents weaving 
together to create a symphony 
of celebration that cannot be 
found anywhere else on earth. 
When I arrived in Jalisco, the 
first thing my grandma did 
was take me to a dance show. 
The atmosphere was differ-
ent in Mexico because I wasn’t 
surrounded by American cus-
toms. The air wasn’t tainted 
with the smell of hot dogs and 
hamburgers; instead, it smelled 
like spice and warmth. I stood 
on the sidewalk, devouring my 
paleta. Sticky, sugary liquid 
dripped down my arm as His-
panic women danced through-
out the street. Their dresses 

soared through the air, radiat-
ing intensified colors of con-
tentment, joy and celebration. 
The women’s dresses — long, 
flowing 
and 
adorned 
with 
ruffles — billowed out around 
them as they spun and twirled, 
releasing a gust of air that car-
ried with it the unmistakable 
aroma of spicy Mexican cuisine 
and the feeling of utter free-
dom.
As I watched the women 
dance, I noticed something: 
their hair. It was like mine. I 
was suddenly reminded of the 
feeling of not fitting in through-
out 
my 
elementary 
classes 
because I spent many nights 
looking in the mirror, wishing 
I had the perfect blonde locks. 
However, it was different here. 
My eyes couldn’t believe what 
they saw. Women danced in 

their thick crocheted dress-
es. They carried confidence, 
pride and power. They twirled 
the fabric in circles, like they 
wore the rainbow. And these 
women were like me. We both 
had brown eyes, dark hair and 
tan skin. Here, I actually fit in: 
not only visually, but verbally. 
We shared a common first lan-
guage. A language I once feared 
to liberate because of the stares 
I might attract. A language that 
I couldn’t fluently vocalize. It 
was the power of these women 
that showed me the beauty of 
the Spanish language and my 
Mexican heritage. 
Traveling to Mexico was 
a dream come true for me. I 
spent the whole two weeks only 
speaking Spanish, and I didn’t 
care if it did not sound flu-
ent. I could never roll my “r”s 

perfectly, but I realized that it 
was beside the point. Mexico 
opened my eyes to the beauty of 
my heritage.

 I shouldn’t be afraid because 
my roots are like the sturdy 
roots of a young sapling, break-
ing through the hard soil and 
reaching 
towards 
the 
sun, 
determined to grow strong 
and tall despite the obstacles 
in their path. They are like the 
pioneers who set out into the 
unknown, with nothing but 
their courage and their dreams 
to guide them, forging a route 
towards a new life in a foreign 
land. When I came back to the 
United States, I was empow-
ered to accept my difference. 
For once, I felt more confident 
than ever. It didn’t matter if 
I stood out in the yearbook 
or spoke a different language 
because the differences made 
me unique. My individuality is 
like a brilliant splash of color 
on a blank canvas, transform-
ing the mundane into some-
thing extraordinary.
So to the little kids I grew up 
with during snack time, I will 
proudly tell you how to say cat 
in Spanish.

Michigan in Color
10 — Wednesday, March 15, 2023

A journey to reclaiming my identity: Rediscovering my Mexican roots

JACQUELINE AGUIAR
MiC Columnist

JACQUELINE AGUIAR/MiC

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

An imagined yesterday

I’ve 
always 
considered 
myself to be a sentimental per-
son. I must have been 6 or 7 
years old when I started scrap-
booking, and my construction 
paper, painted purple with an 
Elmer’s glue stick, became a 
canvas for the materializa-
tion of my memories. I became 
obsessed with assigning a tan-
gible object to every memory 
because I thought it would help 
me stop my happiest moments 
from fading into vague recol-
lections. I have held on to every 
birthday card I’ve received and 
the envelopes they came in. I 
like to look at the way my name 
was written on each envelope. 

It’s 
spelled 
incorrectly 
on 
some, and the “y”s in my name 
are replaced with “i”s that are 
dotted with little hearts. My 
name is lettered beautifully 
on others, and sometimes my 
friends would write one of the 
nicknames they had for me in 
between small parentheses. 
Every time I browse through 
my piles of envelopes, and gift 
cards I already spent, I can 
see myself sitting in my living 
room at my 8th birthday party. 
My friends are all surround-
ing me, and my sister is stand-
ing over us, looking through a 
green disposable camera. I’m 
unwrapping a gift that appears 
to be some sort of book. It turns 
out to be a baby blue photo 
album, 
embroidered 
with 
orange songbirds and white 

vines. I can see where everyone 
is sitting around me, and as I 
feel the cold February breeze 
rushing through from the crack 
under the door, it’s like I’m 
turning 8 again. It’s 2012 and 
I’m surrounded by my friends 
and family, seeing the world 
through my turquoise wire-
frame glasses. I never want the 
moment to end. 
I 
find 
myself 
flipping 
through that baby blue album 
very often. It holds all the pho-
tos my sister printed from the 
stack of disposable cameras she 
ran through that day. Beside 
each photo slot, I wrote “My 
birthday party (8 years old)!!!” 
With each page, my handwrit-
ing gets a little sloppier, and 
the 8s start looking more like 
ampersands. I love that I can 

see what my handwriting was 
like then, and picture myself 
sitting beside my sister as she 
filled the photo slots and I cap-
tioned each one with a wooden 
pencil. 
For the longest time, the 
memories I collected sparked 
joy in me. I was amused by the 
things my younger self thought 
were important to hold on to, 
and impressed by my ability to 
capture my emotions in writing 
from such a young age. 
But as I grew older, these 
memories became deeply influ-
enced by my relationships with 
other people, which couldn’t be 
reduced to a simple keepsake. 
I was no longer capturing the 
simple joys of a birthday party. 
My 
once 
intelligible 
emo-
tions of happiness and sad-
ness became entangled 
with the bitterness of 
grief 
and 
transience 
of joy. Feelings of love 
and hatred were lay-
ered with my newfound 
understanding of envy 
and desire. I was trying 
to eternalize my rela-
tionships with people, 
as though a person can 
be strapped down to 
a place and time and 
compressed in between 
sheets of paper. 
I would lay all of the 
things I collected of 
a person beside each 
other 
— 
everything 
they had given me, or 
anything I had saved 
that reminded me of 
the time I spent with 
them. I expected my 
mind 
to 
go 
rushing 
back to a time when we 
were together, rewind-
ing past all the time we 
spent apart. I expected 
to feel how I felt when I 
was around them, in the 
same way I was able to 
revisit the thrill of my 
8th birthday through 
a stack of envelopes. I 
wanted to feel magi-
cally 
entrenched 
by 

the bliss of experiencing love 
for the first time. But instead, 
I was met with this wistful 
desire, making it abundantly 
clear to me that remember-
ing isn’t enough. My memories 
lacked the rawness of human 
connection. There was nothing 
I could do to capture the bliss-
ful naivety of falling in love for 
the first time, and there was no 
way for me to materialize an 
enchanting memory of a person 
that no longer exists in such a 
way. 

Acoss pages of unfinished 
smash journals, diaries and 
albums, 
I 
have 
mistakenly 
extended 
my 
understanding 
of the temporality of experi-
ences to that of people. I tried 
to assign people to places and 
those places to points in time. I 
would recall a feeling and try to 
chase it until I lost sight of what 
it was I was longing for. I kept 
trying to reinvent a person I 
once knew through a collection 
of memories: a receipt from an 
ice cream trip, a handwritten 
letter, a printed polaroid photo 
signed with our initials. But 

none of these things amount 
to a person. There is no num-
ber of memories I could collect 
or moments I could rebuild to 
capture a human connection. 
I can’t staticize a person, or 
rebuild a relationship based 
merely on what I remember of 
the past. 
The happiness I feel when 
I look through my baby blue 
photo 
album 
doesn’t 
exist 
when I revisit my more recent 
memories. As I flip through 
journal pages and sort through 
memory boxes I’ve assembled 
over the last few years, I find 
the visual recollections of my 
memories clouded with a sense 
of longing, as my once bliss-
ful attempt to be sentimental 
is now tainted by inability to 
move on. 
My inability to grasp the 
largely intangible concept of 
human connection has cost me 
to lose sight of what my origi-
nal intent was in saving all of 
these keepsakes. At 8 years 
old I wasn’t trying to create an 
avenue for myself to continue 
revisiting the past. I captured 
memories through words, pho-
tographs and small memen-
tos because of how much I 
valued the present moment. 
I tried making each moment 
last forever because I found 
contentment in being present, 
unaffected by what has passed 
and what is yet to come. Over 
the years, I lost sight of what it 
means to be present. I became 
so heavily entrenched in a nos-
talgic, imagined yesterday that 
I found myself constantly grap-
pling with the passage of time, 
and I lost sight of the here and 
now. 
In an effort to escape this 
elusive past that I have trapped 
myself in, I am learning to 
succumb to the fleetingness 
of moments. I am grounding 
myself in present connections, 
memories and expectations. 
I’m learning to find closure in 
the passage of time and no lon-
ger trying to revive things that 
are gone.

ANONYMOUS
MiC Contributor

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your insights, 
and most of all, 
we need your 
dreams.”

 
 
 
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We shared a 
common first 
language. A 
language I 
once feared to 
liberate because 
of the stares I 
might attract. A 
language that I 
couldn’t fluently 
vocalize. It was 
the power of 
these women 
that showed me 
the beauty of the 
Spanish language 
and my Mexican 
heritage. 

I was trying 

to eternalize my 

relationships 

with people, as 

though a person 

can be strapped 

down to a place 

and time and 

compressed in 

between sheets of 

paper. 

