Representation Matters

Being a white-mixed Latina growing up in America has never been easy. I always felt stuck between two crossroads–embracing my heritage or succumbing to conformity; I chose the latter. It looked like the kinder path, the path with less pits in the road, or so I thought, that is.

Growing up, the color of my skin made my stomach churn. I wasn’t like the other kids. I was dark skinned, yet I didn’t speak Spanish; this often caused a mass amount of confusion. With confusion brought resentment, with resentment brought denial, and soon enough I’d grown to hate the color of my skin and the connotations along with it.

I never saw anyone like me on television, not on the cartoons I’d wake up early for, bright eyed and ready with my bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. All the characters looked the same. Why couldn’t there be anyone that looked like me? I wondered. It was a notion that loomed in the corner of my mind, but being young and naive, I never fully pondered the thought, and accepted that people like me–people with my skin color–didn’t belong on Saturday morning cartoons.

When kids my age saw shooting stars, they wished to become millionaires, to be president of the United States, or to have a knight in shining armor whisk them off their feet. I, on the other hand, longed for pale skin. It was a wish that would follow me until my freshman year of high school.

Around that time I began to become more aware of my culture and the social issues that surrounded it. See, I spent fourteen years in the education system, but did not learn an ounce about Mexican culture.

For people of color, in order to be represented, they have to seek outside resources. The media never guarantees accurate representation, unless one wants to see their culture perpetrated in a handful of offensive stereotypes.

With lack of representation, one can grow to feel ashamed of themselves, such as I did when I was younger. I tried to conform into Eurocentric ideologies because that’s all I saw as a child. If there had just been a Mexican hero, a Mexican doll, I would have maybe learned to embrace the beauty of my heritage and features.

The matter of representation only worsened when I entered middle school, faced with conflicting thoughts on my sexuality. In life, we are faced with one singular notion: boys love girls and girls love boys. Anything challenging that is a risk at the status quo.

So imagine my dismay when I realized that not only did I like boys (which was expected of me) but girls as well! Recollections of blockbuster hits passed through my mind, every love song on the radio, every poem read in English class–none of them were about people like me. I was always open minded and accepting about sexuality, but it’s a different story when it occurs to you.

I panicked and did what every teenager my age would do; i repressed my thoughts. All the representation I had seen (seldomly so) of LGBT+ individuals had been highly negative. The teenagers who had came out received backlash from parents and students alike; it was never happily ever after.

To be in the school environment and be anything but normal was a death sentence. We have all heard the girls in the locker room, nervously whispering that the person next to them “might just be a lesbian!”; it was the “L word” nobody had the nerve to say–the most shameful word of them all.

What these people do not realize is we travel the world run on our own fear and adrenaline. Scared for the moment someone might just find us out. We continuously tide the current of acceptance, anxious to see who will dive in alongside us.

I didn’t embrace who I was. Being bisexual wasn’t an option to me. Bisexual and biracial? You had to be kidding me.

The media is built upon the notion of heteronormativity–the idea that everyone is heterosexual, thus all the concepts shown have to be heterosexual; it allows for little focus on LGBT+ subjects.

Bisexuals in particular, when they do receive their five seconds of fame, are painted in a negative light. We are seen as indecisive, objects of lust and attraction, and an overall fake, imaginative notion. “They just can’t make up their minds!” is a commonly heard phrase.

This thought continued to linger in the back of my mind like my over-drilled Geometry lessons–I just couldn’t get it. Denial, denial, denial was my ideology. Even when I saw a cute girl and my heart would run to the back of my throat, my knees would shake, and my face would feel like the heat of a summer afternoon (just like it would for any other boy), I would still believe it was all in my head, a phase I would slowly overcome with the passing of seasons.

However, it never did.

The process of acceptance might have been a walk in the park for me if children like myself had access to higher forms of representation. Seeing children of color, children in wheelchairs, children who love both boys and girls, children who escape the conformity of gender–all this representation is important to children who are growing and exploring who they are with each passing day.

Even in adults this representation can make a difference; it can make them love their hair type, their skin color, and their culture.

I am now eighteen-years-old and fairly confident in the person I am. I’ve learned to accept and love the things I once tried to repress and change about myself. Picking up novels about LGBT+ people of color helped tremendously.

The novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, a story of two Mexican-American boy’s discovering their sexualities, provided comfort I have never felt before. I could see myself in the characters. It painted an image for me that not even the world’s most amazing artists could capture. This is all because it had one thing: representation.

Self-love and positivity is a hard enough notion without these factors coming into play. My hope in life is for children like me to never have nights spent losing sleep and staring at the ceiling hoping and praying that maybe, just maybe, they could be normal like the people they see on television.

By casting more roles to people of color, roles embracing their heritage and not built on stereotypes, by talking about notions outside of the status quo in songs, books, and shows, can this be achieved.

I wish for a world where a black girl can turn on the television and see a cast of black characters staring back at her. I wish for a world where a boy wondering why he felt butterflies in his stomach while holding his best friend’s hand can watch a film and see two boys head over heels in love staring back at him. I wish for a world where the media actually represents the melting pot we call the United States. With that, will come self-love, positivity, and acceptance.