"But you talk so white?"

S: Are you Mexican, Ms. Minjares?

My parents are Mexican and I identify as Chicana.

S: Oh, but you talk so white?

In my five years working with young people in an educational setting, this is an exchange that I’ve come across several times in the classroom. As much as I identify my journey through education as one where I’ve had to negotiate how much I identify with culture I grew up in order to create and entry into the culture of power, I am still refining the words and expressions to use when responding to this too-real question.

How can I get them to understand? How can I be honest?

How do I tell them?

How do I tell them that I know I talk white? That code-switching was something I learned in school, and that to me code-switching meant I had to rejected the inclination to respond in the manner with which I learned to speak English at home.

How do I tell them that talking white equates with being able to explain myself  to a crowd of white people. And that I figured out in high school that getting scholarships, doing well in job interviews, asking for letters of recommendation from teachers, and doing anything that allowed me to access the resources to elevate in my socioeconomic status required me to “talk white”.

How do I tell them that as I got better at talking white, part of me started to feel resentful of my parents for not being better at talking white? How do I tell them that part of me getting better at talking white meant rejecting the culture I lived in for 18 years? How do I tell them about how when I speak to my mom, dad, brother and sister, who all still live together at home, I code switch. How do I tell them that although I speak to them in English, it is what may be considered by the dominant culture as “broken English” or “Spanglish” or “dumbed-down English”. It’s not the English I use at work nor when I’m with my white friends. How do I tell them that I speak “dumbed-down English” to my family members?

How do I tell them that once I entered college, I took every opportunity being around white people to learn how to talk white? And that I still do? I listen for expressions and idioms I never heard as a child and sometimes even write them down and look them up later, in order to add to my arsenal of things to say around white people.

How do I tell them that I grew up in a community that valued English way more than Spanish and although my parents were fluent in Spanish, did not feel it was important to help me learn fluent, grammatically-correct Spanish, and were not fluent in English, and did not have access to the resources to be able to support my learning fluent grammatically correct English? How do I tell them that my home education only afforded me half-Spanish and half-English fluency? How do I tell them that these levels of language fluency were insufficient for me to be able to gain the status and power I have now?

How do I tell them that it wasn’t until I reached adulthood, that I realized there was some value in knowing Spanish? How do I tell them the frustration I feel when I’m praised as an adult for knowing some Spanish, which was in fact my first language, when all my life it was viewed as a marker of insufficiency? How do I tell them that as an adult, I experience microaggressions that present Spanish as a novelty?

How do I tell them that my learning to speak white was a survival mechanism? That it was a response to living in a society where people in power do not speak English the way my parents do, the way I grew up speaking it. How do I tell them that every single person I came across who was someone that made important decisions, someone who held power above others, someone who was a gatekeeper to the resources I needed to elevate socio-economically spoke significantly “whiter” than my parents did, and they never ever spoke the “dumbed-down English” that I know.

How do I tell them?