#FliptheScript for NAM2015 Day 23
If you are an intercountry or transracial adoptee, talk about how you view yourself in relation to your families, your friends and peers, and the community you either grew up in or live in now. If you were adopted from a country outside the U.S., do you identify as an immigrant? Where/how do you find resources to fill the gaps in your cultural identity formation?
Growing up my brother and I plus one other family with 3 kids who were also transracial adoptees were the only people of color in the neighborhood. At elementary school I could easily count the number of children of color. In middle school I noticed there weren’t really many blended tables there was definitely a racial and economic division and I never knew where to sit, I never really felt entirely welcomed or like I fit anywhere.A few of the elementary school and middle school kids I would call friends. In high school there were still only a handful of Latin@ students and again it felt like I wasn’t welcome because of cultural and economic differences. The one non-adoptee middle class Colombian girl I met was so excited to find out I too was Colombian but, refused to talk to me again after finding out I had been adopted as an infant. Again I only had a handful of friends of color in High School, most of the time I just felt lost and adrift. A lot of the time I suppose I ended up feeling like an ambassador trying to bridge gaps between different groups when issues arose because I didn’t really fit anywhere.
The only other exposure I had to other Latin@s was the other 8 Colombian adoptees I grew up with. We had get a together every few years. I was only really ever close with 2 or 3 of the 8 and as we got older we have completely drifted apart.
So that was it, that was the extent of my exposure and relationships with other kids and families of color growing up. Race never really came up in my house unless someone was being very obviously racist to my adoptive brother (Black Latino). Even then it was usually very quickly and quietly dealt with and then never really talked about again. Growing up as transracial adoptees we knew from a very young age why we looked different from our parents but beyond those basics no one ever really talked about the deep issues and history of race. I think everything we knew and learned at a young age came from books and school textbooks, nothing ever came from adults of color.
I remember in elementary school one day out of every year my mother would come in to my class to talk about how our family was different and too talk about Colombia. This always felt awkward to me as a kid but I never felt I could say anything to my mom. I didn’t realize until several years ago, as an adult, why exactly I felt so uncomfortable. I get that I often got a lot of questions and so she took to coming in to try and head off any problems (I still don’t recommend this, I think this is where putting kids in contact with adult adoptees really important). There’s this whole other piece of having this white woman come in to talk about the country and culture of my birth. To have my mom up in front of my class and me talking about a place she only really knows from books, the news, and the week or so she spent both times she came down to get my brother and then me, a place I had at that point never seen myself, and meanwhile at home we hardly ever talked about Colombian culture or history. Everything I knew about myself, my culture, my race, my ethnicity, my language, was taught to me by white non-Latin@s.
This continues to this day. My goal for the coming year(s) is to really figure out how I learn languages best and to become fluent enough in Spanish to seek out written and in person sources of language, culture, and history. At this point even after 3 years in middle school, 4 in high school and 4 in college, I still don’t have enough mastery to use Spanish language sources. So many of my sources are still either blogs by white adoptive parents with Colombian children or white ex-pat news sources. I don’t know how many people (who aren’t transracial/transnational adoptees) will really understand how awkward, to say the least, that feels.
I wrote a tweet the other day about how I had this sudden realization, after reading some general issues on race and racial identity on Twitter, that I think a lot of my struggle with my racial and ethnic identity probably had some elements of loyalty struggle. I think, consciously or subconsciously, I think I sometimes felt like I couldn’t really ask or talk about race, ethnicity, culture, etc. because that would somehow be disloyal to my parents. I feel like I would have, and maybe did, defend them if someone where to call them out for discrimination or racism even if they were in fact being racist because otherwise that would be disloyal, which then leads to all the fears adoptees have of “what happens if I’m disloyal?“ I actually do recall a few of the first times as an adult I have called my parents out for saying discriminatory things or microagressions and it was a little scary but probably way less scary for my adult self than it would have felt for my childhood self. I can’t really get more into it than that, it’s too new and too painful a realization.
As a kid other than the issues within my family of culture etc. I never really felt like I was non-American really. As an adult however I feel like I’m constantly reminded that I was not born here. Whether it’s random people asking where I’m from, did I grow up here, or the college academic adviser who even after telling her I was adopted as an infant praises me for how “good” my English is, or the questions and snafu with my citizenship papers when trying to sign up for the government healthcare website,etc there’s always some reminder that I wasn’t born here. So, yes I consider myself an immigrant and I am all too aware of the issues my fellow international adoptees are facing with potential deportation. So even though we are frequently left out of the conversation, and many of us probably leave ourselves out, on immigration…this is who we are and the government has no problems making sure we don’t forget.
I am a transracial, transnational, immigrant, adult adoptee and I’m hoping more and more of us will start banding together make our voices heard in the larger conversations on race and immigration.
