Decolonize Your Mind

I’ve been thinking about my own colonization a lot lately. I’m half Mexican and half white but I was raised in a white environment with white ideals, I received a white education, and I have a whitewashed understanding of race and history. I didn’t even find out about my Indigenous Mexican lineage until a few years ago. My family has claimed Spanish heritage for generations—a lie that originally protected us from violence to be sure, but one that eventually began to erase our family identity (shout out to my primo Kermit for being the incredible family historian who uncovered all of this). 

Even though my people are among the colonized, my culture has been kept from me, so I still feel like the colonizer. As a white-raised, white-educated, WHITE-PASSING Latina with undeniable white privilege, I am the product of socially conditioned colonization. My mind has been colonized by the white narrative to the point where I process my whole existence through the lens of whiteness.

90% of the time, I don’t feel like I deserve to claim my own ancestry because I know so little about it, because I haven’t lived it, because I don’t experience it the way others do. So every once in a while I push back and speak to my Indigenous Mexican heritage with pride... and then I realize that in my heart and mind I’m still the colonizer, and I should just shut my racist, appropriating mouth. I know this is my white guilt speaking, but I know it’s also the ancestral anger of my people raging against my own colonized mind.

And it...just...hurts. 

I don’t have any solutions for this right now. I’m going slowly and treating myself as gently as I can. I guess I just wanted to put this out there so that anyone who finds themselves in a similar place—with one foot in the desert wasteland of violence that is white colonialism and one foot aching to tread in the rich, lush Motherland that is the history of their own ancestors—will know they’re not alone.

Decolonization experts like Dra. Rosales Meza and Dr. Jennifer Mullan have really reframed for me what it means to “Decolonize”.  I highly recommend you visit their websites or social media platforms and take advantage of all the incredible education they have to offer.