Daniella Lopez

Daniella [me] spending time at her home in Colombia for her third birthday.

Growing up I never paid much mind to the oddities of my family.

It was normal having two parents with different skin tones and hair types. I was always blended within a family of different cultures and experiences, never doubting who I was. I shared a community of friends who ate the same food as me, spoke the same language as me and even shared the same struggles as me.

I grew up in a Colombian household that was held together by my mom. My father was a musician who would spend endless hours in the studio with his bandmates. In a studio filled with every possible race or color, I never felt like I didn’t belong and never doubted who I was.

My parents separated when I was five or six. My mom spent her time making up the role of a father, while continuing to fill the internal role of a mother. She reminded me of the beauty behind my dark brown eyes and golden-toned skin. It never occurred to me I would ever have to question who I was.

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A few years after my parents divorced, my mom married my stepdad, who eventually moved us to Houston. I hadn’t known much about the city, but I was too naive to notice how different it was from home. We moved into a suburban neighborhood where the only people who spoke Spanish were the people who cleaned our house or took care our garden. I went to a middle school where the majority of the students were black and nothing like me. For them, my skin was too light and my hair wasn’t curly enough to be considered “black enough”, I would bounce between friends that were white and hispanic yet I still felt lost or as if I didn’t belong. My Spanish was spoken with a different accent that made it seem like I was “trying too hard”, I molded myself to whoever would accept me and was ultimately lost in this person who was ungenuine to me.

For the first time I asked myself the question: “Who am I?”

As it is for most girls in high school, finding out what defined me felt like an uphill battle. My freshman year I looked for a new group of friends, often feeling like I hadn’t found my niche. Even with an abundance of friends, I still felt like I still couldn’t find where I belonged.

As I grew throughout high school, I learned not to let my confusion get in the way of enjoying the beauty behind my heritages. Many my of friends would ask me the question: What are you? Where are you from? At first, this looming cloud of rejection made me hesitant to answer. Soon I would be surprised at how comfortable I was explaining to my friends where I was from and what it was like growing up mixed. Outside of school and friends, I kept my cultural differences to myself and my family; still not fully trustful of other people’s opinions. Even though the people I was around everyday learned to accept me, I could only focus on the few who didn’t and what they might’ve thought of me.

Trusting someone to truly understand my struggle was something I was never comfortable with. I always thought to myself: How can I expect someone to fully understand me if there were times where I barely understood myself? 

Trust became easier when I met my boyfriend. Outside of embracing me, Sebastian shared a similar story to mine. He was the son of an Afro-Colombian mother and a Colombian father who divorced when he was younger. Our relationship is your typical young love story, but with a heightened sense of comfort. The culture I once lost, I had found through our experiences together as two individuals who looked for familiarity. It was the idea of sharing aching experiences with someone who had gone through similar things that allowed me to trust and share my culture with the loved ones around me.

I learned that the patterns in our personalities make up who we are. Our culture and where we come from plays a role depending on how big or small we make it. There will always be questions in understanding my truth but realizing the value of who I am is something that overtime has become invaluable.