Can you claim an ethnicity of a culture that you have never experienced? Or should you stick with what you know for certain? Growing up, the only other people I knew with my last name were my father, his parents and daughters and George Lopez.
I liked my last name, because I saw it on the television most nights at 3 a.m., and to a young girl, that was really cool, and it gave me a sense of comfort as the only person with my last name in the house that I grew up in. I grew up in a mixed household and was shamed constantly for having a different father and last name, yet I persevered.
In fact, my last name did not really bother me until around 2015, when the presidential race was a hot topic. One candidate was very vocal about his hate for Mexican immigrants and how he was going to send them back to their home country and keep them there. This was the first time I realized that my last name was common in Hispanic countries. Nobody had ever discussed this with me, and I was always told that we were Cajun French and white.
Kids in junior high are already mean enough, and suddenly, I was being told by them that I was going to be ‘sent back to Mexico,’ where they would build the wall and I would not be allowed back. I was confused because I knew that I was born and raised in Southern Louisiana and had been in the same school with the same kids since Pre-Kindergarten. This was their version of spewing hate that they thought was funny since they heard it from their parents and on TV constantly.
When I brought the question of whether or not we were Mexican to my grandparents, I was told no, kids were just mean, and that just because our last name was Lopez does not mean that we were Hispanic. They did not know why it was our last name.
This left me with more questions that I tried to figure out for the rest of high school. I felt like a hole was missing from my identity. I was surrounded by people who were adamant that we were not anything but Cajun, but also facing backlash from southern people who assumed I was Mexican.
Once I moved out of that horrible house, and came to college, I really started to work on figuring out my family tree. I had taken a class where we made our ancestry tree for two weeks, but I couldn’t get anything past my third great grandparents on my Lopez side. My grandfather’s dad passed away when my grandfather was young, and it left a lot missing for my grandfather, who had the same questions that I did about our ancestry.
Finally, about two years ago, after months of research, I found the history of my seventh great grandfather, Gabriel Lopez, who came from Axarquía, Spain with 81 other people, including his brother, Juan Lopez, to discover and develop Nueva Iberia in 1778, which is now known as New Iberia.
Once my seventh great grandfather started a life in Louisiana, he immediately immersed himself in the French culture of the state, including naming his kids common French names. While I don’t know why he chose to do this, I imagine that he wanted to conform for some reason. I like to believe this is the reason they also stopped speaking Spanish.
From my seventh great grandfather all the way to my father today, no Spanish culture was shared. No Spanish recipes, no family stories, no Spanish language, and no speaking of Spain at all. This is why my grandfather was shocked to learn that his fifth great grandfather immigrated from Spain.
New Iberia is proud of their Hispanic origin, and still has a parade every year to celebrate the founding families. Each family holds up a banner representing their last name, and there is one for Lopez. I like to imagine that I have a lot of cousins there, since they all descended from Gabriel and his brother, and I hope to go down there one year to experience the parade.
This is a really long-life story, all to explain why I have this predicament: If I am filling out a form, do I mark Hispanic and white? When people learn my last name and ask me if I am Spanish (which happens often), do I say no? Do I say yes, and explain how my ancestors came from Spain 245 years ago?
How can I say that I am Spanish, when I know that I have not experienced any of the culture, and that my family has shunned any sign of being Hispanic out a long time ago? Besides my grandfather, none of my other family members on my father’s side want to talk or believe anything about being Hispanic and anything else besides Cajun and white. (While Louisiana is a mixture of a lot of different races, living in the deep south will teach you that some people are still not accepting of anything but their own race.)
I feel a sense of guilt if I say yes when someone asks me if I am Hispanic. This is a mixture of not knowing for sure if I was growing up, and feeling like I cannot connect to the culture, and therefore shouldn’t claim it. I know that other people may have gone through a problem like this. At the end of the day, I will keep researching my family history and try to learn what I can about the culture, and what my ancestors went through when they came to Louisiana.
While I may not feel Hispanic, I can be knowledgeable about the culture and my family history, and hopefully I can learn ways to incorporate parts of it into my life.
